When Mark Walker announced March 13 that he would not challenge Addison McDowell to a runoff in the Republican primary in the 6th Congressional District, he said he preferred an offer “right down our alley”—to be director of faith and minority outreach for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
What he didn’t say was that he was conceding his third rejection from his own party in three years, after he was compelled to walk away from Congress and his dazzling ascent to the GOP’s House leadership circle.
The dichotomy of fortunes in Walker’s political life is a drama in two acts. In the first, a Greensboro pastor makes his political debut by routing Phil Berger Jr., son of North Carolina’s most potent politician, in a congressional primary runoff. He wins a seat in the U.S. House and in six years becomes the fourth most powerful Republican there.
In the second, he abruptly comes home—his district redrawn from under him, his alliances paltry—to a barely disguised rivalry in his own party, where many in the Berger camp are dismissive of him and even call him dishonest and self-serving.
“You gotta appease people in Raleigh to be successful politically,” said Jack Minor, Walker’s last congressional chief of staff. “Well, he didn’t do that. And that kind of put him in no man’s land.”
Yet he stays in the game. “There are some things you can control in life, and things you can’t,” Walker said in an interview. “I don’t know that you can stress or fret about them. You can do your best, you stick to your guns, which is what we’ve tried to do. And that’s where I feel like our track record has been pretty clean when it comes to not bowing the knee to anybody.”
His new post, if Trump wins in November, opens “an opportunity to work day to day in the White House,” said Walker, 55. “You don’t get those opportunities every day.” But he’s working under a promise of future considerations for a mercurial party leader whose endorsements have gone elsewhere every time Walker seemed to expect them.
As he starts a new journey, and perhaps a third act, Walker inspires polar reactions within his own party. Where he says he’s following a divine calling, others see a man of worldly ambition. In self-portrait and to his devotees, he’s a political outsider, often simply ignorant of the rules. To detractors, he’s an opportunist, making up his own.
“It seems like everyone who has worked for him falls into two camps,” GOP consultant Jonathan Felts said, in a statement that could apply widely in Walker’s world. “They either really like him, or they really hate him. There’s no middle ground.”
Path to the Top
Walker said he felt the call to politics in 2012, standing as a guest on the floor of the Tampa Bay Times Forum during a break at the Republican National Convention.
He talked with his wife, Kelly, a nurse practitioner, resigned as worship pastor at Lawndale Baptist Church in Greensboro the next year, and filed to run for 30-year congressman Howard Coble’s seat in the 6th District, which included much of Walker’s home county of Guilford and a row of counties along the Virginia line. When Coble retired, Walker found himself in a field of nine candidates, including the younger Berger, then the district attorney in Rockingham County and son of the state Senate leader.
“You gotta appease people in Raleigh to be successful politically. Well, he didn’t do that. And that kind of put him in no man’s land.”
Jack Minor, former Walker chief of staff
“I did not know who Phil Berger Sr. or Phil Berger Jr. were,” Walker recalled. “Later on,” he said with an uneasy chuckle, “I would get to know them quite well.”
Julie Scott Emmons, herself a novice when she met Walker, managed his successful runoff and fall campaigns in 2014. She remembers “a fighter, but also someone who cares deeply about those who are on the margins of our society, and helping them reach their full potential.”
“That was very much a trailblazing approach” in the GOP then, she said.
Walker, who had been in ministry for 16 years and in business before that, clearly was new to this. Running what he called a “100 percent grassroots effort,” he finished second in the primary and challenged Berger to a runoff. But Walker made errors of inexperience. In one runoff debate, acting on a tip, he linked Berger to prosecutorial misbehavior in a case that happened 37 years before Berger was born.
Still, he won by 20 points, and he overwhelmed Democrat Laura Fjeld in November. “I show up in D.C.,” Walker said, “and they don’t know who I am, or how I got there. I’d like to say it was out of nobility or integrity, but it was more out of ignorance, that nobody paid our way there. Nobody came knocking on my door and said, ‘Hey, time to settle up.’ There was no agenda that I had to fulfill.”
But some said Mark Walker’s agenda was Mark Walker.
James Piedad, a Triad photographer, met Walker early in that first campaign, liked what he saw, and volunteered. “I’d spend six, eight hours a day in the car with him,” Piedad said in an interview.
Walker made promises during those drives, Piedad said—that he wouldn’t vote to keep John Boehner, who was in disfavor on the right, as House speaker, and wouldn’t join the Republican Study Committee, considered the slightly more moderate of the party’s two main House caucuses. Walker did both. “He sold us out,” Piedad said.
“He’s not being truthful,” Walker said, adding that his pledge to “vote against leadership” clearly referred to issues where he and the leaders would disagree, not to leadership elections. But some former supporters began to portray him as a self-dealer.
He easily won reelection in 2016 and 2018. Many of his colleagues admired his ability to make personal connections and build coalitions. His desire to empower the needy caught the attention in 2016 of Paul Ryan, then speaker of the House, who wanted to broaden the GOP’s appeal and named Walker to an inner-city outreach task force. Walker also made some influential friends in the House, including Trey Gowdy of South Carolina and John Ratcliffe of Texas, who was later the director of national intelligence.
Members elected Walker late in his first term as the youngest person ever to lead the RSC, and in November 2018 they made him vice chair of the House Republican Conference. Above him in the party hierarchy were only Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and Liz Cheney.
Walker’s legislative priorities included fiscal responsibility and national security. Emmons, who served on his staff throughout his three terms, remembers a deep commitment to constituents—“We still have people that call us and ask for help, four years later,” she said—and a rare ability to connect with people, one on one.
He also had priorities outside the usual GOP lane. They included the Prison to Prosperity Act, which didn’t pass but was intended to help incarcerated people re-enter society, and his work to get bipartisan support for historically Black colleges and universities. The FUTURE Act, which Walker worked to enact with Democrat Alma Adams of the 12th District in 2019, brought minority-serving institutions “critical funding … to strengthen STEM programs, improve infrastructure and equip campuses with the technology they need,” Chancellor Karrie G. Dixon of Elizabeth City State University told The Assembly.
He also walked directly behind his friend Rep. John Lewis on Lewis’s last commemorative march in 2019 across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, site of the Bloody Sunday attack on civil rights marchers in 1965.
Emmons said Walker “never followed a prescribed path.” But intentionally or not, he was on one—the path to the top. In fact, his successor in both the RSC and conference posts was Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, who is now speaker of the House.
But seeds of reversal were being sown.
‘An Honest Mistake’
In April 2019, state party chair Robin Hayes and political donor Greg Lindberg were indicted on federal conspiracy and bribery charges, accused of trying to influence state Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey in exchange for campaign donations. The indictment mentioned a “Public Official A” who had been in contact with both Lindberg and Causey, and Politico identified Walker as that official.
Walker was not charged and was not called to testify in Lindberg’s trial. (Lindberg was convicted but the verdict was overturned on appeal; he was convicted again May 15.) Hayes pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and later was pardoned by Trump.
Walker told The Assembly his link to the case arose from “an honest mistake” in arranging a fundraiser and from “how ignorant I was of the process.”
“He went into Congress very, very naive about the system,” said A.J. Daoud of Pilot Mountain, a longtime friend and political veteran who was 6th District GOP chair when Walker went to Congress. “It wasn’t like somebody took him under his arm and said, ‘Here, let me help you.’
“Of all the guys I knew that became freshmen legislators, Mark really did have the roughest go of it.”
The biggest blow came in September 2019 when a state court ordered the legislature to redraw congressional districts that had been challenged as partisan gerrymanders. The new 6th was rated “likely Democratic” by the Cook Political Report, and Walker chose not to run again. Democrat Kathy Manning won the seat in 2020.
Some Walker allies have always hinted that they see the elder Berger’s hand on the redistricting pen.
Legislators have “shown that they have incredible talent when it comes to being creative with how they draw congressional lines,” said Minor, the former chief of staff. “And no decision is by accident.”
Lauren Horsch, Berger’s deputy chief of staff for communications, said in an email: “In 2019, the General Assembly was forced by a court to redraw congressional districts to benefit Democrats, particularly in the Triad. Contrary to what Mark Walker might think, the legislature doesn’t revolve around him and his political ambitions.”
Others see some blame for Walker. “He never made any effort to build relationships with people in the General Assembly,” said Felts, the GOP consultant. “We’ve had four rounds of redistricting since Mark was first elected, and I can tell you: When the legislature is in session, there are certain members of Congress, you see them having dinner with legislators, several times a year. And that was one way that you saw a lot of folks keep their seats, where Mark Walker did not.”
Getting Sideways
Many of Walker’s strongest critics are fellow Republicans. “Mark Walker tends to blame his failures on everyone but himself,” said Nathan Babcock, an independent political consultant who works with legislative candidates and has been a policy adviser to the elder Berger.
“Everyone hates politicians who say whatever it takes to get elected—you know, one thing to one audience, the opposite to a different audience. Hypocritical, dishonest, self-serving. Mark Walker is kind of the embodiment of that politician.”
Babcock said his issues with Walker include inconsistencies in campaign claims and occasional critical statements about fellow Republicans, including Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Trump, whose language on the Access Hollywood tape Walker called “vile” in 2016.
Walker played a role in Robinson’s political rise; Fox News sought his help contacting Robinson after Walker posted a video of Robinson’s now-famous speech to the Greensboro City Council in 2018. But in 2023, during Walker’s aborted campaign for governor, he accused Robinson on social media of “cheating people” and said that “the LG knows a scam job when he sees one.” Robinson has a history of financial troubles, including bankruptcies, unpaid rent, bad checks, and nonpayment of taxes.
Walker “complains about dark money,” Babcock said, but founded a 501(c)(4) called Advancing Hope USA, whose stated mission includes supporting candidates with character and constitutional principles, but which is not required by law to disclose its donors.
People in the Berger orbit also say that Walker recruited candidates to run against the elder Berger for his Senate seat this year. Not true, Walker said—a friend, longtime Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, considered such a run and asked him for advice, which he offered. Page ran for lieutenant governor instead and finished fifth among 11 candidates in the Republican primary.
Walker said he wouldn’t comment on Babcock’s criticism because he doesn’t know him. When told that Babcock has been an adviser to Berger, Walker said: “I think that says it all, right there.”
In nearly two hours of interviews, Walker reflected several times on “getting sideways with some of the political powers.” He recalled one instance, which he said happened about a year and a half after his runoff victory over the younger Berger. He had learned that Berger was running for a state Court of Appeals seat.
“I give him a call and say, ‘Hey, Phil, I heard you’re running …,’ and before I could even finish just saying, ‘Hey, we’ll do what we can to support you,’ it was the most belligerent, nasty pushback.”
Walker said the conversation continued like this:
“Look, I’m trying to figure out a way to support you,” Walker said.
“Well, then send me some checks,” Berger responded.
“Phil, look, I’m trying to do this,” Walker said.
“What else you got?” Berger said.
“You know what? I don’t have anything else,” Walker said. “Maybe this isn’t the right place or the right time.”
Walker said that was the last time the two talked. “Everywhere I’d go, he would never shake my hand,” Walker said. “If I’m speaking, he gets up and walks out of the room.”
Berger, now an associate justice on the state Supreme Court, did not respond to requests for comment.
“I think Phil Berger Sr. has done some wonderful things, specifically economically, for the state,” Walker said. But “I’m always going to be in their crosshairs.”
Disappearing Endorsements
For whatever reason, Walker has struggled politically since his return home. Party feathers were mussed when word spread that he might challenge Thom Tillis in the Senate primary or then-Rep. Ted Budd in the 13th District in 2020.
He sought the GOP nomination in the 2022 Senate race, along with Budd and former Gov. Pat McCrory. Trump, who had endorsed Budd, called Walker to a Mar-a-Lago meeting in December 2021 and promised an endorsement in a House race if he dropped out, sources told Politico.
“I’m always going to be in their crosshairs.”
Mark Walker
But Walker stayed. He got 9 percent of the vote as Budd won.
Walker last year joined the 2024 governor’s race, but in October he decided to try to return to the House in the 6th District, which leans right again after another redrawing. After Trump’s nod went to McDowell, Walker finished second by two percentage points. He signaled his desire for a runoff—but then came a call from Trump that changed his course.
“When he started off, he came across as very authentic,” Felts said. “And now he comes across as inauthentic, because he always has to take things one step too far in terms of trying to connect with an audience, in terms of trying to spin a narrative. You know, he swore up and down that Donald Trump was going to endorse him for any office he wanted … but if there’s going to be any kind of endorsement, you get it in writing.”
Various media outlets reported last fall that Speaker Johnson, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma were not endorsing Walker in the House primary, after his campaign said they were.
Walker told The Assembly that Johnson and Pompeo promised support in text messages, and that Mullin had pledged his backing in a phone call. He said the endorsements melted away in a “domino effect” after Johnson’s new political staff decided that, as speaker, Johnson would not endorse congressional candidates—and also after Trump endorsed McDowell.
The Trump Tightrope
Outside politics, Walker runs a consulting business and works with Lantern Rescue, an Asheboro nonprofit that fights human trafficking, and Proverbs226, a Waxhaw nonprofit that assists children of incarcerated parents. He said he still regularly helps people navigate problems with public agencies.
His pronouns are “we” and “our,” as if he usually considers himself part of a team—in politics, ministry, or family. He and Kelly have raised three children; the youngest will finish high school this spring.
For now, he seems to be in Trump’s good graces, agreeing with his broad policy positions. Asked whether he thinks the 2020 election was stolen, Walker said, “I don’t know if in every state it was fair and square. There were [states that] sent out hundreds of thousands of ballots … that overrode the Constitution and even their own state laws. We will never know specifically who filled out a lot of the ballots, who collected them, who mailed them in.”
More than 60 lawsuits alleging voting improprieties in that election were brought by Trump, or on his behalf, and were dismissed for lack of merit, some by Republican judges.
As Trump’s director of faith and minority outreach, Walker says he’s focusing on the Southeast and on swing states, particularly North Carolina and Georgia. Some GOP insiders suggest the post is a face-saving exit ramp Trump concocted to clear McDowell’s path, complete with hints of a White House job or endorsements in future campaigns, perhaps the House or Senate in 2026, when Tillis could choose to run for reelection.
But if it’s more than a sinecure, the job presents real challenges that illuminate the complicated relationship of Christians, including Walker, with Trump.
Two-thirds of America’s white evangelical Protestants viewed Trump with favor in a Pew survey in February, but cracks are showing. Charlotte evangelical pastor Loran Livingston, in a sermon April 14, said the “God Bless the USA Bible,” marketed by Trump, was “disgusting” and “blasphemous.” Other conservative Christians agreed. And among Black Protestants, a key constituency of Walker’s dual outreach role, 80 percent held an unfavorable view of Trump in that survey.
Walker is on a tightrope—between the Trump convicted of 34 felonies and the Access Hollywood tape and the Trump who attended March for Life rallies, worked with Walker to defund Planned Parenthood, and appointed the justices who overturned Roe.
“Politics are just ugly sometimes,” said Joe Giaritelli, former executive pastor of Lawndale Baptist Church, who hired Walker in 2008. “There’s times you have to go along to get along, and there’s times Mark, I believe, is wise enough to understand that. But there are principles Mark will not go along to get along on, and they’re principles that would empower people, and some biblical values that he would hold, regarding the sanctity of life and of marriage.”
Minor, Walker’s former staff chief, added that Walker “thinks it’s really important that good people with good ideas engage,” even through “imperfect conduits.”
But this engagement is a conundrum for Walker. If he succeeds, and Trump becomes president again, Walker’s political fate will again depend on the designs and whims of a volatile man who has twice publicly rejected him.
Conceding that much of Trump’s life “hasn’t been an exemplary Christian walk,” Walker insisted that the former president “goes to bat for us.” But his sojourn in Trump’s camp is also a survival requirement in today’s GOP, said Republican strategist Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee who grew up in Lewisville.
“You know, you ultimately make some sort of a deal with yourself,” Heye said. “Going forward in Trump Republican politics requires that. You have to allow things that would otherwise be unacceptable to you.”
Eric Frederick was a reporter, editor, and audience strategist at The News & Observer for more than three decades. He’s now an editorial adviser at EducationNC, which does reporting and policy analysis on public education, and a freelance writer.
