Late last week, after Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) obliterated much of what was left of President Joe Biden’s agenda by refusing to support his party’s scaled-back social safety net, climate, and tax package, some observers wondered what was in it for Manchin, the corporate Democrat who holds all the power in the divided Senate.

As we have previously documented, the Democratic rotating-villain role that Manchin is playing typically ends with a cushy landing spot on K Street working for big business. That’s certainly already true for one of Manchin’s longtime aides.

Jonathan Kott went from working as Manchin’s senior adviser to leading a well-funded dark money group that spent millions to crush Senator Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2020 presidential bid, and then back to Capitol Hill. Now, Kott is a corporate lobbyist for health insurers, drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, and Fox News, while the media calls on the so-called “Manchin whisperer-for-hire” to offer commentary about what has motivated his former boss to repeatedly obstruct his party’s agenda.