For all his anti-establishment [campaign] bluster, Trump has proven to be a paper tiger as president. Instead of cracking down on Wall Street plutocrats, he’s appointed them to his cabinet and given them tax cuts. Instead of browbeating world leaders, he’s let them flatter him into submission with theatrically obsequious state visits. Instead of locking out the sneering media elites, he’s pantingly courted the approval of
New York Times reporters and book-writing dandies from Manhattan. And while he hobnobs in Davos with the globalist glitterati, the ragtag team of loyal lieutenants who set out in 2016 to upturn the established order with Trump has been largely shoved to the sidelines or purged altogether from his White House.
[...]
Indeed, while Trump’s “populism” has manifested itself primarily in performative spasms of culture war, the most substantive policy victories of his first year in office have gone to the donor-class conservatism of Paul Ryan and his fellow swamp creatures in the congressional leadership. As it turns out, all they had to do was ask nicely.
[...]
Shortly after his election, congressional sources said, a consensus began to form within the Republican caucus that any member willing to engage in a bit of ego-stroking had a good shot at gaining the president’s ear.
[...]
In this Washington-wide scramble to cozy up to Trump, some Republicans took straightforward approaches. They held their campaign fundraisers at his eponymous D.C. hotel. They trekked to his golf course to pose for grinning pictures on the green and pitch him on their pet issues. They got themselves booked on his favorite cable-news shows and praised him effusively for this
historic victory or that
act of decisive leadership.
[...]
Others, meanwhile, opted for more creative acts of courtship. In perhaps the most famous instance, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy assigned a staffer to sort through packs of Starbursts and fill a jar with just the pinks and reds so that he could present the president with his favorite flavors.
[...]
When immigration talks began to heat up on the Hill, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham—who had spent years working on the issue—abruptly dropped his barbed criticisms of the president and took on a conciliatory, even admiring, tone. Graham made no effort to conceal the reasons for this sudden shift. “You could be dark as charcoal and lily white, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re nice to him,” Graham told CNN. “You could be the pope and criticize him, it doesn’t matter, he’ll go after the pope. You could be Putin and say nice things, and he’ll like you.”
[...]
Often, it seems, the most powerful bartering chip a lawmaker has to offer the Trump White House is not a vote for a given bill or a pledge of support for a given policy, but rather an expression of personal affection for Trump himself.
[...]
People who know him well say the president has taken special pleasure over the past year in watching the parade of pols who once greeted his candidacy with scorn line up to kiss his ring. The nastier you have been to him in the past, the more delighted he is when you want to make up.
[...]
As
The Wall Street Journal recently outlined in its “How-To Guide” for dealing with the commander in chief, each would-be Trump-whisperer has developed his or her own technique. When Trump wants to take serious trade action against other countries, for example, advisers will sometimes come up with reasons to stall, “hoping he’ll forget what he wanted done and move on to something else.” When Trump is weighing defense options, Mattis will gently steer him with a combination of flattery and Jedi mind tricks. “He says, ‘Your instincts are absolutely correct,’ and then gets [Trump] to do the exact opposite of what his instincts say,” a source told the
Journal.
[...]
Though he ran in 2016 as a foe of the billionaire donor class, Trump had spent much of his professional life before that trying (and tragically failing) to convince America’s corporate chieftains that he was more than just a cartoonish TV personality—that he was one of them. The resulting sense of victimhood he carried with him might have made for fiery stump speeches on the campaign trail, but it also meant that once he won, he was tickled to learn that real-life titans of industry like Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson actually wanted to come work for him. To Trump, Nunberg said, they were like “big shiny toys” to be collected and proudly displayed—eliciting oohs and ahhs from all who beheld his glittering cabinet.
[...]
Given the kind of team Trump had assembled, then, it is perhaps not surprising that the signature legislative accomplishment of his first year in office included massive tax cuts for corporations and rich people. He didn’t pitch it this way to voters, of course. In the weeks leading up to the passage of the tax overhaul, he repeated the claim that “the rich will not be gaining at all with this plan.” But inside the walls of his beachfront estate in Florida—mingling with people who had shelled out $200,000 for Mar-a-Lago memberships—he couldn’t resist showing off just a little.
Within hours after signing the bill into law, CBS News reported, Trump told attendees, “You all just got a lot richer.”
The Atlantic
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