Things in Washington have changed — and every DC lobbyist knows it

I’m old enough to remember when corporate lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill. I also remember when half the members of Congress who retired got lucrative lobbying jobs taking their old chums out for meals or drinks and selling them on whatever the corporate backers wanted.

No longer. Now, the lobbying business is all about sucking up to Trump.

Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol calls it “competitive sycophancy,” in which

“competing sets of people [vie] to flatter him and manipulate resources and rules to his personal and family advantage. They do one extreme thing after another, try to outdo each other, and he chooses who to back, with shifts and chaos and unpredictability week after week.”

In a new story for New York magazine, Washington correspondent Ben Terris reports on how Washington’s lobbying class has been reshaped in Trump’s second term.

“Lobbying used to be Congress-focused, but they’re not driving the show anymore,” said one Republican lobbyist. “They are all now taking orders from the administration. Trump is outsize now, even compared to his last term.”

The old lobby firms’ relationships with Congress don’t work anymore. Former members of Congress aren’t making hay. Top lawyers don’t have any lobbying value.

Now, it’s all about toadying up to Trump.

The reason for the transformation of Washington is simple. Congress is no longer much of a player in official Washington. Trump has usurped its role. Republicans control Congress and Trump controls the Republicans.

So if you’re a big corporation and you want something — say, a government contract or an exemption from a pending tariff or a regulatory rollback, or you just don’t want Trump to hammer you — you’ve got to make a deal with Trump. (Short of that, you’ve got to make a deal with Trump’s inner circle.)

The art of the deal requires stroking his ego. One lobbyist told the Danish ambassador that the best way to talk Trump out of taking over Greenland would be to build a “Fort Trump” on the island in his honor.

A lobbyist encouraged Pakistani clients to recommend Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize — which they did, and which the White House tweeted out with a graphic. (But Netanyahu’s offer to recommend Trump for the prize got even more press, and more “appreciation” from the White House).

Beyond flattery, the art of the deal with Trump often entails payoffs — investments in his meme coins and tokens, in Trump family crypto and real estate ventures, in branding opportunities.

To make these deals, corporations are depending on bottom-feeders trusted by Trump — whom he considers utterly loyal.

In Trump’s Washington, all sorts of nefarious people — convicted tax frauds, bribers, and crypto swindlers — have been paying well-connected Trump insiders as much as $10 million to help them get a pardon.

Roger Ver, known as “Bitcoin Jesus” and charged with evading more than $48 million in taxes, spent $600,000 between February and April of this year enlisting the services of Roger Stone (Stone received a pardon from Trump in 2020; Ver is still hoping for his).

Trevor Milton, a former billionaire who donated nearly $2 million to Trump’s reelection efforts, hired Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, Brad Bondi, to advocate on his behalf and was pardoned, sparing him prison time as well as having to pay $165 million to the investors he defrauded with his electric-truck company.

The closest historic analogy to what’s happening in Trump’s Washington is the court of Louis XIV, which brimmed with competitive sycophancy and insider deals. As the Duke de Saint Simon noted in his memoir, written in the 1730s:

“His Ministers, generals, mistresses, and courtiers soon found out his weak point, namely, his love of hearing his own praises. There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly, adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it. That was the only way to approach him; if he ever took a liking to a man it was invariably due to some lucky stroke of flattery in the first instance, and to indefatigable perseverance in the same line afterwards.”

But flattery could go only so far. During the French Revolution, Louis XIV’s tomb was desecrated and his remains scattered.

NOW READ: MAGA is mad about more than a broken promise

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.