Friends,

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.”

snip

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.)