MIAMI — At the beginning of his first term, President Donald Trump didn’t have a close relationship with many GOP lawmakers.
He didn’t seem to think he needed them.
But as his first year in the White House went on — and his legislative priorities, like an Obamacare replacement, went down — Trump learned the importance of keeping his friends on Capitol Hill close and his enemies closer.
After his health care bill imploded, Trump replaced his furious Twitter rants, scathing verbal attacks and painful silent treatments with frequent phone calls, public meetings and some backroom dealings. The result was Trump’s greatest legislative achievement: tax cuts. And even though he didn’t accomplish much more in Congress before Democrats took back the House, Trump seems to have learned an important lesson about GOP lawmakers for his second stint in the White House: The carrot can be more effective than the stick.
“He’s a very hands-on leader,” Sen. Kevin Cramer told NOTUS. “He has a lot of cell numbers and uses them.”
Rep. Byron Donalds noted that Trump is “a business person.”
“He understands how you land most deals is with relationships, not with details,” Donalds told NOTUS.
And Rep. Nick Langworthy, who was not in Congress during Trump’s first term, said that while some presidents come in, lay out an agenda and don’t want input, Trump does. “And I think that that is a breath of fresh air,” he said.
As Trump tries to make good on his sweeping immigration, economic and energy campaign promises, he’s endearing himself to his Republican colleagues with the most powerful commodity in Washington: access.
Throughout his transition back to Washington and during his first days in office, Trump has invited scores of Republican members — from the top brass to the backbenchers — to Mar-a-Lago and the White House, delivering GOP lawmakers much-coveted photo ops and at least the appearance of proximity to the president.
Key congressional stakeholders, like moderates seeking to restore the state and local tax deduction and hard-line conservatives looking for spending cuts, have had their opportunity to bend the president’s ear in sunny Palm Beach. (One source told NOTUS that Trump had met with 90 members of Congress even before his inauguration.)
Ultimately, multiple members told NOTUS that Trump’s endgame is to meet with every House GOP lawmaker in one-on-one or small group sessions. The charm offensive, so far, has done wonders for Trump’s popularity on Capitol Hill, where some veteran GOP lawmakers had been bracing themselves for the return of a strained relationship between the White House and Congress.
Moderate Rep. Don Bacon — who arrived in Washington in 2017 with Trump — told NOTUS he met with Trump in the White House last week after his fellow moderate, Rep. Mike Lawler, reached out to request a meeting. According to Bacon, Trump responded to the meeting request “right away,” so Bacon, Lawler and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick met with Trump at the White House for 45 minutes Wednesday — Day Three back in office.
“The fact that the president had us that early,” Bacon said, “I think it’s pretty impressive.”
Even freshman Republicans are feeling the love from Trump. Rep. Pete Harrigan told NOTUS he will be in one of the meetings with Trump coming up that will likely include four other first-term lawmakers, although he doesn’t know when it will take place.
“That is what a leader ought to do, meet with everybody,” Harrigan said. “Obviously, as much as we all want to execute, bring the ball forward, get things done, we’ve got to do it as a team, and I want to figure out how I can help him as best as possible, and you only have that through personal interaction.”
But perhaps the most striking change in Trump’s leadership style has been his interpersonal relationships with the speaker and Senate majority leader. Speaker Mike Johnson has publicly enjoyed the closest relationship of a speaker with Trump since 2017, regularly attending social and professional functions with the president and boasting about it on social media.
So close is Johnson with Trumpworld these days that last week he recorded and posted a video of Vice President JD Vance’s first moments in the Oval Office.
Behind the scenes, Johnson takes cold calls from Trump regularly throughout the day, according to a source with knowledge. This source’s impression is that the more transparent Trump and Johnson can be with each other, the better the speaker can communicate the president’s thinking with the conference writ large.
With a paper-thin margin, that transparency will be key to muscling Trump’s agenda through the House — and it gives Johnson’s speakership key credibility with his diehard MAGA conference.
“It’s incumbent upon the speaker to know where the president is at any given moment and be able to relay where the president is at,” this source said. “It’s vital.”
That’s not how it worked for Speaker Paul Ryan, who never really came around to Trump’s MAGA ideology and was regularly blindsided by Trump’s whims and social media screeds. Trump has had an earlier start with Johnson. Although the speaker is known for his nice-guy style than the president, his MAGA bona fides — like leading the legal argument within Congress to overturn the 2020 election — have given him credibility with Trump that was instrumental to his reelection as speaker.
It was only after Trump called two of the GOP holdouts — Reps. Ralph Norman and Keith Self — that they switched their votes and delivered the gavel to Johnson again.
Johnson knows Trump is the reason he’s speaker again — and Trump knows it too.
Having the speaker indebted to him means that, on most issues, what Trump says goes with Johnson. It’s one of the reasons Johnson has so vociferously backed the president’s preference for a single reconciliation bill.
Just as GOP leaders have learned how critical it is to keep Trump close, Trump seems to have learned the importance too. It’s one of the reasons he’s gone out of his way to compliment Senate Majority Leader John Thune — Trump called him “fantastic” just last week — even though Thune has a history of criticizing the president.
That’s, of course, a far cry from Trump’s relationship with former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whom he eventually called a “broken old crow.”
Even when Trump has disagreements with GOP leaders, like over Thune’s stubborn support of a two-bill reconciliation process, the president’s been somewhat deferential. He even hosted a private listening session with senators without issuing threats or insults.
After that meeting with Trump about reconciliation strategy earlier this month, Sen. James Lankford said Trump facilitated a “back-and-forth,” saying multiple times, “Let’s talk about that.”
The point of the nearly two-hour discussion was not to settle the debate but, Lankford said, to “have face-to-face dialogue, instead of hearing what he said in a press conference.”
Trump has also worked to grow his relationships with individual senators. He had nearly every senator in the GOP conference to breakfast at the Blair House ahead of the inauguration, and he plans to host GOP senators and their spouses at Mar-a-Lago on Feb. 7 when Senate Republicans come to Palm Beach for an annual retreat, a source told NOTUS.
That’s not to say Trump is suddenly always Mr. Nice Guy.
While he’s put a recent premium on developing personal relationships on the Hill, he hasn’t entirely ditched his trusty primary threat. He threatened to back primary challengers to 38 Republicans who failed to back his government funding plan in December, and he continues to shop a MAGA opponent to conservative hard-liner Rep. Chip Roy.
It’s also not entirely clear what Trump said to Norman and Self to convince them to back Johnson’s speakership bid earlier this month. The two Freedom Caucus holdouts voted against Johnson’s speakership until they spoke to Trump. But however Trump convinced them, he was successful.
Part of the success of Trump’s vote-changing mission for Johnson was having a middleman, Rep. Nancy Mace, on speed dial who could readily facilitate the calls from the floor. He’s cultivated Mace as one of his many key House allies prepared to do his bidding for him.
Despite a not-so-ancient record of Trump criticism, Mace said the president’s calls were no fluke. She said he regularly “calls back immediately” and has made a point to be “very accessible” with members.
Of course, it remains to be seen how long Trump’s consensus-building approach on Capitol Hill lasts. For now, however, lawmakers are just basking in his company, celebrating the Trump-sized olive branch.
A source familiar with the administration’s thinking pointed to Trump blowing up the government funding plan in December as a warning shot: He needs to be kept in the loop every step of the way to ensure he isn’t surprised with “stuff that he, fundamentally, is not going to be OK with.”
“Their biggest mistake would be to not be clearly and regularly communicating, very specifically, about the direction they’re heading about the big picture priorities, or the big picture agenda, and how that impacts the president’s stated priorities,” this source said. “Because if he finds out at the end that there’s a bunch of stuff he doesn’t like, that’s going to be very challenging.”
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Reese Gorman and Riley Rogerson are reporters at NOTUS.