Bob Livingston, the former Republican congressman, was among the conservatives who met with Donald Trump in Washington on March 21. Now a corporate lobbyist whose clients include Verizon and Adobe, Livingston liked what the GOP frontrunner had to say. He endorsed Trump as he left the gathering. “Bottom line is he’s winning,” he told reporters. “He’s going to win.”
Livingston isn’t alone, of course. Over the last few months, prominent consultants and business representatives have made it clear that they prefer Trump to his chief rival Ted Cruz. Paul Manafort, whose client list included deposed Ukrainian autocrat Viktor Yanukovych, has joined the campaign as convention manager. The center of Washington’s influence industry, K Street, is far more open to Trump than the rest of the city is. Bob Dole, John Feehery, Rudy Giuliani, and Trent Lott — they’re all flacks for powerful interests, and they’ve all expressed a willingness to work with the real estate mogul. “He’s got the right personality,” Dole told the New York Times in January, “and he’s kind of a dealmaker.”
This notion of Trump as a dealmaker, as a businessman and master negotiator, is at the heart of his appeal to D.C. lobbyists. Cruz, the thinking goes, would disrupt the capital with his war on what he calls “the Washington cartel.” Trump on the other hand would be willing to listen to the thousands of registered lobbyists — and thousands more unregistered public relations and media and crisis consultants. He’d be more likely than Cruz to include K Street’s desired tax breaks and exemptions and pork barrel projects in his tax, tariff, and infrastructure bills. Trump, the lobbyists believe, would be a pro-business president rather than a pro-market one. Which makes lobbyists see dollar signs.
The problem? The lobbyists’ theory is almost certainly wrong. Trump is no more likely than Cruz to bow to K Street’s wishes. His reputation as a dealmaker is entirely self-created and self-interested: Bragging about his business accomplishments is a substitute for the political and government experience he so obviously lacks.
Haggling over licensing fees and favoring marble tile over terrazzo bears very little resemblance to writing, proposing, and compromising over a tax code of 75,000 pages and a budget of $4.2 trillion. Bob Livingston may want a dealmaker in Trump. But he’s more likely to get a kingpin.
Trump won’t just disappoint lobbyists, however. He is likely to replace the institutions and practices of K Street with something far worse. The influence industry, despite its poor reputation, operates by a set of rules. Registries must be filled out, disclosures must be made, gifts must be recorded. Even the consultants who don’t formally register as lobbyists must keep careful track of their time lest they run afoul of regulations.
Unwritten norms govern how much firms charge their clients. And congressmen have been wary of lobbyists ever since the scandals of a decade ago. Indeed, the scandals themselves demonstrated just how boring and petty everyday lobbying is: The crimes of the most infamous ex-lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, were shocking precisely because they were an order of magnitude greater and more lurid than the run-of-the-mill and somewhat banal ethical murkiness of hosting a fundraiser for a congressman or taking a journalist out to lunch.
But the one thing Donald Trump has demonstrated in this presidential campaign is his refusal to play by the rules. Nor has he any particular loyalty to K Street. He’s rarely used its services in the past: According to federal databases, the Trump Organization and Trump Casino employed registered lobbyists only between the years 1999 and 2001 and for the relatively paltry sum of $205,250.
Most of the lobbyists Trump retained were interested in legislation affecting casino gambling. Former Trump adviser Roger Stone’s firm, for example, was paid $65,250 over a six-month period in 1999 to influence the “national gaming impact study,” the “transportation of gaming devices,” the “federal gaming tax,” and “tax treatment of gaming losses” — a subject important to Trump because he somehow managed to lose money on his casinos.
Another firm, Dyer Ellis & Joseph, was paid $40,000 in the years 2000 and 2001 to lobby on “issues relating to Merchant Mariner documents” in the Coast Guard Authorization Act. Maybe Trump wanted to lower the cost of importing his menswear line from Guangzhou.
Trump doesn’t lobby. He employs an entirely different set of means to bend public policy to his whims. He donates to campaigns to “buy” politicians. He threatens and files lawsuits. He uses the bully pulpit to harass individuals who stand in his way and to intimidate potential critics. He brags, he threatens, he pouts, he bullies. And he relies on a shady network of business associates and fixers. Who needs Patton Boggs when you have Fat Tony Salerno ready to pour the concrete for Trump Tower?
To think that Trump will wheel and deal with Tony Podesta over mohair subsidies is folly: If past is prologue, as president he’ll just issue an executive order, sic the Justice Department on his enemies, and hold a three-hour press conference defaming whoever stands in his way.
The Republican lobbyists fooling themselves into believing there is an upside to a Trump presidency are engaged in the same short-term thinking and selfishness that has allowed Trump to get as far as he has. Again and again, Trump has benefited from elites who have underestimated his abilities, dismissed his outrageousness, or erroneously believed his willingness to transgress democratic norms can be put to their advantage. They’re like the retiree who signed up for Trump University only to realize too late that he was being fleeced. If you dislike the “Washington cartel” now, just wait. President Trump will give the phrase a whole new meaning.
Matthew Continetti, editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is author of The K Street Gang (2006).
