David Perdue, the outsider who has become Trump’s man inside the Senate

Perdue, a longtime business executive with no prior political experience, had recently defeated three sitting congressmen and Georgia’s former secretary of state for the Republican nomination and was battling a well-funded and highly-connected Democratic opponent in the race for the Peach State’s open Senate seat. In October 2014, Perdue traveled to Trump Tower and sat down with the man who would become the next president, kicking off what has blossomed into a powerful and enduring friendship.

“He called our office and asked the next time I was in New York to see if we could have a meeting, so I said, yeah,” Perdue, now 67 and Georgia’s junior senator, recalled recently of his first encounter with the president.

“He wanted to know about the race. He was very cordial. He was a contributor to the race,” Perdue said. “He introduced his daughter, who happened to be in the office that day.”

While Perdue said Trump’s questions ranged from “how I was being treated by the state GOP” to “how my message was being received as an outsider,” he said the New York billionaire gave no hint at the time that his curiosity stemmed from a desire to launch a campaign of his own.

“There were no indications given that day,” Perdue said. “He was genuinely concerned and interested about why I ran and what I thought my prospects were.”

Nearly two years after he defeated Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn, by running for his Senate seat as a reform-minded outsider, Perdue now occupies a uniquely influential position within the GOP.

His corporate credentials and work ethic have already earned him the respect of party elders and congressional leaders despite his status as a relative newcomer to Capitol Hill. But his unwavering loyalty to Trump in the face of controversy has also earned him the trust of a president who has rejected many of his colleagues and much of the political framework in which Perdue operates.

The resulting dynamic has made Perdue one of the few Republicans in Congress whose bridge to the White House has yet to burn, and who is still welcomed warmly on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I’d say there’s been no more ardent supporter of the president” in the Senate than Perdue, Marc Short, Trump’s legislative director, told the Washington Examiner. “He is somebody who has been eager to help us on battles big and small.”

Indeed, Perdue spent much of his summer working behind the scenes to help build support for an Obamacare repeal measure that Trump backed, a bill that died on a night Perdue was presiding over the Senate. More recently, Perdue has aligned himself with Trump on immigration, joining the president and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., at the White House in early August to unveil legislation that would prioritize admission for skilled immigrants who can speak English.

One value Perdue has brought to the White House, Short noted, is his ability to pinpoint for Trump’s aides where the GOP conference falls at a given moment and to highlight “who needs more attention” from the administration as major policies progress.

It’s a notable contribution from someone who so recently rode into office on the same kind of insurgent wave that would sweep Trump to the forefront of the Republican Party less than a year later.

A seasoned corporate executive, Perdue touted his experience as the former CEO of Reebok and Dollar General when running for the GOP Senate nomination in 2014 against a handful of Republicans he dismissed as “career politicians.” Despite his family’s ties to the Georgia political establishment — his cousin, Sonny Perdue, was a two-term governor before Trump named him secretary of agriculture — Perdue styled himself as someone whose fresh perspective and business background could disrupt the status quo and produce results.

Alec Poitevint, Perdue’s campaign chairman and former head of the Georgia GOP, said he witnessed firsthand just how powerful the outsider message was with voters in 2014 and how quickly it propelled Perdue to the front of a crowded primary.

“It was very obvious that he was connecting with people,” Poitevint said. “You could just see that he was connecting.”

Like Trump, Perdue staked his credibility on the jobs he created and the deals he struck as a high-powered executive. And like Trump, Perdue weathered campaign-era criticism for outsourcing American jobs during his time in the private sector. While Perdue’s encounter with an outsourcing controversy came just a month before his election and focused only on jobs lost at a textile company he had managed for less than a year, Trump faced a sustained attack from rival Hillary Clinton on the many examples of Trump-branded products that came from factories overseas.

Nonetheless, both Perdue and Trump prevailed over opposition from within their own party by promising to satisfy voters’ desire to see Congress upended.

“The cornerstones of the things that David ran on are the cornerstones of the things that Trump ran on,” Poitevint said. “President Trump and Vice President Pence, in their campaign, were able to take that same sort of message and spray it over a bigger area.”

After a presidential primary in which two of his Senate colleagues fought unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination, Perdue threw his full support behind Trump in 2016, becoming a surrogate for the campaign and an advocate for the Republican nominee even in his darkest moments.

“My view was always that, look, during the general election, he was an easy guy for me to support,” Perdue said. “I felt like [Trump] was saying the same message in a different way that I had said in ‘14, so I was all in.”

When 11-year-old footage of Trump making lewd comments about a woman on the set of “Access Hollywood” surfaced in Oct. 2016, Perdue did not join the withering condemnation that some of his colleagues lobbed at Trump in the immediate aftermath of what many described as a campaign-ending scandal. Instead, the Georgia Republican said he encouraged his peers to “keep the faith” and “remember what we were after”: a GOP White House.

“While he might not be a choir boy, he had a background of getting results in a pretty tough environment,” Perdue said of how he rallied his fellow Republicans to stick with Trump in the wake of the Access Hollywood debacle. “There’s evidence out there that this guy might just be somebody very special.”

Perdue said Trump summoned him once again to Trump Tower in late 2016, when the transition was underway and most lawmakers were grappling with the impending reality of a Trump administration. Although Perdue was rumored to be a contender for the secretary of commerce position, he quickly affirmed his commitment to remaining a representative for Georgia.

“He was interested in how, once he got elected, how I could help be a bridge builder in the Senate,” Perdue said of his conversation with then-President-elect Trump. “We talked about how to get consensus and get things done in the Senate. He wanted to know about the rules a little bit.”

During the two years between Perdue’s election as an outsider candidate and his informal appointment by the president as an insider ally, the Peach State senator performed a delicate balancing act as he grew his goodwill in the Senate without shedding his insurgent image. It’s a fine line many politicians with his connections and big-money donors have been unable — or, more often, unwilling — to walk.

“I think David has stood very strongly for the reason he ran,” Sonny Perdue, Trump’s Agriculture secretary, told the Washington Examiner. “This is not a personal ambition or an ego trip.”

The former Georgia governor said his cousin has not felt tempted to weigh in on the Trump tweet du jour just because some of his Republican colleagues have begun bashing the president in public.

“He hasn’t taken the bait on many of the stories because … he believes the president is on the right track,” Sonny Perdue said. “Obviously, that’s not a blank check.”

“I think David’s colleagues in the Senate have gained their respect for him,” he added. “They don’t see him pandering to the whims of the immediacy.”

From the high-water mark of his support among elected Republicans, at which he arrived shortly after the GOP convention last year, Trump has slowly lost friends and made enemies within his own party. Progressively fewer lawmakers have demonstrated a willingness to brave the airwaves in defense of their president following a string of controversies that have churned up allegations ranging from sexism and racism to corruption, and a growing number of Republicans have felt compelled to speak out against Trump with each new crisis.

But Perdue has avoided the kinds of confrontations with Trump that have pitted other GOP members against the wrath of a base still fiercely devoted to its leader.

In terms of his relationship with the White House, Perdue’s loyalty has thus far paid off.

For example, the first-term senator attended a lunch in the Roosevelt Room in early March that the White House billed as a “House and Senate leadership lunch.” While House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flanked Trump at the lunch table that day, Perdue was the only member of Congress outside leadership to score an invitation to the White House meeting.

Perdue speaks with Trump or a member of his senior staff regularly, his aides said, and Trump has publicly showered his steadfast ally with praise.

In April, after Perdue accompanied Trump on Air Force One to the NRA Conference in Atlanta, the president described Perdue from the podium as someone he “loved right from the beginning.” In June, Trump called Perdue “one of the great people and the great senators” at a fundraiser for the Republican National Committee, according to leaked audio from the event.

“If I would’ve known you were in the audience, I would’ve been nervous,” Trump joked of Perdue at the RNC gathering.

And Perdue’s connections to the White House and the Republican establishment go beyond his relationship with Trump and his family ties to Trump’s agriculture secretary. Billy Kirkland, who managed both Perdue’s 2014 Senate bid and Trump’s 2016 campaign in Georgia, now works at the White House as deputy director of intergovernmental affairs. Nick Ayers, a Georgian who guided Sonny Perdue to re-election in 2006, is Pence’s chief of staff. Paul Bennecke, chief strategist to Perdue during his 2014 Senate campaign, is presently the executive director at the Republican Governors Association.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican who was first elected to Congress the same year Perdue was, suggested connections with high-level people in the administration are not what give Perdue his pull with the president. Instead, Loudermilk argued, Trump likely trusts Perdue on a personal level because of his business resume and political inexperience.

“It’s interesting with this administration, many of us have relationships with either somebody in the White House” or an official elsewhere in the Cabinet, Loudermilk said, citing his friendship with budget director Mick Mulvaney as an example. “But I don’t see that it gives us a particular advantage other than, I think in David’s case, the president probably does trust him and his advice because of his background.”

Perdue has also built a profile in the Senate that has little to do with his ties to Trump. Perdue’s colleagues describe him as a hard worker whose command of all things budgetary has allowed him to gain clout as a new member.

Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, one of Perdue’s Republican friends and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said his first-term colleague came into the upper chamber and did what any new lawmaker must do “in order to be influential.”

“What he did very quickly was carve out that niche,” Corker said, referring to Perdue’s swift rise as a budget expert, which was aided by his membership on the Senate Budget Committee.

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., suggested Perdue’s focus on results over ideological rigidity has helped cement his reputation as someone who can broker agreements within the conference on thorny issues.

“I think David is, he’s pragmatic, and he is one who will not let the perfect get in the way of a 90 percent solution and that makes him a very effective senator,” Daines said. “He also works quietly behind the scenes in building trust, building coalitions, having discussions without bringing personalities into it.”

Looming battles over tax reform, spending legislation, disaster relief funding for Hurricane Harvey and the debt ceiling increase will soon put pressure on Trump’s already strained relationships with congressional Republicans. The president spent much of August picking fights with GOP lawmakers he deemed insufficiently devoted to his agenda after some chose to denounce the way he handled an outbreak of racial violence in Charlottesville, Va. last month.

While Perdue is expected to help bridge the divide between the White House and the Senate when it comes to tax talks, the Georgia Republican has already shaped the debate both behind closed doors and in front of the cameras. Perdue advocated forcefully against the border adjustment tax, a revenue-generating tool promoted by Ryan and other congressional leaders, and eventually took his opposition to the border tax directly to Trump. The proposal was ultimately scrapped from the tax reform debate.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Perdue’s “personal chemistry” with Trump could ease the tax reform process by providing a reliable mediator to shuttle between two sides that are occasionally at odds.

“I do think people who have that relationship, that personal dimension to the relationship, is very very important, particularly when we get into tax [reform],” Tillis said. “It’s going to be very important because what we need to do is to make sure the message to the American people is consistent on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Trump’s penchant for stirring drama in his party could complicate a month of debates that will test Republicans’ willingness to overlook his flagging approval ratings and embrace his agenda. For some, the impulse to distance themselves from Trump’s most incendiary antics could prevent them from siding with their colleagues who, like Perdue, prefer to tune out the tweets.

“There are just certain things that we don’t necessarily need to wade into that really amplify the issue and distract us from the things that we’re trying to focus on,” Tillis said.

Through all the turmoil that the first eight months of the Trump administration has brought to Washington, Perdue’s admiration for the president he frequently advises has remained unchanged. And for Trump, that support could prove a secret weapon in the coming legislative fights.

“He is meteoric,” Perdue said of the president. “He’s got a vision.”