The Influencers: The People Shaping Trump’s New Washington https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers The Influencers: The People Shaping Trump’s New Washington en-US Mon, 12 May 2025 09:00:00 GMT The Activist Who Persuaded Republicans To Target Trans Rights https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/terry-schilling-transgender-rights-american-principles-project Liz Skalka The GOP’s current trans obsession wasn’t inevitable — or even likely. But Terry Schilling saw the possibilities. And he had data. Mon, 12 May 2025 09:00:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/terry-schilling-transgender-rights-american-principles-project Terry Schilling
Szilard Koszticsak/MTI via AP
HTML EmbedLast July, Terry Schilling, a conservative activist who had yet to interact with Donald Trump outside of a photo line, flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the presidential candidate. A buoyant 38-year-old with spiky hair, Schilling runs the American Principles Project, a group of social conservatives that bills itself as “America’s top defender of the family.” Trump, in the final months of the campaign, had set aside time to participate in an APP documentary that aimed to show how “woke military policies” had weakened the country.

But Schilling had more on his mind that day than the documentary. After filming Trump for 45 minutes, Schilling took him aside and showed him some data from the previous midterms. That election cycle had been a disaster for the GOP, yet Schilling believed APP had garnered numerous votes for Republicans in Arizona and Wisconsin — more than 30,000 in each state — thanks to a paid media blitz on what he called the “trans sports issue.” (The Trump White House didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this piece.)

Trump, of course, was already well aware of this topic. Days earlier, at the GOP convention in Milwaukee, he had told his supporters, “We will not have men playing in women’s sports — that will end immediately.” But if anyone was well-positioned to remind Trump of this issue’s political potential, it was Terry Schilling.

Long before the Trump campaign aired an ad with the tagline “Kamala Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you”; before an analysis by a pro-Harris super PAC showed that a version of the ad featuring radio personality Charlamagne tha God moved the race nearly 3 percentage points in Trump’s favor; before Trump’s victory spawned a civil war among Democrats over whether the party should abandon, or at least modulate, its support of trans rights; before Trump signed executive orders meant to prevent transgender women from participating in female sports and declaring the government would recognize only two genders; before the administration clashed with the governor of Maine over trans rights and banned trans service members from the military — a decade before all of that, Schilling had a hunch about the future of social conservatism. He saw that, once same-sex marriage had become fully legal, social conservatives would need a new electoral battlefront — and opposing the burgeoning transgender-equality movement was what it had to be.

“We were the only group in campaigns and elections on it,” Schilling told me recently. “We started talking about transgenderism in 2015, maybe even before that.”

That year was a turning point for APP, which in those days, according to Schilling, was “an orphanage of important ideas.” Pension reform. The gold standard. Dismantling Common Core. Around that time, APP’s largest donor informed the group that it would need to scale back funding. “‘You’ve got to really make a decision about what you want to do,’” Schilling recalled being told. “And so we did.”

Schilling, who joined APP as political director in 2013 and became the group’s president in 2020, certainly isn’t the only person who helped make opposition to trans rights a focal point of contemporary conservatism. But over the past decade, he has been both a driver and a beneficiary of a remarkable shift in the politics of gender identity.

“Terry and American Principles were the first to convince people, legislators, think-tank types [about] combating transgender ideology,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told me. “The bottom line is that a lot of groups that were more focused on free market questions, tax policy … realized they also have to join Terry and American Principles in fighting that fight.”

Tina Descovich, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, the grassroots organization that backs “parental rights” candidates on school boards, cites Schilling as an influential partner in seeking to use Title IX against transgender rights in schools. “Terry and his group were fighting right alongside us in some of the key swing states,” Descovich told me. “They were running millions of dollars in ads, and we were doing the grassroots work.”

Today, the 30-second political ads on bathroom bills and transgender high-school athletes that Schilling helped to pioneer are a major political factor — in a way that arguably would have been difficult for establishment strategists, even conservative ones, to imagine just a few years ago. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, credits Schilling with pushing Republicans out of their comfort zone on cultural issues. “Terry is a master at diagnosing where the possibilities are based on the popular will and how to get there,” she told me. “Over-caution is the enemy. And locating where real people are outside of political circles is how you move the ball.”

***

Last month, Schilling was trying to talk to me about his friends in the Trump administration over the screeching of a small child. “We’ve actually started creating our own ‘plum book’” — an old-school term for a Rolodex of people with “plum” jobs — “based on all our connections over there,” Schilling told me over the phone. “Because I have a hard time keeping track of them — along with my seven kids.” Those kids range in age from 1 to 19, and Schilling, who lives in Fairfax County, Virginia, and normally works out of APP’s office in Arlington, was home that day on childcare duty while his wife had a root canal.

Schilling is no stranger to the chaos of an extremely full house. The oldest of 10 from a Midwestern Catholic family, he was put to work at his family’s pizza shop, Saint Giuseppe’s Heavenly Pizza, in Moline, Illinois, before he was old enough to drive. He went off to Catholic college at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, where he described his major as “college Republicans.”

Schilling interned with GOP presidential and U.S. Senate campaigns before turning his attention to his own family’s political fortunes: In 2010, his father, Bobby Schilling — a small-business owner and former crack addict who had also, at one point, been a Democrat — ran for Congress amid the Tea Party backlash to Barack Obama. Bobby Schilling was often compared to Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, the Ohioan who confronted Obama over the economy during a campaign stop. Except that unlike Wurzelbacher, Bobby — with Terry serving as campaign manager — won his House race against a Democratic incumbent.
Terry Schilling, Bobby Schilling AP-100318045760 (2000x1328, AR: 1.51)Bobby ran with a populist economic message, but also didn’t shy away from his faith or cultural issues. Terry calls his father “Trump before Trump” — a comparison that works, on some level, if you don’t think about it too deeply. (Trump is a populist, but certainly not a devout pizza shop owner from the Quad Cities.) “My dad had this working-class, pro-free market, protections-for-workers agenda,” Terry recalled, “while also being socially conservative, protecting the unborn, protecting traditional marriage and protecting children and their innocence.”

Two years later, though, Bobby lost reelection to Democrat Cheri Bustos. Republicans blamed redistricting, but Terry seized on another theory: He thinks the campaign should have attacked Bustos harder when she called Bobby “extreme” for backing a GOP bill that seemed to make a distinction between rape and “forcible rape” with respect to banning taxpayer subsidies for abortion. Terry wanted to go scorched earth on Bustos, calling her an extremist for supporting so few restrictions on the procedure. Schilling was frustrated that not everyone in his dad’s orbit agreed.

And he is still annoyed about this: “That really told me that, like, just because you have Hill experience, just because you’re an expert in D.C., it doesn’t mean you actually know anything. And it definitely doesn’t mean you’re right. And so that’s kind of informed everything I’ve done in this town. Anything is possible if you work hard enough and you come up with something smart.”

***

On the heels of his father’s defeat, Schilling moved to Washington and joined APP, which had been founded four years earlier by strategist Frank Cannon, legal scholar Robert P. George and GOP candidate Jeff Bell as a conservative bulwark against the liberalism of the Obama era.

It was not an auspicious time for social conservatives, and Schilling — with good reason — worried about the party “completely capitulating on LGBT issues.” State by state, the right was rapidly losing the gay-marriage debate — and in 2015, the Supreme Court would effectively end the argument by legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. In 2014, Time magazine published its famous “Transgender Tipping Point” piece; the next year, Vanity Fair put Caitlyn Jenner on its cover. It seems almost impossible to believe now, but in his 2016 GOP convention speech, Trump said, in the context of denouncing radical Islam, “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology” — then, upon receiving sustained applause, added, “And I have to say, as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”

Even in Schilling’s telling, it can be tough to get to the bottom of why he latched onto this specific issue. He describes it as a mix of gut instinct, moral conviction and actual data — with a strong emphasis on the latter. To determine next steps after the same-sex marriage decision, Schilling convened market research panels to gauge “consumer” sentiment on political messages, and one thing kept jumping out. “We tested a bunch of different things, and what we kept finding was that all those negative aspects about putting gender identity into civil rights law were very unpopular,” he said.

He began cutting ads — at first, without much success. The earliest ones focused on the 2016 gubernatorial race in North Carolina, the first state to pass an anti-trans bathroom bill. GOP Gov. Pat McCrory, a supporter of the law, lost his reelection bid that year to Democrat Roy Cooper after bathroom-bill detractors argued the law would harm the local economy. “Even though we had plenty of polling that showed people largely agreed with the bathroom bill, because of the influence campaign and businesses threatening to leave, the left showed they had a playbook that worked,” said a former APP staffer whose current job precludes speaking on the record.

Why didn’t the APP ads succeed? “I think [voters] were probably skeptical of this type of thing happening. That was something we ran into early on transgender messaging — just disbelief,” this person said. “And then over time, as more stories were written, more anecdotes were put out there, that changed.” In 2019, APP debuted sports messaging in the Kentucky gubernatorial race between GOP incumbent Matt Bevin and Democrat Andy Beshear. Thanks to APP, voters were now being asked whether it was fair to have an athlete who “claims they’re a girl but was born a boy” playing female sports.

Beshear won, but Schilling says the media blitz shrank Bevin’s losing margin. “We compared the people that saw our ad versus a control group of people that never saw our ad, and we found we shifted 26,000 votes by spending only $600,000,” Schilling told me. “I went back to my donors and said, ‘Listen, we came up short. It was very close. But this really works. It moves voters away from Democrats.’”

Soon, APP was also turning the screws on Republicans. In 2021, the group targeted South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem who, fearing backlash from the NCAA, had vetoed a bill that would have prevented trans women from competing in women’s sports. A year later, Noem signed an almost identical version of the bill into law. APP applied the same playbook to Greg Abbott in 2022, when the Texas GOP governor wouldn’t support a bill declaring sex-change surgery for minors child abuse. According to Schilling, Abbot got behind it after APP began running ads against him on Fox News.

“You know, sometimes we’re winning over the conference by just showing them the water’s warm,” said Schilling, who takes credit for helping usher bills banning trans women from women’s sports in 26 states. “The American people are in. The voters are behind you.”

By 2024, pro-GOP super PACs beyond just APP were spending millions to ask voters in Montana, Ohio and Nevada whether they wanted to reelect Democratic senators who supported allowing “biological men in girls’ locker rooms.” APP also ran its own ads targeting the Harris-Trump race, piggybacking off the “they/them” push. But for the first time, due to market saturation, APP had no real idea how many votes it alone had moved for Trump — which, for Schilling, was a pretty good problem to have.

***

Progressive activists, needless to say, regard Schilling’s work with disgust. Cathryn Oakley, senior director of legal policy at the Human Rights Campaign, accused Schilling and his allies of “fear-mongering around trans kids and using people’s lack of understanding about what it means to be trans” to advance the right’s agenda. “His rhetoric shows absolutely no compassion for these kids, no sense of reality,” she said.

Schilling, of course, rejects that characterization, arguing it’s not the kids and their parents he’s against. “I would separate out the politicians and the people. That’s a very important distinction,” he told me. “The politicians have no excuse for not knowing what’s actually going on. The politicians and the profiteers, that’s the evil part of this movement. But there are a bunch of just, you know, nice people who just really don’t know how devastating this is.”

People who’ve worked for Schilling describe him as a humane boss and a “true believer” with boundless energy for conservative causes. Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, called him “unfailingly cheerful,” which is rarely how anyone in D.C. describes someone else from D.C. Dannenfelser, who runs the nation’s preeminent anti-abortion advocacy organization, which she called a sister organization to APP, regards him “like a son.”
Trump, Riley Gaines, banning transgender women AP-25036813840764 (4000x2667, AR: 1.50)APP’s super PAC appears to be thriving under Schilling’s leadership. It has gone from raising around $1 million per election cycle a decade ago, according to Federal Election Commission filings, to bringing in almost $13 million in the 2023-2024 cycle, much of it from GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein’s Restoration PAC. Schilling said he hopes to raise another $10 million to $20 million ahead of the midterms.

As APP’s influence has grown, so has Schilling’s personal brand. “The White House takes our work very seriously,” he told me, noting that he had met with Trump’s domestic policy council. “It’s not a coincidence,” Roberts said, “that Terry, still in his relative youth, has gained such influence among the highest elected officials, starting with President Trump, who loves him, and Speaker Johnson, who considers Terry a confidant.”

Schilling’s work on trans issues isn’t done. He still wants Congress to take up legislation codifying anti-trans policies, like barring surgery and gender-affirming care for minors, or defunding them as much as possible at the federal level. And beyond that? To the extent that he’s regarded as someone able to divine, or manipulate into existence, the next cultural backlash, Schilling doesn’t seem to have a firm handle yet on what that might be. He’s spoken publicly about the challenges, like declining economic opportunity and marriage rates, facing boys and men. Recently, APP has gotten behind the push for states to pass age verification for online porn. But as far as culture wars go, it’s an issue without compelling characters, no heroes and villains. No one is really against keeping children away from porn.

For now, though, Schilling has much to celebrate. Back in February, he was invited to the White House for the signing of Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order, which had been an APP goal during the election. Schilling doesn’t appear in many, if any, media photos of that day, but he didn’t necessarily need to be front and center. “He’s definitely in the circle of influence,” said Descovich, who was also at the signing. “Everybody knows that he’s playing a role.”

—
Liz Skalka is a political reporter based in Maryland.]]> ‘He’s Very Polite’: The Rise and Future of Trump's Least Trumpish Cabinet Member https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/scott-bessent-treasury-trump Claire Heddles Can Scott Bessent appease Trump, work with Musk, calm markets — and keep his job in an administration where he is a truly strange fit? Mon, 24 Mar 2025 09:40:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/scott-bessent-treasury-trump Scott Bessent
Tom Williams/AP
HTML EmbedIt was June in Washington — five months to go until the election — and Scott Bessent was in full campaign mode. The hedge fund manager was not a household name, even among those who closely followed politics, but was prominent enough in Republican circles to be a featured speaker at a conference hosted by the conservative Manhattan Institute.

During a Q&A with the think tank’s president, Reihan Salam, Bessent explained why he had decided “to come out from behind my desk” to campaign for Donald Trump: Democrats “have a central-planning, top-down mindset,” he said, describing their approach variously as “Bidenomics,” “Bidenflation” and “Biden-itis, ’cause it’s almost like an acute disease.”

He also had some harsh words for the woman he would, in a matter of months, succeed as treasury secretary. In late 2023, Janet Yellen had shifted sales of U.S. debt toward short-term notes and away from long-term bonds. To Bessent, this looked like a cynical ploy to pump quick money into the economy: Yellen, he said in his prepared remarks at the conference, had “departed from norms regarding the issuance profile of Treasury debt in an effort to stimulate markets in advance of the election.”

Fast forward eight months, and Bessent, in his first major move as Trump’s treasury secretary, decided to… maintain the same debt strategy as Yellen.

Hypocrisy? Maybe. Or perhaps it was simply the decision of a most un-Trump-like cabinet secretary: someone who listens, learns and moves carefully. “We’ve already seen an instance where he changed his view, his publicly announced view, based on information and input from advisers,” Wilbur Ross, Trump’s first-term Commerce Secretary and a longtime friend of Bessent, told NOTUS. “I think that’s a very good demonstration of how he’ll go about things. He’s ultimately a very rational, very intellectually fact-driven person.”

It would be difficult to overstate just how strange a fit Bessent (who did not comment for this piece) appears to be in this administration. He’s not a Trump loyalist like Kash Patel; he’s not a middle finger to the D.C. establishment like Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; he isn’t a hardcore conservative ideologue like Russell Vought or a product of Trump’s infatuation with media personalities like Pete Hegseth or Dan Bongino.
Marco Rubio, cabinet nominees AP-25020733089123 (8256x5504, AR: 1.50)In an administration full of look-at-me types who relish taunting foreign allies, Democrats and journalists, Bessent’s affect is notably debonair, calm, bookish. “He’s kind of a low-key personality. He’s not a screamer and yeller. He’s not a show-off,” Ross said. “He’s not a lot of things that would interfere with interpersonal relationships. To the contrary, he’s very polite.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, his appointment was opposed by the administration figure most determined to move fast and break things: “Bessent is a business-as-usual choice,” Elon Musk wrote on X before his nomination. “Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another.”

Bessent is also a longtime employee of George Soros, one of the right’s favorite villains. And in addition to everything else, he is a gay man in an administration that has made opposition to LGBTQ+ rights a centerpiece of its rhetoric and agenda.

It all adds up to a bit of a mystery as to what, exactly, Scott Bessent is doing in this job. And perhaps the biggest mystery of all in the months and years ahead will be whether — and how — he might manage to last.

***

On a breezy Thursday evening in June 1998, an unusual — perhaps unprecedented — scene unfolded in the entryway to Kensington Palace in London: A gay couple was presented to the Prince of Wales. Thirty-five-year-old Scott Bessent and his then-partner, Will Trinkle, were guests at a fundraising dinner for the newly created Prince of Wales Foundation. “It was a big deal to be presented together,” Trinkle recounted years later to royals expert and journalist Sally Bedell Smith. “Those things are preplanned. That doesn’t happen by accident.”

The annual dinners, Bedell Smith explained to NOTUS, “were big ticket items that Scott Bessent could afford.” But, she added, “beyond the money, I think he had a very good and supportive relationship with both” Charles, then Prince of Wales and now king, and Camilla, now queen. (Trinkle did not respond to a request for comment from NOTUS.)

The presentation was notable for another reason too: It symbolized the steep climb Bessent had made during his seven years in London — a period when he was not always well-liked by his British hosts.

Bessent, born and raised in South Carolina, had attended Yale University as an undergraduate. A once aspiring journalist, he nevertheless landed a finance internship one summer and stuck with the field after graduating in 1984. He was sent to London in 1991 by his then-boss, George Soros, to manage European stocks. Within two weeks, Soros had fired everyone else in that office. Bessent, however, stayed on, managing about a third of Quantum Fund’s money, as he recounted in Steven Drobny’s 2006 book, “Inside the House of Money.”

Soon, Soros’s hedge fund hatched a plan that would essentially break the Bank of England. In an incident that came to be known as “Black Wednesday,” the bank was forced to buy sterling back from shareholders at a fixed price, even as the value plummeted. As Sebastian Mallaby chronicled in his 2010 book, “More Money Than God,” Soros amassed more than $10 billion in sterling, shorted the currency and ran off with over $1 billion in profit. (Soros’s Open Society Foundations did not respond to a request for comment from NOTUS.)

Bessent attributed the idea to buy a massive amount of sterling to his colleagues from New York. Yet his role in Quantum’s payday was not insignificant. He realized that mortgages in the U.K., unlike most U.S. mortgages, weren’t fixed rate. The traders knew, Mallaby explained in his book, that when they started selling off their stockpiles of sterling, the currency’s value would drop and the government would be forced to raise interest rates to lure back investment. But Bessent flagged to Soros in the planning stages that the government was limited in its ability to use this economic salve because raising interest rates would hit nearly every homeowner in the country.

“They basically squeezed everyone in the United Kingdom with a mortgage,” Bessent told Drobny. “When they raised rates from 7 percent to 12 percent with the stated goal of defending the pound, we knew it was unsustainable and that they were finished.”

It was, Ross told NOTUS, “probably the single most successful trade that Soros and maybe anybody else ever made” — and it did not make Bessent a popular man in London. “After that, a lot of companies wouldn’t meet with me. At first, it was a matter of national pride for the Brits,” Bessent told Drobny. “But as they saw interest rates come down and the economy improving, they softened their stance.”

By the time Bessent left London in 2000, “obviously they really accepted him,” Bedell Smith said, noting that he lived at Albany, a storied British complex housing the London elite — “which was not an easy thing for an American.” Somehow, Bessent had managed to burnish his reputation while operating in the shadow of a chaos-causing, headline-hogging boss.
Scott Bessent, Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick AP-25034646592427 (6000x4000, AR: 1.50)When he returned to the United States, he started his own firm — which, as The New York Times reported late last year, had mixed success — then shuttered it within five years. By 2012, he was back working for Soros again — and that year, in New Haven, he had a conversation about Japan’s economy that he later described, in a piece he wrote for The International Economy, as a “day I’ll never forget.”

Huddled among the athletic trophies and Yale pennants adorning the wood-paneled walls of Mory’s — a private club and restaurant near his alma mater — were Bessent, Soros, a colleague and Koichi Hamada, an economic adviser to soon-to-be reelected Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. The four were discussing Abe’s economic plan, also known as the “Three Arrows.”

It was the start of what Bessent would describe as “the Bank of Japan’s fantastical decade of ultra-loose monetary policy” — a political plan to drive investment that Bessent later plotted to cash in on. “I’m not sure whether [Abe’s plan] will work, but it will be the market ride of a lifetime,” Bessent told Soros.

Months after that lunch, Bessent, now the chief investment officer of Soros’s fund, bet against the Japanese yen. Forbes called the move — which would prove to be successful, though not nearly as successful as the London affair — “vintage Soros.”

Hamada, the Abe adviser from the lunch that got the investment wheels turning, told NOTUS he had forgotten Bessent was even there. But he did remember subsequently meeting him in New York. He contrasted Bessent’s demeanor with that of Soros, who tossed bold policy ideas his way. Bessent, Hamada recalled, was a “very good listener” and “not forthcoming with policy or ideas.”

Hamada isn’t the only person to characterize Bessent as having an air of reticence. A longtime colleague, Gary Gladstein, described him as “reserved,” though, at the same time, not entirely averse to public life. “I think Scott enjoys getting some publicity,” Gladstein told NOTUS.

“I would call him a reluctant society figure,” R. Couri Hay, a New York publicist who crossed paths with Bessent at various elite parties over the years, told NOTUS. “He’s not competitive for the camera. He’s not competitive for the press attention.” He has, it would seem, a more modest disposition than many of his new colleagues in the administration — which may prove to be an asset when seeking to survive the upheavals of Trump’s Washington.

***

“For 35 years, I’ve been sitting outside the room with my ear up against the door,” Bessent told Bloomberg recently. “Trying to figure out what policymakers should do or are going to do and how that would affect markets. Now I’m inside the room trying to figure out what everybody outside the room expects us to do, how the market’s gonna react.”

For most of his career, Bessent has not had much of a public political profile — “I didn’t see him as a political person,” Gladstein told NOTUS — but he didn’t exactly ignore politics either. He made small donations to Mitch McConnell in 1996 and Hillary Clinton in 1999 for their respective Senate races, then gave more than $100,000 to a Democratic National Committee-affiliated account in 2000. In 2007 he donated to Barack Obama, and in 2008 to John McCain. In 2013, he gave $25,000 to a PAC that was paving the way for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. The balance of donations to Democrats versus Republicans had shifted to the right by the time of Trump’s first campaign, and over the past decade he’s become a major GOP donor — giving more than $1.3 million to the Republican National Committee since 2017, and well over a million to Trump-affiliated PACs this cycle.

As a veteran of the world of finance tossing around massive campaign contributions to get Trump elected, Bessent was never going to be well-received by progressives: Speaking to NOTUS, Sen. Elizabeth Warren denounced “all of his work to squeeze extra money out of every rule or trick or path in order to help rich people and leave everyone else behind.” But the installation at the Treasury Department of a Wall Streeter with a bipartisan, centrist track record did appear, at least at first, to fit a conventional pattern stretching back decades — one that included Trump’s first-term treasury secretary.
Scott Bessent AP-24327825674248 (3000x1997, AR: 1.50)Bessent is “very, very knowledgeable. Reminded me in some ways of Steven Mnuchin,” Sen. James Lankford, who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, told NOTUS. Both men “could go right through to be able to talk through policy areas.”

Mnuchin brought a certain sense of stability to the first Trump administration. He maintained professional processes at Treasury and negotiated closely with Nancy Pelosi. He was, as Business Insider recently explained, “the guy who reassured markets everything was going to be all right.”

Almost two months into his tenure, it’s far from clear that Bessent will do the same. The trouble started soon after Bessent’s confirmation, when Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency began accessing Treasury’s systems. In an interview in early February with Bloomberg TV, Bessent attempted to reassure viewers that DOGE’s role at Treasury was limited. “There is no tinkering with the system. They are on ‘read-only,’ they are looking, they can make no changes. It is an operational program to suggest improvements,” Bessent said. Around the same time, according to Politico, he provided similar reassurances to Congress.

However, after Wired reported otherwise and new court records showed that the DOGE team had broader access to payment systems than past auditors, Senate Democrats were furious: “It is highly concerning that you are either misrepresenting basic facts to Congress and the American people — or simply do not know what DOGE is doing in your agency,” they wrote to him. (A deputy inspector general at Treasury later told lawmakers they had launched an audit, writing that “we recognize the danger that improper access or inadequate controls can pose to the integrity of sensitive payment systems.”)

Graham Steele, an assistant secretary under Yellen, told NOTUS that the entire episode was “a real early hit to his credibility about what kind of secretary he was going to be and what kind of principles and values he was going to stand up for. If you had asked me before that what he was going to be like, I was hearing … ‘This is gonna be somebody coming from finance, similar to Secretary Mnuchin, not gonna be that different.’ Those early steps were really a problematic signal about how much independence there really was going to be at Treasury.”

Then, as markets began to fall in early March — fueled by uncertainty surrounding Trump’s tariff threats — Bessent went on CNBC and defended the instability as part of a “detox period” (though he later told NBC that “we are not going to have a crisis”). He also said, during a speech at The Economic Club of New York, that cheap goods are “not the essence of the American Dream.”

In making bold proclamations, Bessent seemed to be displaying the public ideological loyalty that his boss wants. “Trump likes there to be initial disagreement among staff people. He would call a bunch of us into the Oval on some issue or another and he’d like to hear everybody out. But once he felt he had heard enough to make his decision, that would be the end of the discussion,” Ross said. “Scott will be very much of that mind. So I think to the degree that they have disagreements, it will be in the Oval or in an office. It won’t be in the media.”

The problem is that Bessent’s job requires him to project not just loyalty but also stability — and that may lead to inherent tension with a president whose governing style provokes constant chaos. “Scott is a terrific guy. Whether he can stand up to the president or not — I don’t know,” Gladstein said.

David Smick, a colleague during Bessent’s early years working for Soros, put it this way to NOTUS: “I think Scott, because he’s careful in what he says and it’s not just flying off the handle — ’cause he’s obviously different from a lot of the crowd there — I think that’s gonna serve them long-term in a positive way. They’re gonna say he’s a steady hand, the calm in the storm, the calm voice.” Indeed, his mild demeanor, his history of working effectively behind the scenes, his track record of surviving financial mayhem, his apparent willingness to listen and adapt — all of these traits could be exactly what the Trump administration needs to get along with Wall Street over the next four years. If, that is, Scott Bessent has a chance to use them.

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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.]]> If Trump Succeeds, This Man May Be Why https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/james-braid-trump-vance-congress Jasmine Wright James Braid, Trump’s liaison to Capitol Hill, isn’t a household name. But the fate of the MAGA legislative agenda could be in his hands. Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:00:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/james-braid-trump-vance-congress James Braid (highlighted) with JD Vance and Marco Rubio
James Braid, right, with his former boss JD Vance. Sources describe their relationship with lawmakers as good cop (Vance) and blunt cop (Braid). Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO va AP; NOTUS
HTML EmbedAround 5 p.m. on the night before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a senior White House official got a call from his new boss, James Braid. Republican D.C. was, at that point, in full party mode: A raucous MAGA rally featuring, among others, the president-elect and the Village People was underway at Capital One Arena. Throughout the city, Republicans were preparing to attend lavish inaugural events later that evening.

But Braid’s mind was elsewhere: Having been tapped to serve as Trump’s main liaison to Congress, he was seeking to fill out his team. And he had decided this aide should join him — in just 45 minutes — for in-person interviews. “I’m like, ‘James, it’s 5 o’clock, it’s snowing,’” this official recalled. “And I go, ‘Let me see what I can do.’ And I call him right back, and I’m like … ‘Hey, can we …’ and he’s like, ‘No, we’re gonna do the interviews.’” The aide ended up helping conduct the interviews in a full tux.

“That’s James, ya know,” this official told NOTUS. “Some of us are over there in D.C. to be seen and to be around all this. And that’s not to say James isn’t, but his mission is to do the work first.” The official described Braid as “the hardest working guy I’ve ever worked for.”

Braid, whose official title is director of the Office of Legislative Affairs and deputy assistant to the president, arrives in the administration having just worked in the Senate for now-Vice President JD Vance. At 6-foot-6, he typically stands high above the lawmakers he walks alongside, and friends and allies describe him as “physically imposing” or “hulking.”

Braid’s assignment is to deliver results where Trump largely failed during his first term. Tax cuts aside, Trump’s first four years in office did not really birth a major legislative policy achievement, and the president went through four legislative affairs directors in the same number of years. Part of the reason for the revolving door, according to one Republican strategist close to Braid and Vance, was that “we unfortunately had a leg affairs team that sometimes felt like they were not representing the president’s interests” and instead were “working with congressional leaders to rein in” or “divert from” Trump’s agenda.

By contrast, Braid appears intent on serving Trump rather than restraining him. “I think I view my fundamental mandate from the president as translating his ideology and his views into legislation. So, there’s no desire to contain him,” Braid told NOTUS in an interview. “Our role across the administration, but most especially in legislative affairs, is to be faithful stewards and implementers of that vision, not to contain or otherwise try to ameliorate what he’s trying to accomplish.”
Russell Vought AP-24358836120359 (8640x5760, AR: 1.50)Russell Vought — the newly confirmed Office of Management and Budget director, who hired Braid at OMB during Trump’s first term and says they have a “close relationship” — is confident in Braid’s ideological loyalty. “Having known him, he’s always been most comfortable in the policy agenda that has become kind of the Make America Great perspective,” said Vought in a NOTUS interview. “So it is not a surprise to me at all that he’s working for the president and pushing those objectives on the Hill.”

Braid isn’t one of the well-known names in the new administration — multiple people describe him as someone who doesn’t seek the spotlight — yet it’s hard to think of any behind-the-scenes player whose success, or lack thereof, could have bigger consequences for the country over the next four years. In some ways, the fate of the Trump policy agenda rests with the small daily tactical decisions that Braid will make. Though Trump is known to be his own top negotiator with lawmakers, who tend to call him directly, it will be Braid who deals with the nuts and bolts of legislation — as well as where and when the White House decides to expend its political capital.

“You look at his promises during the campaign, you look at the legislative landscape, and the name of the game is to try to get as much of that done as possible in a challenging environment,” Braid told NOTUS. Given the narrow House majority, and the sheer sweep of Trump’s agenda, “challenging” may well end up being a dramatic understatement. But among most of the two dozen Republican lawmakers, strategists, White House officials, Hill aides, friends and allies that NOTUS spoke with for this story, there is a belief that this hard-working loyalist is uniquely suited for what is likely to be, by any measure, an extraordinarily difficult job.

***

Braid, now 35, was born and raised in North Carolina. His father immigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1980s from Scotland. Braid first attended the University of Oklahoma, then the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he played rugby and graduated in 2013. According to a friend, he was a bartender in North Carolina before moving to D.C. This friend described him as a humble person who’s “always had to work for it.”

Most describe him as very smart and an avid reader. He reviewed books for The Washington Free Beacon while working for Heritage Action for America in D.C. as an intern, then staffer. In those years, Heritage was a conservative thorn in the side of wavering Republicans. It was at Heritage, one co-worker recalled, that Braid received a crash course on how to wield power and get results from members of Congress.

His first job on the Hill was as a senior legislative assistant in the office of then-Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Within a span of 14 months, he was promoted to legislative director, then deputy chief of staff. A cigarette smoker, he frequently worked 18-hour days on the Hill and was there on weekends, colleagues said. “He was not my roommate, but he was there at the office a lot,” Sanford, who famously lived at his office, told NOTUS. “James was a loyal soldier and definitely a workhorse.”

Sanford’s office was a notoriously demanding place to work, and it could feel like a revolving door. The congressman often found himself disagreeing with other Republicans — and it fell to Braid and his co-workers to help explain why Sanford would not vote for a bill that was popular with the rest of the conference.

Sanford told NOTUS that the pair used to playfully argue about conservative policy in the office. “James, as I remember him, had a soul,” Sanford said. “I remember him to be a good guy who thought a lot about conservative philosophy — and with due respect to the people I know and like who work for Trump now, conservative philosophy is not the driver of where Trump is coming from.”
Mark Sanford AP-29836841131 (4928x3280, AR: 1.50)From there, Braid went on to work for then-Reps. Ken Buck and Ted Budd and the House Freedom Caucus, among other conservative offices. One ally said that a signature part of Braid’s work as an aide was assisting lawmakers in taking bigger swings than they were expected to — like helping Budd become the face of the fight against the 2018 Gateway Tunnel bill, stepping toe-to-toe with Sen. Chuck Schumer. (The bill would have built a rail tunnel under the Hudson River for $30 billion, and it drew significant pushback from President Trump.)

“It was just fascinating to see how he could sort of position a no-name freshman into taking on the minority leader at the time,” said Chad Yelinski, a groomsman in Braid’s wedding and former Capitol Hill co-worker. “I don’t know how many guys can … pick a fight and elevate it in such a way that you get, you know, some kind of big policy outcome from it.”

Multiple people told NOTUS that when Vance arrived in the Senate in 2023 he sought out Braid to work on his team. (Vance did not comment for this story.) These sources described their relationship with lawmakers as good cop (Vance) and blunt cop (Braid). According to the Republican strategist close to Braid and Vance, it’s in part because of Braid that Vance boasted strong relationships for someone relatively new in the Senate.

Vance was able to build “unique” coalitions — with Democratic then-Sen. Sherrod Brown on a train safety bill, for instance, or with Democratic then-Sen. Debbie Stabenow on a bill to protect the Great Lakes. “A lot of that is James Braid,” the strategist said. “He understood the coalition, because he understood where JD was ideologically, and because he actually had a sharp mind for politics. He was able to look at what we were doing on the political side and synthesize it into policy and legislation.” With Trump returning to the White House, Vance helped push Braid’s résumé for the role of legislative director, the strategist said, even though the transition team interviewed other people.

A few people who spoke with NOTUS were surprised to see Braid in this role because of his historical commitment to limited government and traditional conservative principles. “I don’t know how you can look at yourself in the mirror and go tell members of Congress that we are going to impose tariffs on Denmark because they won’t give us Greenland,” said a source who worked with him during his time on Capitol Hill.

Some sources said his beliefs had evolved toward a more populist-Trumpian outlook as he ascended through the ranks. “He’s a true convert to this MAGA stuff,” said a Republican operative who once worked with Braid. The strategist close to Braid and Vance put it this way: “I think there’s something that always happens when anyone you know works in a job and then takes a new job, where, when you take your new job, you have new priorities.”

Braid credits trade for playing a role in opening the door to his complicated version of conservatism. Those closest to him say he has always been both conservative and populist — that he has moved not just with the Republican Party, but in some ways ahead of it, seeing the turn toward populism before others were comfortable with it. He is able, multiple people told NOTUS, to apply his principles to the circumstances at hand. Sources also described him as loyal to those he represents — and proud to represent Trump’s interests.

***

Braid, according to friends, has softened somewhat after getting married and becoming a father of one — soon to be two. His wife, a Republican staffer on the Hill, is due in May. (A source familiar with Braid’s situation said he doesn’t plan to take paternity leave.) Friends say he’s a thoughtful and at times sentimental person, who gave one of his groomsmen Robert Caro’s “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” as a thank-you gift for participating in his wedding.

Still, the old work ethic remains. Braid, who has an office in the East Wing, meets with the president multiple times a week, according to the source familiar with Braid’s situation. (The source would not say whether Braid has walk-in privileges to the Oval Office.) Lawmakers who spoke to NOTUS say Braid has a near-constant presence on all things pertaining to Capitol Hill — from the Senate confirmation fights to the House’s already-fraught efforts to pass a government funding bill next month. Since Election Day, one Republican lawmaker said, he has attended over a dozen meetings with Braid present. A senior White House official — the one who wore the tux to the interviews — also said Braid calls members, even though he has staff to do so on his behalf.

A Republican strategist whom Braid prepared to attend meetings with senators and Trump cabinet nominees said that Braid offered an invaluable verbal dossier on lawmakers. He has “the intel on what these senators need to hear, what promises they need, what promises you’re gonna have to keep,” said the strategist. Asked how Braid gained all his intelligence, the strategist replied, “Every time I ask him, ‘How do you know that?’ he’s like, ‘I read it.’ He just reads everything. He consumes every piece of written material about whatever subject he’s working on.” It now appears that every Trump nominee who went through the Senate process will be confirmed — a significant victory for Vance, who got a lot of the credit for pushing the nominees across the finish line, but also a major win for Braid.

To this work, Braid brings a no-b.s. communication style. Buck, one of Braid’s former bosses on the Hill, said it’s “probably his most effective attribute” — a “straightforward honesty in how he describes the position of the people he’s helping.”

He seems capable of tempering that bluntness with humility, however. “James has not come into the room telling everybody how it’s going to be,” Rep. Dusty Johnson said. “He does message the importance of doing this as a team and working through pain points together. He has taken a thoughtful approach.”

Not everything has gone smoothly so far, to be sure. In December, during talks over how to raise the debt ceiling, Braid’s negotiation tactics angered a few Republican members, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. They believed it was Braid who tipped Trump off, in the middle of negotiations, that Rep. Chip Roy was among the fiscal hard-liners who ardently refused to raise the debt ceiling without deep spending cuts — and that it was Braid who got Trump riled up enough to call Roy “very unpopular” and “an obstructionist” on social media. Ultimately, Trump’s push failed, with 38 Republicans rebuffing him.
Roy Chip AP-24355060318497 (4000x2667, AR: 1.50)It now seems, though, that the episode was a mere bump in the road. A month later, Roy dismissed the thought that there was any beef with Braid. “We’re moving forward,” he told NOTUS, saying he wouldn’t be discussing anything that happened before the new year. (Roy later tweeted that “swamp media vultures” were trying to cause conflict between Braid and conservatives on the Hill. “He is not the issue,” Roy wrote.) And one other lawmaker in the room said Braid wasn’t combative at all.

“I love Chip Roy, looking forward to working with him to implement the president's agenda,” Braid told NOTUS.

The next big test for Braid lies in the debate over reconciliation, which would allow Republicans to bypass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate — and probably represents the best vehicle to pass Trump’s ambitious agenda on the border, energy and taxes in the first 100 days. At the root of the issue dogging Republicans is whether to do one reconciliation package or two — splitting border security, defense and energy from tax cuts and a debt ceiling raise to make them both (in theory) easier to pass.

Some Republicans who had discussed reconciliation strategy with Braid and the transition team felt caught off guard when the president suddenly endorsed a one-bill strategy in early January — in part, said three people familiar with the discussions, because it was Braid and his team who had pushed the two-bill strategy and made it seem like that’s what Trump wanted. The back-and-forth, which has yet to be resolved, left lawmakers to question whether Braid and Trump were actually on the same page.

Then again, the reality, according to Trump’s first legislative director, Marc Short, is that the president is always going to be his own primary dealmaker. “He does a lot of the negotiation,” Short said. “And I don’t think the important things he’s going to delegate to somebody on his staff.”

Add that complicated dynamic to the substantial list of challenges facing Braid as he settles into his new role. “It’s a tough job to be delivering when you’ve got a one-vote margin in the House, right?” one longtime friend of Braid told NOTUS. “Just because anything getting across the finish line takes a miracle, right?”

“How does anybody handle that?” said one lawmaker who was in a meeting with Braid and Trump in early February. “It’s a challenge for everybody — Republican, Democrat, whoever.” But Braid, this person added, “knows this conference very well. No doubt about that.”

—
Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS. NOTUS reporters Oriana González, Reese Gorman and Haley Byrd Wilt and managing editor Kate Nocera contributed to this story.]]> Peter Navarro Is One of Trump’s Most Faithful Allies. Now He’s Getting His Trade War. https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/peter-navarro-tariffs-trade Haley Byrd Wilt Navarro’s unyielding crusade for tariffs — which frustrated many Republicans in Trump’s first term — will now be put to the test. Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:00:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/peter-navarro-tariffs-trade Peter Navarro
Navarro is a Harvard-trained economist who might just love tariffs even more than Trump. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
HTML EmbedYears before Peter Navarro went to prison for contempt of Congress, he was already known for his contempt for Congress.

Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, lawmakers often left meetings with Navarro — the president’s trade attack dog — uncertain of the new administration’s strategic endgame. They were hearing concerns from companies in their districts about Trump’s tariffs on imports from America’s allies, which were causing higher prices and threatening jobs. Could someone explain, they wondered, why paying more for steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico was necessary for national security?

Rep. Warren Davidson shared apprehensions like those in a meeting with Navarro, but it left him frustrated. It was “a complete waste of time,” he recalled in a recent interview with NOTUS.

Reports afterward were that Davidson, an Ohio Republican, was so agitated, he flipped a chair in anger as he left. He now promises, looking back, that he didn’t flip the chair on purpose. It was more that when he stood up to leave — yes, angry with the conversation — his knees knocked over the flimsy plastic chair he had been sitting in.

“There was no throwing of anything,” he said.

Still, Davidson was upset.

“His goal for the meeting was to say that we had a meeting and then to go out and do a press statement to say, ‘I’m working with Congress,’” Davidson said of Navarro. “But he was not listening at all.”

Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist who might just love tariffs even more than Trump, didn’t bring polite disagreement or diplomacy to those first-term trade wars like then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. No — he brought more of a long-simmering rage to the table. Navarro was furious that much of America’s manufacturing capacity had moved overseas. He was angry that cheap products had reshaped U.S. consumption and investment habits after America normalized trade relations with China. And he was angry, more broadly, with the “globalists” who want to ease the flow of goods between nations.

Challenge Navarro’s ideas, and you might find yourself labeled a globalist, too, with any number of creative epithets attached. He shares Trump’s passion for crafting insults, once calling then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a “HYPOCRITE BLOWDRIED CCP BITCH.”

Even his allies say it’s impossible to win an argument with him.

“You can’t,” said Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser who counts Navarro as a close friend.

“Peter’s one of the most intense guys I’ve ever met,” Bannon told NOTUS. “He’s very aggressive, and he rubs a lot of people the wrong way. He just does. He can be abrasive. But that’s his greatest strength. His superpower is his relentlessness.”

Navarro’s desire for companies to make most products within the United States isn’t just an “obsession,” according to Bannon. “This is as close to a religious belief as he’s got: the American worker and American manufacturing.”

Navarro didn’t respond to interview requests from NOTUS or requests for comment on the details in this story.

Plenty of GOP lawmakers would love to see more manufacturing in the U.S., like Navarro does, and they’ve grown increasingly critical of China’s trade practices. Some members even want to end permanent normal trade relations with China, introducing bipartisan legislation in January to do so.

But Navarro’s willingness to strike U.S. allies with trade penalties during Trump’s first term — and pushing for them again this time around — seemed counterproductive to some Republicans.

“I went to the U.S. Military Academy,” Davidson told NOTUS. “Every military academy on the planet would say some version of: ‘You’re more likely to win any conflict if you multiply your allies than if you multiply your enemies.’”

“Why put tariffs on everybody all at once,” Davidson asked, “when we could actually build a coalition to go after China?”

AP 24025840273416 (5914x3943, AR: 1.50)Navarro is back in the Trump administration as a close trade adviser — one of the few staffers to return from the first round. His loyalty to Trump is unwavering: He served four months in federal prison last year for defying a congressional subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. Trump sees him as a true believer, and they align on trade policy. The president is already rolling out ideas Navarro supports. He’s upending international trade and invoking emergency presidential powers this week to place 25% tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico, as well as 10% tariffs on products from China.


Trump and Navarro hope those tariffs will incentivize American companies to make goods almost entirely domestically, even if production costs more.

The plan is sure to cause supply chain disruption and an outcry from U.S. manufacturers relying on products from Mexico and Canada. American companies usually pay tariffs, not foreign countries, and those firms are likely to pass increased costs on to American consumers. Mexico, Canada and China have also already promised sweeping retaliation, threatening to slap tariffs on many American exports.


Trump defended his decision by pointing to the national debt. He also argued (again) that Canada should simply join America as the 51st state to enjoy duty-free commerce.


“We’re not going to be the ‘Stupid Country’ any longer,” he declared in a social media post over the weekend. “MAKE YOUR PRODUCT IN THE USA AND THERE ARE NO TARIFFS!”

The new tariffs are far more radical than any Trump rolled out during his first term, covering roughly $1.4 trillion of imports. The main dynamic that’s changed since then is that he and Navarro will actually have far more allies on Capitol Hill, at least publicly, during this trade war. In interviews before Trump approved the tariffs, Republican lawmakers expressed support for Navarro and backed any impending tariffs on close allies, despite clashing with him in the past. Even Davidson described Navarro as knowledgeable and skilled, adding that he’s “excited” to work with him again. And Navarro’s foremost critics within the GOP during Trump’s first term, like former Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, have retired or been run out of Congress. Others have changed their tune.

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, for example — who once co-sponsored a bill to revoke Trump’s ability to unilaterally roll out tariffs for broad national security reasons — is more reluctant to criticize the tactic today.

“Tariffs are definitely a double-edged sword. But I’ll give the president the benefit of the doubt,” he told NOTUS. “He won the election. He talked about this.”

Johnson added that he became “a big Peter Navarro fan, when all was said and done.” He pointed to the coronavirus pandemic when Navarro raised alarms over the fact that medical products and components of personal protective equipment are made in China.

“I view him as an ally,” he said.

And Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who once told me he’d like to see more congressional authority over trade, said Navarro is a “bright, able guy” who is “clearly very supportive of the president.”

“I look forward to working with him again,” Cole told NOTUS.

Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina also said Navarro is “one of the sharpest, most engaged men I’ve ever met.”

Norman remembered meeting with Navarro to advocate for a company that wanted an exemption to Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. “He worked it out,” Norman said.

Norman is a lot more supportive of tariffs today than a Freedom Caucus member might have been a decade ago: “We’ve got to get self-sufficient to manufacture things,” he told NOTUS, echoing Navarro’s longtime ethos. “We can’t depend on China to do it.”

Others said they’re already telling businesses in their districts to toughen up ahead of new tariffs.

“They’re worried about it, of course,” Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said of manufacturers back home. But “it’s a negotiating tool for Trump.”

“A lot of these businesses are looking at their bottom line, and they need to start looking at America and our people and what’s good for the country long-term,” Burchett told NOTUS. “If they could just rally around the president, I believe we could really put America back on track.”

Republicans might sound like they’re on the same page, but the proof will be in how long they’re willing to withstand higher prices for companies in their states. And differences often arise when they have to answer this question: What are tariffs for?

Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, has pointed to three purposes: to respond to unfair trade practices by countries like China, to raise revenue and as a negotiating tool. But Navarro’s vision is grander — he wants to see American products made almost entirely in America. Tariffs, for Navarro, serve that purpose and, ideally, redirect supply chains to domestic companies. Any resulting higher prices or supply chain challenges are simply growing pains.

“America’s record on trade — specifically America’s chronic and ever-expanding trade deficit — says that America is the globe’s biggest trade loser and a victim of unfair, unbalanced, and nonreciprocal trade,” Navarro wrote in the trade section of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

He lambasted the theory that free trade is beneficial for nations, since it reduces the prices of goods and can make production more efficient. Economists often illustrate those benefits by describing how painstaking it would be to make something as simple as a sandwich without trading with anyone else for the ingredients. (You’d have to farm the wheat, harvest it, make flour, bake the bread and so on.)

But according to Navarro, free trade theories don’t have “any relevance in global markets dominated by industrial espionage, rampant cheating, intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, state capitalism and currency misalignments.”

Economists who do believe free trade is, on the whole, positive for all countries argue Navarro is often more confident than correct.

“Navarro’s maybe most famous claim was that no countries would retaliate when the Trump administration imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum,” said Scott Lincicome, a trade expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “And of course everybody retaliated instantly.”

“The guy says that trade deficits subtract from GDP, and that’s just flat wrong,” Lincicome added.

Still, even Lincicome sees some tactical interest in having Navarro in the administration.

“It is somewhat savvy of Trump to bring Navarro back, if only to let him execute his kind of madman theory of international relations,” he told NOTUS. “If governments don’t believe Trump is crazy enough to do these types of crazy tariff things, then they are less likely to cave to his demands, right? There is a strategic benefit to having Navarro in the Oval Office, because there’s always a little fear that somehow Navarro is going to convince Trump to do it.”

As adamant as Navarro is about reshaping America’s economy, Trump and his allies seem to have recognized they can’t embrace all of Navarro’s most aggressive ideas, like withdrawing from the World Trade Organization, from the jump. Many voters have said they chose Trump because they hoped he would bring down prices of consumer goods. Tariffs do the opposite.

That’s why a few Republicans are still willing to share their concerns about Navarro’s ideas.

“I am hopeful that we’ll be judicial,” Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana told NOTUS when asked about tariffs.

He described Navarro as “driven,” “pretty forceful” and “very convinced of his ways.” Zinke was Trump’s interior secretary when the president decided to slap tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum the first time. Almost as soon as Trump gave the thumbs-up, Zinke remembered, he got a call from Johnny Morris, the founder of Bass Pro Shops.

“Johnny was livid because that little tariff we just put on aluminum, it raised the price of a fishing lure by a couple bucks,” Zinke said.

“When you do a tariff — buyer beware — the supply chain is tenuous,” he added. “It’s kind of like a valve or a button on a nuclear submarine. Don’t be flipping switches and valves unless you know what they do.”

For his part, Bannon thinks Navarro has a good chance of success. He remembered shouting matches between Navarro and Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin about tariffs, when Navarro learned the key to success is to never give an inch.

“This guy will never back down,” Bannon said. “To wit, he went to prison.”

Navarro was involved in efforts to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, later insisting that any communications about it were covered by executive privilege and weren’t subject to subpoena. It was the culmination of Navarro’s transformation from a Democrat before Trump’s rise to power to a die-hard MAGA devotee. (He ran as a Democrat both for mayor of San Diego and a House seat, and he expressed support for Hillary Clinton.)

After his conviction, Navarro spent four months in a Miami prison. He spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer, the same day he was released.

“They convicted me. They jailed me,” he said. But “guess what? They did not break me.”

—
Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS. ]]> Marco Rubio Says He’s All In on Trump’s Foreign Policy Vision. Is There Room for His Own? https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/marco-rubio-trump-foreign-policy Haley Byrd Wilt All of Washington seems to be counting on Rubio to balance out Trump. Wed, 08 Jan 2025 10:00:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/the-influencers/marco-rubio-trump-foreign-policy Marco Rubio
Lawmakers from both parties said they are earnestly rooting for Rubio. Matt Rourke/AP
HTML Embed
When the Chinese government steamrolled pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, Sen. Marco Rubio saw it as an existential clash between freedom and tyranny — and one that demanded a response from the United States.

He advanced legislation that year to sanction officials responsible for the crackdown, reconsider Hong Kong’s trade status and block sales of tear gas and other crowd control equipment to the Hong Kong police force.

“We have to decide: Do we want to be a defender of democracy?” Rubio told me in an interview that August. “Do we want to be a defender of those principles that have made the world, in my view, safer? And do we think American democracy is safer with more democratic nations on earth?”

“Or,” he continued, “do we sort of want to just retreat within ourselves and believe that somehow, we’ll be better off with a world in which the principles that underlie who we are have eroded as a model for nations and for governance?”

At the time, President Donald Trump wasn’t too worried about those questions — or about the protesters.

“Hong Kong is a part of China,” Trump said of the protests that summer, which he described as riots. “They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.”

The differences between the two men couldn’t have been more apparent.

Now, more than five years later, Trump is returning to the White House, and Rubio is up for confirmation as his next secretary of state. It’s a dream job for the Florida Republican: Rubio will have the power to shape foreign policy, support dissidents around the globe and implement the human rights sanctions he helped pass into law while serving in the Senate. But he’ll also be doing that within an “America First” framework — and on behalf of a president who often praises dictators while insulting America’s allies.

“Trump has made it very clear that he wants to destroy our alliance structure,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee with Rubio.

“It’s true that Sen. Rubio has held some positions that seem contrary to President-elect Trump,” Murphy told NOTUS. “But I think when you sign up for this cabinet, you’re signing up for Trump’s view of the world.”

The rest of Washington seems to be hoping otherwise. In interviews, lawmakers from both parties said they are earnestly rooting for Rubio and believe he will be an adult in the room during Trump’s second term. They sounded optimistic that he would speak up strongly in favor of democracy and human rights around the world as Trump’s secretary of state — and handle his responsibilities with competence, even if chaos reigns in the new administration.

Rubio has plenty of work cut out for him. Trump hasn’t even taken office yet, but he has already proposed annexing Canada as the 51st American state (first seemingly as a joke, and then growing more enamored with the idea in subsequent social media posts), threatened close allies with strict tariffs, said he wants to claim control of the Panama Canal and resurrected his first-term hopes of buying Greenland.

On Tuesday, Trump refused to pledge that he wouldn’t use American military forces or economic coercion to claim the Panama Canal or Greenland. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said at a press conference. “It might be that you’ll have to do something.”

Rubio will also enter office at a dangerous moment on the world stage. Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, numerous violent conflicts continue in the Middle East and the Chinese government is acting ever more belligerent in the Taiwan Strait.

He will almost certainly have an easy time being confirmed. After nearly 15 years in Congress, he still has plenty of friends, an accomplishment in an era when relationships between lawmakers have been strained to the limit.

In 2017, Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin told reporters that Rubio was “one of the great leaders in the United States Congress on human rights” and that he “speaks with moral clarity.”

Two presidential impeachments and a global pandemic later, Cardin — who was most recently the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and has now retired — is still a fan of Rubio.

“I respect him greatly,” he told NOTUS in December.

Other Democrats who spoke for this story had a hard time coming up with criticism for their Florida colleague, beyond noting that they obviously disagree on some policy questions. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said he would have selected Rubio for his own cabinet if he were president and that he’s often joked in the hallways in recent months about how astonished he was that Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance for vice president instead of Rubio.

And New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker responded to the news of Rubio’s nomination with unreserved joy. “I’m just happy for him and his family,” he told NOTUS. “He has an understanding of foreign policy’s nuances and complexities.”

“Marco is my friend,” Booker said.

Republicans tripped over themselves with enthusiasm to praise him.
Marco Rubio, Ben Cardin AP-17095594188704 (4621x3088, AR: 1.50)“He’s got a wicked sense of humor,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who spends a lot of time with Rubio and other colleagues cracking jokes in the Senate cloakroom. He’s also “one of the most articulate debaters I’ve ever seen,” Graham told NOTUS, a “really good geopolitical mind,” and he “can convey complicated concepts in an understandable way.”

GOP Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana feels the same way. He quipped that Rubio is young among his colleagues, considering that the “average age in the United States Senate is deceased.”

But “he exercises power intelligently and maturely,” Kennedy told NOTUS.

Rubio’s more Reagan-inspired, hawkish foreign policy was on full display during the 2016 election when he ran in the GOP presidential primary against Trump. After Trump became the nominee, the senator delivered speeches pushing back on some of Trump’s foreign policy plans.

“If we are not engaged in the world, the price we pay will be much higher in the long run than the price we pay to be engaged,” Rubio said at the time.

In more recent years, Rubio has tried to strike a balance between his prior views and Trump’s more isolationist impulses, voting against a recent aid package to Ukraine because it did not address American border security. In a Senate floor speech before the vote, he said he understood why some Americans would question more aid to Ukraine because the United States faced other problems at home.

Still, he said, “We have a national interest in the outcome.”

“It’s not an unlimited national interest,” he added of the war. “It doesn’t mean we spend however much they need for however long it takes. But there is an interest.”

For Rubio, it is related to great power competition with China. “They’re hoping we’re going to get stuck in Ukraine, along with what’s happening in the Middle East, and we’re going to be drained by it and we won’t be able to focus on the Indo-Pacific,” he said of the Chinese government’s goals. “But if we do become disengaged, then what? Their hope is that they’ll go around telling people, ‘You see? We told you America is unreliable and a power in decline.’”

Trump has said he wants to quickly negotiate an end to the war, and Rubio will likely play a role in those talks. His colleagues in the Senate are glad Rubio may be in the room: He has long called Russian leader Vladimir Putin a war criminal, and in his speech about the aid package, he said he wants Ukraine to survive the war with its democracy intact.

If Rubio is confirmed, he’ll have some dynamics working in his favor. He understands the foreign policy bureaucracy, Congress and Trump. And he’s had more practice in leadership since Trump’s first term, serving as the top Republican on the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s gotten more than 40 bills passed into law — which is more than many members of Congress in this gridlocked period — and he has a reputation for doing his policy homework.

It’s a good sign, too, that even Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, whose libertarian foreign policy views differ with Rubio’s in nearly every meaningful way, told NOTUS he is a “good pick” for the role.

Rubio will still have to face questions from his Senate colleagues during his confirmation hearing, expected next week. Booker told NOTUS he’ll want to ask about the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Other Democrats are likely to ask how Rubio will weigh further military aid to Israel as its war against Hamas continues in Gaza. Rubio would have a say; the State Department is required to consider whether foreign forces receiving American assistance are committing human rights abuses.

Trump’s team did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Rubio’s spokesperson also declined an interview request for this story. In a statement after Trump announced his nomination, Rubio pledged that he would “work every day to carry out” Trump’s agenda.

“We will deliver peace through strength and always put the interests of Americans and America above all else,” he wrote.

For Rubio, those interests have often been connected to human rights questions, as well as the rise of authoritarians who threaten democracy around the world. When he introduced a bill in 2017 to punish Bashar al-Assad after Syrian forces used chemical weapons against civilians, Rubio preemptively answered hypothetical questions about what the conflict has “to do with America.”

“This is who we’ve been for over two centuries: a people who care,” he said during a press conference about the bill. “It’s embedded in our founding principles, in the belief that all people have the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not all Americans. All people. And we’ve lived out those principles — often imperfectly — but we’ve lived them out more than any other nation and any other civilization and any other society in human history.”

Rubio’s evolution as a politician has meant accepting the reality that his style of serious legislating isn’t what will win out in today’s Republican Party. Trump isn’t known for making similar speeches — at least, not unless a staffer has fed one into a teleprompter for him first. But Trump is just going to get more attention (and more votes) than someone like Rubio in this era: “If I give the most thoughtful statement in history, people will ignore it,” Rubio told reporters in 2019. “Because it doesn’t get the clicks and it doesn’t get the ratings.”

Rubio has found a way to understand and explain Trump’s style of leadership — and work with it. During our conversation about Hong Kong back in 2019, Rubio had an answer ready for Trump’s lack of concern — he was seeking a trade deal with China at the time — even though Rubio wanted to see him support the protesters.

“The president is a businessman, and he’s coming at this as a businessman,” he said. “And that’s how he entered office, what he got elected to do. As a businessman, he’s a very transactional person. So I think he views foreign policy in a very transactional way.”

Trump being transactional instead of completely cemented in one way of thinking gave Rubio the opportunity to have real influence during his first term. Rubio often lobbied him on foreign policy matters, at one point becoming a kind of shadow secretary of state for Latin American policy. And he frequently pushed for stronger measures to combat aggression by the Chinese government.

Rubio may look to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as an example of threading the needle. Pompeo decried abuses against ethnic minorities in China’s northwest region of Xinjiang while he led the State Department, even as Trump himself reportedly told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that he thought imprisoning them en masse was the right thing to do.

“The second Trump administration, like the first Trump administration, will be a mix of people from different factions,” said Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist who reported a book on Trump’s first-term China policy, titled “Chaos Under Heaven.”

“Those factions are sure to clash constantly. And Trump in the first administration lorded over these factions in a Roman Colosseum-type arrangement,” Rogin told NOTUS. “He sided with different factions at different times, for different reasons, in an unpredictable way — and then often changed his position and sided with the other faction, and then changed his position again.”

Rogin expects Rubio to succeed in convincing Trump to embrace some of his hawkish ideas toward China — that issue “cuts across these factional lines in unique ways” — and that he’ll have plenty of say over day-to-day State Department operations.

But on the big questions, when Rubio will have to go make his case in the Oval Office, “all bets are off.”

In those debates, Rubio’s colleagues on Capitol Hill hope he comes out on top.

“If Trump has half a brain, he will not only listen to Sen. Rubio but respect his judgment,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat who co-led the Congressional-Executive Commission on China with Rubio when the panel spearheaded a sweeping forced labor trade ban. “This is a guy with a lot of experience in foreign policy.”

“The more I’ve worked with him and his team, the more I’ve, frankly, appreciated his knowledge and his convictions,” McGovern told NOTUS. “I hope he continues to be who he is when he’s secretary of state.”

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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.]]>