I spoke to Maggie Haberman for her New York Times piece with Jonathan Swan on President Trump’s floor-the-zone nomination strategy.

Liam Donovan, a former National Republican Senatorial Committee aide, said that “we’re on a collision course between traditional senatorial prerogatives and the unique power dynamics of the Trump restoration.”

Now, as Mr. Trump prepares to take office for the second time, he is demonstrating how confident he is that the branches of government will bend even further to accommodate him.

He plans to test just how far he can go.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Andy Duehren for his New York Times piece on the Trump agenda and the looming fiscal cliff.

Mr. Trump’s ambitions for a second term will ultimately have to compete with the signature accomplishment from his first: the giant tax package that Republicans passed and Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017. Large swaths of that tax cut expire at the end of next year, setting up an expensive debate that could overshadow Mr. Trump’s other goals.

“Nobody wants to acknowledge at all the sheer enormity of the challenge,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “There’s a reckoning coming.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Josh Green for his Bloomberg Businessweek piece on the implications of a second Trump term.

What, exactly, will it mean for Trump to “Make America Great Again” a second time? Washington has fixated on this question since at least mid-summer, when Trump’s widening lead in the polls over Biden made the former president’s prospective return seem ever more plausible. It’s a question that can’t fully be answered until it’s clear which party will control the U.S. House of Representatives. But even if Democrats can hold onto this last bastion of power, the consensus in both parties is that Trump will go much further than last time, and be far more effective in achieving his goals. “A lot of the impact he’ll have is the incredibly expansive use of unilateral power,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican lobbyist. “That’s the stuff that’ll shock the system. He’s not going to want to have another situation where lawyers are telling him no.”

Trump isn’t likely to have many Republican critics outside the White House, either. The military officers, former cabinet officials and Republican lawmakers such as Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who publicly stood up to him have either retired or been driven from the party. No lawmaker with any ambition will dare emulate their example. “There’s no flavor of Republicanism that can exist in explicit and deliberate contrast to Trump,” said Donovan. “It has to be implicit, subtle and unspoken for anyone hoping to make it through a primary as a winner.”

Read the piece here.

I spoke to Molly Ball for her Wall Street Journal piece published in the aftermath of Trump’s victory.

“I think we’ve learned this country has an appetite for what [Trump] represents,” said Liam Donovan, a GOP lobbyist. “A lot of Democrats convinced themselves that people don’t want it, that they were exhausted, that they wanted to turn the page. It’s not that they didn’t warn people or say ‘fascist’ loud enough,” he said. “People understood what they were getting and decided they wanted more of that and it was worth the risk.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Dave Weigel for his Semafor piece on the nearly $5 trillion fiscal elephant in the room.

Why aren’t the presidential candidates talking about it more? Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist not working for either presidential campaign, said that the facts around the 2017 law create some uncomfortable messaging issues for both of them.

“On the GOP side, you can warn of the coming tax hikes — but then you’d have to remind people why this exists,” he said, referring to how Republicans put sunsets on the individual tax cuts while making corporate tax cuts permanent in order to pass the bill. “On the Dem side, you could lean into that and say, we told you this is bad! But they don’t want to remind people they’re on board with the $5 trillion in Biden raisers.”

Read the full piece here.