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.

I spoke to Bloomberg‘s Josh Green for a cover story around his interview with Businessweek.

But Trump is also aware that whatever “love” the CEOs might have expressed was ultimately driven by self-interest: They can read election polls like everyone else. “Whoever’s leading gets all the support they want,” he says. “I could have the personality of a shrimp, and everybody would come.”

This wasn’t always the case. With Trump disgraced and seemingly finished in politics after his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the Republican business community was part of a coalition eager to anoint a new standard-bearer for the party. It began lavishing money and attention on a rising generation of business-friendly politicians, led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has also served as co-CEO of the investment firm Carlyle Group Inc. But in 2024, DeSantis’ presidential campaign collapsed, Haley’s petered out, and Youngkin’s never took place. Business leaders were shocked and crestfallen as Trump cruised to the nomination.

“Everyone read this wrong,” says Liam Donovan, a Republican business lobbyist. “There was a core assumption that Trump was finished. But DeSantis was never going to be the guy, nor was Haley. People saw an opportunity to turn the page, tried to make it happen, and it didn’t happen. The base wanted Trump.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Michael Kruse for his POLITICO Magazine piece on former President Trump’s gift for image-making in light of the iconic photos from this weekend’s attempt on his life.

“Visuals matter more than words,” former House speaker and Trump ally Newt Gingrich wrote in his book called Understanding Trump in 2017. “How you look is more important than how you sound,” Stone told me in 2018. “He has,” Republican strategist Liam Donovan said to me on Sunday, “a handful of instincts and impulses that have served him well, but the primacy of aesthetics and image-making really is the core.”

Read the full piece here.