Donald J. Trump flew to Washington last summer in a state of misery. He was there for his arraignment and then told his staff that the city was disgusting. He could sense Washington’s hostility, aides said.
Today he returns to the nation’s capital under very different circumstances – to assert his dominance over a political and economic establishment that has been forced to come to terms with him.
The former president is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee against President Biden after defeating several primary rivals, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in recent months and rallying behind him a wide range of Republicans who denounced his recent criminal conviction in Manhattan as evidence of that an armed justice system.
Mr. Trump’s planned meetings with lawmakers — including Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who denounced him in the Senate weeks after a pro-Trump mob’s violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — are the clearest examples of an establishment , which still hates him, has accepted his possible return to office. After years of hoping that someone else could take over the leadership of their party, the establishment is gradually submitting to the reality of the 2024 election campaign.
“There is a lot of anticipation and a lot of excitement here,” spokesman Mike Johnson told reporters on Wednesday ahead of Mr. Trump’s visit.
The former president’s morning begins with an early meeting with a group of House members, followed by a visit with dozens of business leaders who belong to the prestigious Business Roundtable. In the afternoon, he will visit senators at a meeting organized by Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a close ally who in January became the highest-ranking senator to support Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
The agenda of the meetings is not entirely clear; A campaign official said meetings with lawmakers would focus on policy and issues such as the refugee crisis. A lawmaker who wanted to be present and was not authorized to discuss the meetings said there was no apparent agenda other than that Mr. Trump was eager to drum up enthusiasm.
Republican House members have been his most loyal supporters in Washington for many years, particularly as his support has helped shape the makeup of the GOP conference by pushing pro-Trump candidates through the primaries.
But the meeting with senators, who as a group have become less responsive to Mr. Trump’s demands over time, will mark the first time Mr. Trump has been in the same room as Mr. McConnell since 2020, when the former president sought re-election and eventual trying to enlist lawmakers to help him stay in power.
Mr. Trump’s repeated claims of widespread voter fraud in battleground states like Georgia were widely seen as dampening turnout in two Senate runoffs that cost Republicans the majority.
A day after those runoff elections, the pro-Trump mafia stormed the Capitol in a deadly siege to prevent the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. Mr. McConnell condemned Mr. Trump’s actions and held him responsible.
But he also did not vote for conviction in Mr. Trump’s subsequent impeachment trial, the second of its kind against the outgoing president, saying it was the wrong forum for an absent president. The decision by Mr. McConnell and other Senate Republicans to acquit would prove fateful, ultimately enabling Mr. Trump’s unlikely comeback. A conviction would have barred him from office.
“We have a criminal justice system in this country,” McConnell said in his speech after the Senate trial. “We have a civil case. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either. I believe the Senate was right not to usurp the power the Constitution does not give us.”
Since then, Mr. Trump has been impeached four times and convicted in what is likely to be the only trial that will take place before Election Day. But Mr. McConnell, for whom taking back control of the Senate is a priority, had said long before Mr. Trump became the nominee for a third time that he would support his party’s nominee even if it were Mr. Trump.
Contrary to the expectations of Mr. McConnell and many others, Mr. Trump did not disappear. He turned his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida into a GOP mecca where potential candidates had to come to seek his support. He destroyed the man many believed would succeed him, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and went on to win nearly every primary and caucus in which he participated, gaining strength in the Republican primaries following his indictments.
For the most part, these charges have helped Mr. Trump politically. They fueled accusations of a two-tier justice system by Mr. Trump’s allies, including a number of Capitol Hill lawmakers who said Republicans needed to use tools of the criminal justice system to prosecute Mr. Trump’s prosecutors and a broad spectrum of Democrats.
Between sessions of the House and Senate, Mr. Trump will be a guest at the Business Roundtable, whose members include executives such as Apple’s Tim Cook and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon.
After the violence of January 6, most American corporations turned away from Mr. Trump. But as he has risen in the polls, a number of business leaders have become disillusioned with Mr Biden and Trump’s tax cuts, which expire in 2025, have now moved to either support Mr Trump or his proposal for a second one to be open-minded towards the government.
Mr. Trump and his campaign have been eager to recruit them as donors, and in recent weeks many business leaders have privately indicated they would come on board.
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2024-06-13 09:05:02
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