POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast spoke to experts on both sides of the Atlantic to harvest a few tips for Britain’s new man about town.
Find the billionaires
Rather than spending all of your energy building connections with Trump’s White House staff, Kim Darroch, who served as U.K. ambassador to the U.S. from 2017 to 2019, highlighted the “very wealthy businessman” — what he termed “the billionaires’ club” — whom Trump talks to regularly.
“It’s interesting when he is trying to form a view on things,” Darroch reflected. “I suspect he listens far more to his businessman friends who he will phone up and say: What do you think about this?”
Darroch argued Trump has greater confidence in these “practitioners out in the field” that the president sees as having a “better feel for the American economy” than he does in his Washington bubble political staff.
The theory goes that if you can influence the billionaires, you can influence Trump.
Copy Shinzo
John Bolton, U.S. national security adviser during Trump’s first term, said people that want to get along with the U.S. president should study the approach of the late, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
