I’m old enough to remember when corporate lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill. I also remember when half the members of Congress who retired got lucrative lobbying jobs taking their old chums out for meals or drinks and selling them on whatever the corporate backers wanted. 

No longer. Now, the lobbying business is all about sucking up to Trump.

Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol calls it “competitive sycophancy,” in which “competing sets of people [vie] to flatter him and manipulate resources and rules to his personal and family advantage. They do one extreme thing after another, try to outdo each other, and he chooses who to back, with shifts and chaos and unpredictability week after week.”

In a new story for New York magazine, Washington correspondent Ben Terris reports on how Washington’s lobbying class has been reshaped in Trump’s second term. 

“Lobbying used to........

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