Introduction

Business competition for influence in Washington, D.C. has been redefined by a “Revolution in Political Affairs.” Several interrelated trends have upended the status quo: the discrediting of the post–Cold War policy consensus, the reemergence of anti-corporate populism as a major force in American politics, and rising alienation between the governing class and the electorate. These seismic changes demand a reconception of corporate engagement of government. Companies should prioritize personalities, networks, and ideological communities – rather than policy and process – as the foundation of effective advocacy.¹

American business has encountered such shifts before, perhaps most notably at the turn of the 19th century during the bracing transition between two Republican presidents: William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Despite his admiration for McKinley, President Trump has upended the formerly stable GOP–business alliance in a manner that resembles Roosevelt’s approach. As described by presidential historian Tevi Troy, Roosevelt was the “new sheriff in town,” bringing an end to “the era of laissez-faire.”²

The Era of Populist Reform

By the end of the 19th century, oil, rail, and steel tycoons had grown used to cooperation from politicians. “Presidents didn’t keep secrets from the captains of industry,” one historian has noted.³ President McKinley embodied this Gilded Age of corporate coziness. “America is truly to be congratulated upon Mr. McKinley’s election,” John D. Rockefeller wrote in 1900. “With financial interests on a sound basis, the next four years ought to accomplish much for the general welfare of the American people.”⁴

This all changed when Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency following McKinley’s assassination in 1901. Image-conscious and media-savvy, Roosevelt was a highly unconventional populist who reshaped the GOP coalition – against the protest of the party establishment.⁵ Few understood that Roosevelt was about to revolutionize how the White House interfaced with business. The president of Hanover National Bank commented shortly after McKinley’s death that “it seems hardly possible that anything could happen” to alter the “enlightened conduct of affairs during the presidency of Mr. McKinley.”⁶

In 1902, Roosevelt surprised J.P. Morgan with a lawsuit under the Sherman Antitrust Act, seeking to dissolve his Northern Securities Company. Expecting an easy reconciliation, Morgan told Roosevelt: “If we have done something wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”⁷ Yet the President had no interest in an amicable resolution.

The business climate had changed overnight, catching most financiers off guard. One banker in the Morgan orbit lamented, “The business of the country appears to be conducted in Washington now.”⁸ Threatened by the even more anti-corporate Democrat William Jennings Bryan, Rockefeller and Morgan felt they had no alternative but to support Roosevelt’s 1904 reelection campaign.⁹ A highly popular candidate, Roosevelt did not need their patronage and continued battling corporations during his second term.

The business community’s response to this extended period of GOP-led populism was mixed.¹⁰ In 1907, Morgan wisely sought Roosevelt’s approval before acquiring a smaller steel company, explaining that the move would prevent a market crash. Meanwhile, Rockefeller uselessly attacked Roosevelt, claiming he spelled “disaster” and “chaos” for America. The President famously proceeded with a lawsuit that eventually broke up Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.¹¹

The Revolution in Political Affairs

As in the Gilded Age that preceded Roosevelt, pro-business policies defined the Clinton-Bush era that spanned almost two decades. This favorable climate for the nation’s largest companies has been undone by a Revolution in Political Affairs:

END OF THE POST-WAR POLICY CONSENSUS

Following the failed promises of the Iraq War, the Great Recession, the China trade relationship, and the COVID response, the expert class has been discredited and trust in institutions has collapsed. In the past several years, public confidence in everything from news media to the three branches of government has reached historic lows.¹² The corporate domain has not been spared: in 2023, three times as many respondents reported “very little” or “no confidence” in big business as compared to those expressing “quite a lot” or a “great deal” of trust.¹³ The balance of power has shifted decisively in favor of anti-establishment forces at the expense of public office holders, C-suites, and the “managerial class.”¹⁴

ANTI-CORPORATE POPULISM

With few exceptions, the Democratic Party has rejected the pro-business neoliberalism dominant through even the Obama presidency. More surprisingly to many C-suites, major segments of the Right also have grown hostile to business, departing from the Reagan-era attitude that “corporations are people,” as Mitt Romney argued during his presidential campaign in 2011.¹⁵ Even as GOP elected officials – starting with President Donald J. Trump – express admiration for the nation’s biggest enterprises, rising factions within American conservatism nurture a deep disdain for corporate power.¹⁶ Charlie Kirk, a leading Trump campaign influencer as identified by Baron’s Influencer Analytics methodology,¹⁷ has advocated creating a “parallel economy.”¹⁸ “These massive corporations,” he has told conservatives, “don’t share your values – and quite honestly, they’re at war with your values.”¹⁹

Approaches to reform differ within the conservative movement. Some believe in nudging legacy companies toward the national interest, using incentives such as those in the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. Others claim that the U.S. would be best served by preferencing newer corporations explicitly committed to becoming national champions, such as the emerging defense firms Anduril and Palantir. As thought leader Oren Cass has argued, America must “create as much space as possible for our [Elon] Musks and [Anduril founder Palmer] Luckeys to do great things” for American industry.²⁰

WASHINGTON, D.C. VERSUS AMERICA

As in other high-density areas, the political culture of the District of Columbia bears little resemblance to the roughly even partisan divide that characterizes national politics.²¹ Since the ratification of the 23rd Amendment granting the District the right to vote in presidential elections, the nation’s capital has been heavily Democratic, although Republicans constituted a sizable political minority. In recent presidential elections, however, the number of Republican voters in D.C. has dwindled to near trace-element levels, mirroring the trend in other “Super Zips.” During the four decades from 1976 to 2016, the share of votes cast in the District for non-Democratic presidential candidates plummeted by more than 75 percent, dropping into the low single digits.²² In the 2024 presidential election, then-Vice President Kamala Harris won over 90 percent of the vote in Washington, D.C., a share far greater than she won even in Vermont (64 percent).²³ Practically, this divide means that Washington, D.C. – the home of America’s political governing class and their attendants – sits a stunning 85 percent or more to the left of a national electorate that favored Trump by about 1.5 percent.

Baron’s Solution

Just as corporations under President Theodore Roosevelt had to approach politics differently than during the Gilded Age, companies today must redesign engagement with a Washington, D.C. that has fundamentally changed. Rather than prioritizing narrowly defined regulatory and legislative processes that favor the input of credentialed experts, corporations must navigate an increasingly tribal system defined by new personalities, networks, and ideological communities. As public sector competition grows less and less responsive to traditional lobbying, public relations, and advertising, Baron has spent nearly two decades developing a cohesive set of services to ensure clients prevail:

Influencer Analytics (IA): The Revolution in Political Affairs has produced policy influencers almost entirely unaddressed by conventional engagement techniques. Baron’s IA research platform reveals the information environment that surrounds decision makers and provides clients with customized rankings of the non-governmental “Super Influencers” who disproportionately drive policy outcomes. IA enables clients to optimize advocacy both in near-term legislative and regulatory contests and in longer-term efforts to shape the very terms of issue debates. With mastery of the information environment, clients can persuade decision makers and outcompete rivals constrained by obsolete tactics.

Deep Biography: Baron provides clients with unrivaled insights into the key leaders in and around government. The corporate public affairs industry commonly suffers from a recency bias that undervalues the experience and professional journey of prominent figures. Baron’s Deep Biography offers detailed studies of leading authorities – inside and outside of government – through extensive analysis of the public record. The most strongly held beliefs of policy makers often appear in their earliest publications and formative experiences. For example, former White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’ successful career at the intersection of health care and government in many ways built upon the work of his father, Alan Zients, an expert in the administration of federal psychiatric programs.²⁴ Deep Biography understands such figures on their own terms by assembling rarely considered archival material into a detailed assessment to inform strategies, outreach plans, and messaging.

Transparency Research: Powerful commercial forces often work stealthily in shaping law, regulation, and procurement to tip private-sector markets. Often, an attack against a company in the “marketplace of ideas” in actuality reflects a concealed effort by a private-sector rival to capture government resources. Baron has extensive experience surfacing publicly available, yet obscure information that reveals significant financial or other undisclosed motivations and even conflicts of interest. Once policy makers recognize the true stakeholders in a competition, they can properly balance the value proposition and credibility of vying interests.

Political Risk Assessment: Besieged by ever more complex and chaotic political forces, companies struggle to understand and affect public affairs through a sustained and actionable strategy. Over two decades, Baron has refined a rigorous Political Risk Assessment methodology that, by applying the framework of geostrategic competition, forecasts near-, medium-, and long-term challenges and opportunities for corporate clients. Baron’s approach generates unparalleled insights not captured by conventional datasets. The Political Risk Assessment provides a practical blueprint for winning the most formidable competitions waged through the public sector.

Outlook

When Theodore Roosevelt left office, business leaders expected a return to McKinley’s pro-business policies. Yet his seemingly business-friendly successor, William Howard Taft, launched twice as many antitrust cases as Roosevelt.²⁵ Similarly, the contemporary corporate community should not expect a “return to normalcy” anytime soon; rather, business leaders should prepare for an extended period of anti-corporate sentiment.

Just as Roosevelt acted on populist forces that would endure well beyond his administration, President Trump’s return to office heralds lasting changes in national life. Barring an improbable reversal of well-established trends, electoral and economic volatility will continue.²⁶ In such an environment, the business community must be ready to confront unfamiliar challenges – and to deploy unconventional solutions.

Endnotes

See “Stalemate on K Street,” Baron Public Affairs, Summer 2024, https://www.baronpa.com/library/stalemate-on-k-street.
Tevi Troy, The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry (New York: Regnery, 2024), pages 13–14.
Susan Berfield, The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), page 117.
President McKinley’s campaign manager and political patron Mark Hanna also was a childhood friend of John D. Rockefeller. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), pages 356 and 425–466; and Jonathan Hughes, The Vital Few: The Entrepreneur and American Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), page 433. In 1896, the J.P. Morgan building at 23 Wall Street was decked in McKinley banners, and Morgan effectively lobbied his position on the gold standard, a decisive issue that election, into the Republican platform. Lewis Corey, The House of Morgan: A Social Biography of the Masters of Money (New York: G. H. Watt, 1930), page 77.
When President McKinley was assassinated, Hanna, then head of the Republican National Committee, exclaimed: “Now we’ve got that damned cowboy as President!” Corey, The House of Morgan, page 187. David Greenberg, a historian of media and the presidency, details how Roosevelt “embraced the job of leading the public, striving to discern the public interest and engage the citizenry directly.” He spoke to the press constantly, even “hosting informal press conferences during his afternoon shave.” David Greenberg, “How Teddy Roosevelt Invented Spin,” The Atlantic, January 24, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/how-teddy-roosevelt-invented-spin/426699.
“Financiers Look for a Rally in Prices,” The New York Times, September 15, 1901, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1901/09/15/101080807.pdf.
Hughes, The Vital Few, page 426.
“President’s Action Startles Wall Street,” The New York Times, February 21, 1902, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1902/02/21/101937190.pdf.
Morgan and Rockefeller wrongly assumed that campaign contributions could buy Roosevelt’s inaction in his second term and hoped for lessened scrutiny of their monopolistic practices, which proceeded apace. In any case, Roosevelt publicly refused Standard Oil’s contributions, which boosted his own popularity. Troy, The Power and the Money, page 20.
On the surface, the barons changed their tune. Rockefeller publicly admitted that some regulation is necessary: “capital and labor are both wild forces which require intelligent legislation to hold them in restriction.” Yet his true attitudes about Roosevelt were exposed. Indeed, underneath the shift in rhetoric, many tycoons were sticking to the same old approach. The steel magnate Henry C. Frick lamented of Roosevelt: “We bought the son of a b****, and then he didn’t stay bought!” Ibid., pages 23 and 25; historians vary on the exact wording of the second clause of Frick’s statement.
Ibid., pages 23–28.
“Data Behind Americans’ Waning Trust in Institutions,” Trend, The Pew Charitable Trusts, October 17, 2024, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/data-behind-americans-waning-trust-in-institutions.
“Confidence in Institutions,” Gallup, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.
See Baron’s discussion of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) in “Corporate America, Meet the NatCons,” Baron Public Affairs, Winter 2023, https://www.baronpa.com/library/corporate-america-meet-the-natcons.
CNN, “Romney: Corporations are people too,” YouTube, August 12, 2011, https://youtu.be/FxUsRedO4UY.
See “The Political Isolation of Corporate America,” Baron Public Affairs, Spring 2019, https://www.baronpa.com/library/the-political-isolation-of-corporate-america.
See “The Trump Campaign Information Environment,” Baron Public Affairs, Fall 2024, https://www.baronpa.com/library/the-trump-campaign-information-environment.
Charlie Kirk, “Building the Parallel Economy with Michael Seifert, Donald Trump Jr., and John Solomon,” The Charlie Kirk Show, March 3, 2023, https://thecharliekirkshow.com/podcasts/the-charlie-kirk-show/building-the-parallel-economy-with-michael-seifert.
Turning Point USA, “Big Corporations Are Running Our Government,” Facebook, August 12, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/turningpointusa/videos/4267130443381236.
Oren Cass, “Can the Tech Bros Find a Home in the Conservative Coalition?” Understanding America, August 16, 2024, https://www.understandingamerica.co/p/can-the-tech-bros-find-a-home-in.
See “Boomtown: The Gilded Age of Washington, D.C.,” Baron Public Affairs, Spring 2022, https://www.baronpa.com/library/boomtown-the-gilded-age-of-washington-d-c.
Baron analysis of MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 2017, “U.S. President 1976–2020,” Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/42MVDX.
“Election 2024: Presidential results,” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/results/president.
See “Washington’s Man of the Moment: The Jeff Zients Story,” Baron Public Affairs, Summer 2023, https://www.baronpa.com/library/washingtons-man-of-the-moment-the-jeff-zients-story.
Troy, The Power and the Money, page 28; James F. Rill and Stacy L. Turner, “Presidents Practicing Antitrust: Where to Draw the Line?” Antitrust Law Journal 79, no. 2 (2014): pages 577–99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43486917; and “William Howard Taft,” The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/william-howard-taft.
See “The One Trend to Rule Them All,” Baron Public Affairs, Winter 2024, https://www.baronpa.com/library/the-one-trend-to-rule-them-all.

Image: President Trump cuts the cake at the Commander-in-Chief Ball on Inauguration Day (January 20, 2025). Credit: Anna Moneymaker/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock. Baron uses this image in an editorial capacity and does not claim commercial rights.