Ultra-Accessible Trump Shocks D.C. After Four Years of Ultra-Insulated Biden: ‘Like Night and Day’

O n January 3, House Speaker Mike Johnson was having trouble clearing the first ballot to become speaker. Watching the chaos unfold on the House floor, Representative Nancy Mace (R., S.C.) figured the best strategy to win over on-the-fence House Republican holdouts to Johnson’s reelection bid was to get the leader of her party involved.

So, she rang Donald Trump.

The president-elect spoke over the phone with two of the holdouts and convinced them to get on the team and vote for Johnson before the vote closed. Soon enough, they relented. For Mace, the phone call signaled how eager Trump was to help even rank-and-file members settle an intraparty leadership dispute — two weeks before even taking office. “President Trump picks up the phone or calls back within minutes, ready to get on the phone and get to work,” Mace tells National Review, adding that the difference between him and his predecessor “is like night and day.”

Trump’s wide-ranging accessibility to members of his own party marks a stark departure from the insulated posture preferred by his predecessor, Joe Biden, who spent four years in office shying away from cable news interviews and even Democratic members of Congress. Formal interactions with the White House press corps were also rare: He averaged fewer than ten press conferences per year, according to the American Presidency Project of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

By contrast, even before taking office, Trump opened the doors of Mar-a-Lago to foreign leaders, tech CEOs, cabinet picks, and even blue-state House Republicans looking for concessions from congressional GOP leadership in this year’s tax bill.

Already this week, since taking office, Trump has had numerous lengthy interactions with the press inside the White House, including while signing his Day One executive orders. On Tuesday, he held two separate closed-door meetings with members of congressional GOP leadership regarding his agenda for the first 100 days.

On his third day in office, Trump held a private meeting with the three House Republicans who represent districts Kamala Harris won in November: Representatives Don Bacon (R., Neb.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), and Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.).

Bacon was stunned that the president prioritized the meeting. “It was fascinating that it was that fast,” Bacon said in an interview with National Review after Wednesday’s meeting, adding that the president was “very welcoming,” while declining to get into specifics about the substance of the private conversation.

“I wasn’t part of Joe Biden’s party, so I imagine they got more access” to the former president, the Nebraska congressman said of his Democratic colleagues in Congress. But Bacon still finds it strange that the Biden White House kept him and other moderate Republicans at arm’s length throughout his entire presidency. “I’m one of these guys that you can negotiate with,” he said, adding that the former president’s team “never reached out once on policy.”

Biden’s insulation from Capitol Hill was not lost on high-ranking congressional Democrats — some of whom aren’t shy about contrasting his cocooned presidency with the more accessible White House of former president Barack Obama, his former boss.

“President Obama regularly called me when I was a ranking member” of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Adam Smith (D., Wash.) told National Review in the U.S. Capitol last week.

The 44th president’s accessibility among Democratic members of Congress did not translate to the 46th.

“President Biden called me once,” Smith says. “I did not have any interactions with him, even when I was chairman of the committee.”

Press reports suggest that even high-ranking administration officials were iced out of Biden’s inner circle. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, “at least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome.”

The Biden team’s efforts to insulate the president from the press and other lawmakers grew more heightened as his presidency progressed, especially as public opinion polls continued to suggest that most Americans had serious worries about his age and fitness for a second term. Those concerns trickled into swing-district Democrats’ campaigns. Some rank-and-file Democrats were stunned by how fragile Biden looked up close at the December 2023 White House Christmas celebrations, so much so that one House Democrat expressed concern to National Review at the time that the president wouldn’t “make it” to Election Day.

A little more than a year later, there’s a new commander in chief in town. And, for now, at least, the accessibility optics will be tough for Democrats to ignore.

“Welcome to the Trump White House,” posted White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on X late on Wednesday evening, “where truth and transparency actually matter.”