Two months before the man who is running Donald Trump’s super PAC took the job, he was calling the billionaire a “narcissist” and predicting that a litany of lewd interviews with Howard Stern would do in his campaign.

“There’s so much stuff to pound away on [with] Trump. All you have to do is get all the Howard Stern tapes, when he and Howard Stern would talk about girlfriends,” Ed Rollins said during a panel discussion about the election at Hofstra University on March 10, five days before Trump won the Florida primary.


“I think he’s in for a real battle. And what I’ve discovered watching him is, like many narcissists — which clearly he is — they don’t like to be attacked. Anytime he gets attacked, he loses his cool.”

Rollins, who did not respond to a request for comment, is singing a different tune now that Trump has become the GOP’s presumptive nominee and is looking more and more like a winner to a party desperate to take the White House — and he’s hardly the only one.

Having bested 16 Republican primary rivals, Trump now looks competitive in a general election matchup with Hillary Clinton, according to a number of recent polls. Several members of the GOP establishment and its consultant and donor class who led the fight against Trump are now working directly on his behalf, motivated by a desire to win, the prevention of further splintering within their own ranks or the jingle-jangle of their next lucrative contract — and, in some cases, all of the above.

Take Sen. Lindsey Graham, the also-ran who back in December called Trump a “xenophobic, religious bigot” and said he’d prefer to lose than support Trump but who is now quietly encouraging Republican donors to fall in line behind the nominee. Take former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another former rival who once called Trump a “barking carnival act” and “cancer on conservatism” but is suddenly volunteering himself to serve as his running mate.

And take Ken Cuccinelli, the Senate Conservatives Fund president and Ted Cruz backer who blasted Trump’s “Gestapo tactics” and his campaign’s “banana republic approach” to delegate wrangling and drew a final line in the sand in February over Trump’s apparent embrace of Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism: “When you’ve got a guy favorably quoting Mussolini, I don’t care what party you’re in, I’m not voting for that guy,” Cuccinelli said then.

But after receiving a phone call from Trump after Cruz quit the race and made the New Yorker the presumptive nominee, Cuccinelli relented. “I anticipate voting for him,” he said.

Even many of those now on Trump’s payroll were among his most vociferous critics just months ago. Rick Wiley, who signed on last month as Trump’s political director, tweeted an article headlined “Scott Walker attacks Donald Trump, likens him to Obama” following a September debate days before the Wisconsin governor ended his campaign.

Tony Fabrizio, the Florida-based pollster who Trump hired last week, tweeted a link to a George F. Will column titled “Donald Trump is a counterfeit Republican,” calling it a “[g]reat piece.” Around the same time, he predicted that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s career would last longer than Trump’s.

“On the staff side, this is a combination of a number of things: It’s inertia, it’s partisan muscle memory and, unfortunately, it’s just a sense of people who don’t want to stall their careers for a cycle,” said Tim Miller, a sought-after GOP communications specialist who worked during the primary for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and later for a super PAC that tried to stop Trump. “Whether you like it or not, if you want to continue to be involved in politics at the national level right now, you’re going to have to work with Trump in some manner.”

As much as these operatives falling in line behind Trump believe they’re doing so for the good of the party, their choice is still deepening the rift with those Republicans who, like Miller, remain in the “Never Trump” camp and are openly questioning the motivations of their fellow conservatives.

“I’m particularly disappointed with people who are partners at big firms, who can afford to sit a cycle out,” Miller continued. “But most of the people going to the Trump campaign don’t do it for the money. They do it for access and the proximity to power. For some people, it’s kind of blind Hillary hate, but that’s an easy out. Most operatives understand the threat of Trump and the danger of Trump to the conservative movement and to the country and they’re doing it anyway.”

Ironically, Trump’s anti-establishment campaign may be authoring just the latest chapter in a familiar Washington story, exposing how the nation’s political class may be motivated less by principle than by proximity to power. But some consultants credit Trump’s willingness to listen to conservative leaders since becoming the party’s new standard-bearer, which has mollified some of their preexisting anxieties or at least provided political cover for them to temper their criticism and even begin to offer praise and, in some cases, their services.

In many cases, Trump, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment, is doing the outreach himself. His personal calls to Graham and Cuccinelli appear to have paid dividends. It’s part of a broader effort to reassure establishment Republicans that he isn’t going to deviate too far from party orthodoxy in the areas that matter most.

Trump’s ballyhooed sit-down last week with House Speaker Paul Ryan could lead to an eventual endorsement, which would signify approval from a conservative intellectual focused on economic policy. His decision to release a list of 11 potential Supreme Court nominees that looked a lot like the Heritage Foundation’s wish list has helped ease concerns of social conservatives eager to maintain a conservative majority on the court. And his meeting Monday with Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is a first step toward showing a willingness to adhere to a more hawkish, mainstream Republican approach to foreign policy.

“In spite of the bluster, he seems to be willing to listen to people,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP operative in Washington. “Trump has gotten the memo that he can’t win if everybody in his own party doesn’t vote for him. And he’s using this time while the Democrats remain divided to do that work.”

If Republicans are receptive to Trump’s overtures — even those who remain conflicted about backing him — they are motivated by the same thing, prompting Trump to take a more conciliatory approach with those who spent months attacking him.

“As Republicans, we’re all just sick of losing,” Haynes said. “At the end of the day, we’ve had seven years of a Democratic administration and we just want to win.”

