Washington, at least in one respect, is still President Trump’s kind of town. Trump, searching for good news amid the daily flood of revelations and reversals, can find plenty of it in a place the author Mark Leibovich memorably, and correctly, labelled “Suck-Up City.” On Tuesday, the President held a press conference with the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, as his aides huddled in crisis meetings elsewhere in the White House with Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, who is facing an allegation of sexual assault from several decades ago. Trump had a friend by his side in Duda, a hard-right nationalist who offered him more than the usual flowery compliments that fellow world leaders have taken to lavishing on the flattery-loving President. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Duda told the reporters, “I was smiling when talking to Mr. President. I said that I would very much like for us to set up permanent American bases in Poland, which we would call Fort Trump.” Trump didn’t accept on the spot, but he made it clear that he was delighted by the idea, all the more so since Poland offered to cover the two-billion-dollar price tag.

Offering to slap Trump’s name on a multibillion-dollar military installation is a new one in the annals of Trump suck-up-ery, and Duda’s Polish political rivals quickly bemoaned it. “What an embarrassment in front of the entire world!” a former Polish defense minister tweeted. “Even leaders of banana republics had more respect for themselves and their countries than President Duda does.” But, while extreme, it is by no means an isolated incident.

Even Trump’s trademark insults these days are often met not with angry retorts but with lavish praise for the President. Consider the case of Trump’s frequent target Jeff Sessions, his own Attorney General. For more than a year, Trump has publicly assailed Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, a move that Trump blames for triggering the special-counsel probe. His broadsides against Sessions have become so common that we tend to forget how extraordinary it is to see the President publicly attacking the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer while leaving him in his job. Later on Tuesday, after his press conference with Duda, the President gave a TV interview to The Hill in which he went after Sessions in particularly savage terms. “I don’t have an attorney general,” Trump said. “It’s very sad.”

Still, Sessions, already a model of turn-the-other-cheek forbearance when confronted with Trump’s previous insults (which have included, according to the new Bob Woodward book, calling Sessions “mentally retarded” and a “dumb Southerner”), chose to respond by flattering the boss. In a Wednesday speech to law-enforcement officials in Waukegan, Illinois, he “effusively praised” Trump, as the Washington Post put it. “Under his strong leadership, we are respecting police again and enforcing our laws,” Sessions said. “Based on my experience meeting with officers like you across the country, I believe that morale has already improved under President Trump. I can feel the difference.”

Capitol Hill, where Sessions spent two decades as a Republican senator before joining the Trump Administration, has long been considered the epicenter of sucking up in Washington, with so many big egos crammed together in one building, all of them exquisitely attuned to the city’s ever-shifting hierarchies of power. In his twenty months as President, Trump has seen firsthand the shift on the Hill among formerly skeptical elected Republicans, most of whom (aside from Sessions) were not enthusiastic supporters of his Presidential campaign. The South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham called Trump a “kook” when he ran against him in the 2016 primaries, before becoming one of the President’s closest confidants in the Senate and his frequent public defender. Ted Cruz, another 2016 rival, called Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” before endorsing him; now he’s bringing Trump to Texas to campaign for him in an unexpectedly close November race. Few senators, however, have flip-flopped on the subject of Trump more dramatically than Dean Heller, the highly vulnerable Nevada Republican who welcomed the President for a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Thursday. A few weeks before the 2016 election, Heller was quoted memorably as saying he was “a hundred per cent against Clinton” and “ninety-nine per cent against Trump.” But that was then. Today, Heller considers Trump a “great leader” and told Republicans in a call to drum up interest in the rally beforehand, the Times reported, “We’re so thrilled to have the President.”

Washington under Trump may have reached a new era of sucking up, and it is telling that so many world leaders and members of Congress have settled upon this self-abasing strategy for dealing with a vain President who seems to take particular delight in their puffery. Still, their shameless flattery should not be confused with personal preference or some uniquely Trumpian ability to induce acts of public prostration; it is not about whether Andrzej Duda or Jeff Sessions or Dean Heller loves Donald Trump. Duda wants an American military presence in his country to deter the Russian threat across his border. Sessions wants to save his job. Heller wants to win reëlection and needs Trump-loving Republican voters to do it. This is just power politics, raw, calculating, and subject to head-spinning, poll-induced change at any given moment.

But what goes up in Washington may come down just as fast, another iron law of politics that, like sucking up to the guy in the White House, applies now more than ever in the Trump era. Nowhere is that better illustrated than the swift reversals that have plagued Kavanaugh. A week ago, Kavanaugh’s confirmation was seen as all but assured, with a handful of red-state Democratic senators possible yes votes and the remaining suspense revolving around two undecided pro-choice Republican women senators concerned that Kavanaugh might provide the decisive vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But then, over the weekend, a college professor named Christine Blasey Ford stepped forward, telling the Post in an interview that Kavanaugh had drunkenly attacked her at a high-school party in the nineteen-eighties and attempted to rape her, an allegation that Kavanaugh quickly denied.

Kavanaugh’s nomination immediately seemed uncertain at best, as Washington readied for a #MeToo-era replay of the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, which featured an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee alternately interrogating and patronizing Anita Hill, Thomas’s former employee who came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment. The Trump White House and its Hill allies quaked at the implications and, by late Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee (still with zero female Republican members all these years later, though Democrats now have four of their ten seats occupied by women) postponed its vote on the nomination and instead invited both Ford and Kavanaugh to a hearing, set for this coming Monday. A day later, however, Ford’s lawyer balked at the terms, insisting on an F.B.I. investigation and additional witnesses, as had been the case with the Hill charges against Thomas.

There was no escaping the political context in which the sexual-assault allegation was playing out: with the midterm elections less than fifty days away, this is a campaign issue that no one expected, an October surprise a couple of weeks early. The Thomas-Hill hearings happened more than a year before the next election, and yet backlash over the treatment of Hill and Thomas’s confirmation helped define 1992 as the “Year of the Woman.” The Kavanaugh-nomination fight is playing out just six weeks before the elections, in a campaign season in which record numbers of Democratic women candidates are running to exploit the backlash against Trump, a President himself publicly accused by nineteen women of varying types of sexual predation. Yet, in these more polarized times, Republicans have a strong incentive to stick together and notch a win for Trump; delivering two Supreme Court seats to the Party’s conservative base is a key G.O.P. selling point in an election season otherwise dominated by qualms about the President’s character.