Everyone likes being flattered, and we’re all susceptible to persuasion when someone is telling us what we want to hear. Furthermore, in every administration, aides develop strategies for getting what they want from the president. Maybe you take your idea to him when he is in a good mood, or a bad one, or you develop a key ally to speak on the idea’s behalf, or you frame a proposal as benefiting a constituency you know he cares about.

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But Trump is different, in that everybody, from White House staff to members of Congress to the leader of a hostile foreign nation, thinks they can play him. And they’re right. For a guy who made a living for years conning vulnerable people out of their money, he is shockingly easy to manipulate.

Of course, doing so may require you to swallow your pride and probably your integrity, as well. Two years ago, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) ranked No. 1 on this list of “The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most” after a primary campaign in which Trump relentlessly ridiculed Graham. That May, Graham tweeted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” But now Graham has adopted a different strategy, as Lisa Miller of New York Magazine reports:

It was at this juncture, according to someone familiar with his thinking, that Graham made the strategic decision to publicly flatter Trump. … in general, it made no sense to stand on principle only to draw Trump’s petty wrath — and risk getting fired in the next cycle by hard-liners back home. Better, Graham thought, to praise him in public in order to influence him in private. Graham understood that “all Trump really cares about is being celebrated,” this person said. By genuflecting to Trump, Graham could seem to be in collaboration with him — the impression probably most important to the president — and “move mountains behind closed doors.”

Those mountains may involve policy, or they may be personal — I’m sure Graham would love to be secretary of state one day, and in this administration, you never know when a position will open up. But Graham has decided to swallow whatever personal distaste he has for the president and shower him with praise, even if it requires taking a bath afterward.

It works in the other direction too: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, by many accounts perhaps the sanest person in Trump’s orbit, has seen his relationship with the president deteriorate. Why? Because, as the New York Times reports, “he has batted down multiple requests from the White House to go on ‘Fox & Friends’ to praise the president’s agenda,” and “while he does not want to publicly disagree with his boss, he is also uncomfortable with showering false praise on Mr. Trump.”

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We have known about Trump’s insatiable need for adulation for a long time, but that shouldn’t make us accept it as ordinary in a president when the truth is that it is utterly appalling. A person with even a shred of insight would realize that when someone is being obsequious toward you, that doesn’t necessarily make them smart or right; it just means they have an agenda. You would think that any president would be particularly wary, because occupying that office means that everyone wants something from you and people are going to constantly kiss your butt.