I made my first visit there in late spring to meet Trump’s former campaign manager and still-confidant Corey Lewandowski. He held court in the middle of the lobby bar, seated at a table marked ‘‘Reserved’’ with a shiny glass plate. The last time I saw Lewandowski was in February, before the Super Bowl in Houston. He was there as a guest of Microsoft, wearing shorts and a red-and-white New England Patriots polo shirt and chatting with Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner and a Trump friend, at a V.I.P. reception before the game. Lewandowski was now dressed in a sharp gray suit and shiny black dress shoes. Potential clients were knocking down his door, he told me. He was, by any measure, a made man.

As with many people that populate the inner ring of Trumpland, Lewandowski has virtually no cachet independent from his relationship to the president. He has spent his career as a journeyman political operative, a two-time failed candidate for office (in Massachusetts and New Hampshire) and a police officer. Yet where the Clintons were surrounded by a vast horde of ‘‘friends,’’ Trump ran a family business with a small network of flag-wavers. His campaign was a tiny operation, and Lewandowski got in early, stuck around and stayed loyal. Never mind that he was bounced as campaign manager in June 2016, one reason being that he had run afoul of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump; Bloomberg reported last month of a détente between Lewandowski and Kushner, consummated on a ‘‘stroll through the White House Rose Garden,’’ ending in a hug.

Being one of ‘‘Trump’s guys’’ positions Lewandowski at the apex of Washington influence in 2017. He is clearly close to the president. He can decipher his moods, know which buttons to push and when to stay away. Rather than ‘‘going in’’ (local shorthand for ‘‘going in to an administration’’), Lewandowski leveraged his big-fish status in Trump­land to open a lucrative Washington consultancy to help corporations and clients ‘‘navigate’’ the new administration. Unlike Spicer’s position, this inside-out role enables Lewandowski to pick his spots and steer clear of the West Wing infighting and fiefs and, maybe most of all, the day-to-day dramas inherent in being too close to Donald J. Trump.

Lewandowski warned me to keep my voice down, as he suspected that the guy sitting on the couch behind him was an eavesdropping reporter — a familiar hazard at the Trump Hotel. After a few minutes, we were joined by Anthony Scaramucci, the Long Island-born financier, fund-raiser and Trump acolyte — known as ‘‘the Mooch’’ to fellow Trumpians, New York tabloid-headline writers as well as his long-ago Little League teammates. Scaramucci, whose sculpted jaw, hair and form-fitting suit give the impression of an infomercial host, had been having trouble landing a top White House job. He had apparently been up for a role as an adviser and public liaison to government agencies and businesses, but that stalled because of complications related to the sale of his company, SkyBridge Capital, to foreign buyers.

‘‘Thanks for that thing at the White House today,’’ Scaramucci told Lewandowski, the first of four times he would thank him in the five minutes that we were together. The men locked eyes and nodded simultaneously: Gratitude acknowledged, accepted. Lewandowski had to rush off to catch a flight home to New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife and four children. The Mooch thanked him again.

I found out later that Scaramucci was now in line to be the Paris-based ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, pending Senate confirmation. In the interim, Scaramucci has been appointed chief strategy officer of the United States Export-Import Bank, an institution that Trump derided during the campaign as ‘‘excess baggage.’’ But the Mooch says the plan is now to keep the bank open. The excess baggage, in other words, has been claimed.

Trump was elected in part by portraying and revealing politicians to be feckless weenies — and many of them went out and reinforced this view by displaying their willingness to be rolled by Trump in the campaign and unwillingness to stand up to him in office. This gets to one ethic of This Town that has endured and that Trump has reinforced: The interests of self-perpetuation drive nearly everything. Much of the Republican base still loves Trump, and few Republicans in Congress can afford to alienate these voters by defying him too forcefully, even though many of them — particularly senators — plainly hold the president in low regard.