Robert Lighthizer is a name that strikes fear into the hearts of diplomats. Plenty of seasoned foreign officials shudder as they recall bruising negotiations with Washington’s fearsome tariff zealot.

Lighthizer – known as Bob to his friends – was the US trade representative in US President Donald Trump’s first-term cabinet. He went about the job, traditionally one of the more sedate, like nobody else. With his boss’s blessing, Lighthizer lit a fire under the global trading order – renegotiating US trade deals, attacking China and Europe with huge tariffs and railing against the World Trade Organization.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because Trump’s second term is the more intense second act to his first – at least as far as trade policy goes. But one character is missing: Lighthizer. Despite the fears of many trade diplomats in Washington, who swiftly convened crisis meetings when Trump won the election in November, Lighthizer fell by the wayside as Trump’s palace games unfolded over the winter months.

“The president still calls me up from time to time,” he says, when we meet in Washington’s popular Cafe Milano. But he insists that he did not want to return – at least, not in his former role. “There’s only one job worth doing twice, and the president has it.”

I had hoped to meet Lighthizer for lunch in Palm Beach, the seat of the modern-day Maga movement, where he has a waterfront condo. I imagined dining a stone’s throw from the pink towers of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. But Lighthizer only spends time there during the winter. Mostly, he’s in Washington. Sometimes he’s in Chestertown, on the Maryland shore, where he hangs out with his son and his grandchildren, who live in New York. His daughter, with whom he is close, lives in a Washington suburb.

Milano, set just off a busy shopping street in the well-heeled Georgetown neighbourhood, has been a frequent hang-out for presidents and politicians for decades, and Trumpworld characters are not immune to the lure.

When I arrive, 10 minutes early, Lighthizer is already seated with a Diet Coke. Although dressed in a plain dark suit and white shirt, he is fresh from a game of golf, which he later tells me went extremely badly.

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