President-elect Donald Trump's unpredictability — and Twitter storms — has Washington on edge.
"D.C. is all about relationships and knowing what's going to happen and being able to predict what is going to happen next," New York GOP Rep. Thomas Reed, a member of Trump's executive committee, told Politico.
In the last three days, for example, the president-elect criticized a move to gut the House ethics oversight office, questioned the integrity of the nation's top intelligence officials, and threatened to punish Toyota with a major tax if it builds a plant in Mexico.
"He is constantly in motion and in command of the pace and tempo of the political news environment. That is something that his opponents have yet to figure out," Kevin Madden, a GOP communications strategist in Washington who advised Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, told Politico.
"The sheer volume of activity and coverage around him works to his advantage."
The strategy worked during his successful primary and presidential campaigns, but the question remains if it'll work in the Oval Office.
"A lot of the time he creates chaos in order to get where he wants to go. It's often planned chaos," Louise Sunshine, a longtime Trump Organization executive, told Politico. "His style is to throw all the cards up in the air and let them land. He likes to see people scramble and be on their toes."
"Out of the chaos usually comes something good for him. It doesn't always work for everyone else," she added.
Alex Conant, a GOP consultant who oversaw communications for Sen. Marco Rubio's presidential bid last year, told Politico "there are challenges and opportunities" with that approach.
"The challenge is by being spontaneous, it's hard to build an echo chamber of surrogates and supporters to consistently drive home the message," he said.
"The opportunity is that Trump is able to connect with the American people in an authentic and real way that other recent presidents haven't been able to. When he tweets, people understand it's actually coming from him."
The unpredictability is a double-edged sword, according to former GOP Sen. Trent Lott.
"A lot of our allies are very nervous about whether they can count on us," the former Mississippi politician told Politico. "And a lot of our enemies now feel like they have a way in."
"The tweets unnerve me. I see how you can use that to go around and over the traditional media and how many people get his tweets. But it unnerves me because I'm kind of old school. I don't put anything in writing that I don't know who is going to see it."
"He is very capable of doing a switcheroo really quick, which can be a good thing or it can not be," Lott added.
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