When the story compels him, his interest extends beyond Americans and can be a bridge to broader public policy changes, as Sen. Marco Rubio found out when he was able to tell Trump about Venezuelan political prisoner Leopoldo Lopez. Rubio brought Lopez’s wife, Lillian Tintori, to the Oval Office early in the Trump administration. After their conversation, the group took a picture with the president, and he promptly tweeted it, asking Venezuela’s Maduro regime to release Lopez. It was a harsher stance than the Obama administration, which had never granted a meeting with Tintori despite her attempts, had ever taken.

“This administration has been really receptive to things like this,” said Rubio spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas, adding that the senator’s relationship with Trump means he “has his ear” in a way he didn’t with the last president. Since then, Lopez has been transferred to house arrest from prison, but is still detained.

By contrast, the more clinical and professorial Obama took the opposite approach, and in his most high-profile deals to get Americans back, got completely hosed in the trades