Since the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been almost as quiet as I have, stunned into…what? The Washington business lobbies have to now confront a putative friend who won election by gleefully abusing the political establishment forces in his path and has all the more reason to keep going now that he needs to keep Congress pliant. In Trumpland, domain of only one king, the Chamber is just another Washington beast the new president will clobber into submission and chain to his will, whatever affinities of interest they may share.

Put it this way: The Chamber spent $32 million on the 2016 election to hold Republican control of the Senate, and CEO Tom Donohue hasn’t even taken a trip up the Trump Tower elevator. Maybe he got the invitation; maybe he didn’t — either way, the atmosphere feels deep-frosty.

On the one very big hand (not the president-elect’s), the cabinet-in-waiting looks to be a deregulatory dream team, including an EPA nominee, Scott Pruitt, who worked intimately with the Chamber as Oklahoma attorney general on its court combat against President Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Trump promises to work with a friendly Republican-held Congress to enact long-sought corporate tax cuts. Massive infrastructure spending, above and beyond a pointless Mexico border wall, would fulfill another big item on the Chamber’s wish list.

But the raw meat of the Trump economic agenda, the rantings about erecting tariffs and demolishing trade deals and Buy American that won him so much appeal in the job-deprived American heartland, promises to heap profound costs onto U.S. commerce and the earnings of the companies that fund the Chamber — and moreover come as ideologically offensive to a group dedicated to expanding trade and opening global markets.

In a sign of how fast the Washington weather has changed, former Chamber congressional lobbyist Rolf Lundberg, who once lobbied to advance trade-opening agreements, is now on board the Trump team that will enforce a “Buy American/Hire American” agenda.

Trump’s already established habit of calling out companies like Carrier for shutting down U.S. factories and opening operations elsewhere, and demanding re-commitment to American plants even at higher cost, means (as intended) that businesses will think twice and ten times before fleeing. Their undesired choice: pile on costs or suffer brand-crushing bad publicity.

Oh, and forget about expanding immigration now, an employer’s dream dead.

Like all of us, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been thrown into semi-paralysis in processing how to navigate a new order where in place of extended policy deliberations between interested parties behind the scrim, vital decisions about the American economy rest with the whims of one very strange man who flings out his decrees, praises and punishments to millions instantaneously on Twitter.

Once at work, his business-world cabinet members may be the ballast that brings Trump down to the same terra firma on which the U.S. Chamber built its significant political power in a past political era. But that’s not the same thing as the Chamber actually possessing that might.

Forever ago, in 1998, Donohue wrote to woo a tobacco industry donor with big plans to rule Washington: “My goal is simple — to build the biggest gorilla in this town.”

Enter King Kong. Who doesn’t stand for competition.