The U.S. election had just ended and Pete Hoekstra was on a bit of a high. He’d taken charge of a divided Republican Party in Michigan and, with his team, helped steer the key battleground state to Donald Trump.

Now he was asking Trump’s people about possible jobs in the new administration.

They had a simple response: talk to the president-elect himself. Hoekstra dutifully called Trump on his cell phone and won an invitation to the Mar-a-Lago estate – the next day.

Hoekstra and his wife Diane drove three hours from their own home in Florida to the Palm Beach compound and soon enough the former congressman was sitting down with Trump.

“He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I think I see myself as your ambassador to Canada,’ ” Hoekstra recalled in a recent interview. “He had kind o

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