Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission by Mark Leibovich
This is one of the dozens/hundreds of books written about the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Author Mark Leibovich is a seasoned political journalist who has worked for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and The Atlantic magazine, his current gig. He has written three books on politics and one on the National Football League. Even that book had a lot to do with the politics of the NFL. He has a great sense of humor and of the absurd, two good traits for a political writer.
December 2020 The book begins at the Trump International Hotel in Washington which is located between the US Capitol and the White House. For the past four years, the hotel had been a gathering place for reporters and Trump acolytes, so it was a happening place. A few weeks after Trump lost his bid for reelection, the hotel bar, had become headquarters for the Proud Boys and other election deniers including Roger Stone, who was pardoned by Trump after having been convicted of seven felonies. Rudy Giuliani, who was perhaps the most out-there election denier in Trumpworld, Steve Bannon, former press secretary Sean Spicer, and many cabinet members had hung out at the hotel during Trump’s presidency. Leibovich describes the hotel’s steakhouse as “a petting zoo” for Trump’s “guys.”
Senator Lindsey Graham and Mark Leibovich have known each other for decades. The journalist had been good friends with Senator John McCain, Graham’s sidekick for many years. On page 4, the author asks Senator Graham why he totally shifted on Trump, flipping from being very critical of candidate Trump’s recklessness to becoming his lap dog. Lindsey was honest with the author. Graham wanted to stay “relevant” which is incumbent code talk for getting reelected. In South Carolina, had Graham not toadied up to The Donald, he would have lost a primary to a full-bore Trumper. He would have lost his seat in the Senate, something he could not imagine or abide by.
Lindsey Graham’s honesty was refreshing, and it sets the direction of the book. Leibovich spent decades in Washington and, despite working for liberal newspapers, was considered to be very balanced in his reporting. He had a lot of Republican elected official friends, including Donald Trump, who were remarkably forthcoming in explaining why they supported Mr. MAGA no matter what he did. That is the essence of the book.
Early in his writing, Leibovich talks about the belief of his inner circle that Trump would stew for a few days and then accept defeat. Many of his closest supporters thought that there was no downside to humoring the loser. They were wrong. While very few people believe that the election was rigged, over a few weeks most elected Republicans went along with the lie and stood against Joe Biden’s victory. This book focuses on why that happened.
August 2015 Leibovich looked back at the field of Republican presidential candidates early in the race. NJ Governor Chris Christie looked good. He was in the NYC media market and led a big state. He was funny and reporters loved to banter with him. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was in and was weird but he had appeal to Libertarians. Texas Senator Ted Cruz was never about legislating. His job was to be on Fox News 24/7 to boost his chances for the presidency. He was all about ambition. His colleague, Lindsey Graham, once said, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” Jeb Bush looked good on paper but there was no there there. He was flat in his run for the White House. Trump’s description of “low-energy Jeb” was on the mark. Similarly, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was short and didn’t excite a crowd.
In an early debate, Fox News’s moderator Megyn Kelly, who, while being sharp and intelligent, was there because she met the Fox News on-air criteria of being “attractive and blond.” She asked Trump some probing questions. After the debate, he said that she was being mean to him because it was probably that time of month for her. Many wags went nuts burying his candidacy because of his insensitivity to females. Nope. It probably helped him with many women who thought that Kelly was being uppity.
Trump was embraced by the “outs” in society, especially the non-college educated whites who had seen their middle-class lifestyles eroded by changes in the economy that cost them their good jobs at good wages. Both parties had pretty much ignored these people. Trump romped through the primary elections because he had a solid base of these voters. Many candidates got endorsements from traditional Republican bigwigs, but nobody except Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was with Trump.
After getting hammered in many primaries, Christie, Cruz and Rubio, who had said the NYC developer was unfit for office, jumped on his bandwagon. They knew where that wagon was headed – to the nomination of Donald Trump for president. Leibovich writes, “If Trump was really such pure evil, shouldn’t that override whatever musty notions of party loyalty they still clung to? I’m assuming you remember how that turned out also.”
Summer 2016 As time went on, establishment Republicans increased “their rationalized devotion to their abuser” as they were willing to “discard every principle they once held for the purpose of staying in office.” Second-tier Republicans like SC Governor Nikki Haley – Trump is “scary” – and Texas Governor Rick Perry – Trump is a “barking carnival act” – soon came around and endorsed and praised the future nominee. Each was rewarded, Haley as UN Ambassador and Perry as secretary of energy. Trump accused presidential candidate and neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson of being a child molester. Ben endorsed his accuser and he was rewarded by being appointed secretary of HUD.
These and other observers were confident that once Trump was nominated he would “pivot” and become a more balanced and anchored candidate. Leibovich, who had covered him for decades, thought that this was ridiculous. The Donald had been over-the-top his entire career; it was the essence of his brand.
Once it was clear that Trump would be the nominee, Reince Priebus, head of the Republican National Committee, was responsible for developing a productive working relationship with the head of the ticket. It never worked out. RNC staffers – lifelong Republicans who resented the hijacking of their party – couldn't stand Trump and the feeling was mutual. Priebus had to shift from the guy who oversaw the “autopsy” of the failed 2012 presidential election that called for the party becoming more inclusive and less judgmental. Instead, he had to become cheerleader for a guy who had no use for broadening the party. Trump correctly saw that the way to power was to play to the grievances of blue-collar and no-collar (unemployed) white America. They, like Trump, were victims of the liberals and Democrats. He felt their pain.
The author quotes dozens of Republican elected officials and operatives who early on were sharply critical of Trump and worried about the damage he would do to the party. As the summer wound down and Trump became the nominee, any criticism was rare, and politicians that loved to be on TV went missing. At this point, most of them thought that Trump was unelectable so keeping your mouth shut made sense. Even Lindsey Graham, who was a regular of Fox News, went dark.
Leibovich summarizes things in the late summer of 2016. Since Trump couldn’t win, what was the harm in continuing to humor him? It was the same mentality that led people in the White House after the 2020 election to let Trump rant about how he really won despite not one scintilla of evidence that he did. What can go wrong? January 6 went wrong.
Most of the book deals with how politicians caved into Trump in order to stay elected or advance their careers, but the media also rolled over. Moderate Republican Hugh Hewitt was a long-time radio talk show host and regular guest on the Sunday morning TV political talk shows. He had been consistently critical of Trump, calling him a “cancer on conservatism.” Like everyone else, Hugh saw the light and became a shameless suck-up to Trump. He wasn’t alone. Conservative media personalities, most of whom were very wary of their candidate, figured out that the party had changed and that they needed to change with it to keep their ratings up and the money coming in.
October 2016 Many of us forget that Hillary Clinton was a shoe-in to win the election. That was many Republicans' fallback position – he can’t win, and Hillary will be a terrible president, so the party will come back strong in 2018 and win the presidency in 2020.
The Clintons were survivors. Bill survived accusations of infidelity and bad behavior while he was running for president. The couple survived the Whitewater real estate scandal investigation. Hillary did a poor job of leading an effort to get national health insurance but she came out of that unscathed. Bill lied and apologized his way through the Monica Lewinsky affair, with Hillary standing by her man, biting her tongue. The Clintons played angles and were “cute” in that they would spin the truth and dissemble to skate by, but they were no match for Donald Trump. “He was willing to say or do or lie about anything. While Hillary had drawn her own suspicions and distrust over the years, she respected certain lines. With Trump, there were no lines.”
Leibovich talks about Clinton Fatigue and how the Hillary Industrial Complex had to work hard to make their candidate more human and relatable. The author had spent a lot of time covering the Clintons over the years and had good access to them. He sensed that some days Hillary’s heart wasn’t in the campaign. The campaign was monolithically top-down and tightly controlled, which didn’t help soften Hillary’s image. Speeches emphasized data and analytics, not the warm and fuzzy stuff that connect to undecided voters.
Leibovich talks about Bubble World, the political elites who gave Trump no chance to win. These insiders, including a lot of media people, focused on the disorganization of Trump’s campaign that was a mess. He fired and replaced campaign managers and top staff frequently. He kept insulting people he didn’t agree with. He apologized for nothing and showed no humility.
Bubble World chortled about how Trump's rallies were disorganized while praising the no-nonsense precision of Hillary’s appearances. They didn’t notice the insane high energy that Trump events generated even if they weren’t organized well. They didn’t need to be. The Republican candidate was becoming a cult figure with a large following.
As the campaign moved through October, Hillary had some small health issues, most of which were because campaigning for president is grueling. Trump jumped on this, despite the fact that he was 50 pounds overweight and lived on cheeseburgers. Still, most observers thought that Clinton would win handily.
November 8, 2016 Trump won and the author held out some hope that he, as an outsider to politics, would be good for the country. “If you could get beyond the bluster and menace of Trump (and okay, the cruel bigotry, lunacy, criminality, incompetence, and so on), his message did contain kernels of cogent defiance against Washington’s permanent syndicates.” Maybe the system was rigged against regular people. Senators (and future presidential candidates) Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren often talked about the “rigged system” long before Trump ever did.
Hillary Clinton’s comment about “deplorables” helped make Trump’s case that the ruling class had no use for the plain folk. Of course, it’s a stretch to think that a New York City billionaire real estate developer would have any connection to, interest in, or empathy for regular people. Some of the observers quoted in the book think that many of Trump’s supporters had minimal expectations that he would help them. They just wanted revenge, and the new president was their weapon.
On election night, RNC Director Reince Priebus got special thanks from the president-elect, who called him up to the stage to say a few words which he did. As it turned out, while the campaign was disorganized and the candidate disdained the party apparatus, the RNC came in and did a lot of the grunt work in voter ID and such that led to Trump’s victory. Reince became the new president’s chief of staff. He knew it was not a long-time position. He lasted six months and was fired on Air Force One by a tweet that Trump sent while sitting ten feet away.
Inaugural Day 2017 Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, had an interesting first day. He assured the media and the country that Trump had a larger crowd at his swearing in than had Barack Obama. This was patently false but it set the tone for this administration. Lying was good. We can make up our own facts. As it turned out, they were right to a large extent. Many people today will buy anything that someone they like is selling. As chief advisor Kellyanne Conway said on a Sunday talk show when confronted with pictures that showed that Trump’s crowd was much smaller than Obama’s, press secretary Spicer was merely offering “alternative facts.” Ironically, Spicer’s being mocked on Saturday Night Live made him a hero in Trump World. That celebrity status probably enabled him to hang on to the job for a month or two longer than would be expected.
June 2017 Mark Leibovich sat down to interview President Trump. Leibovich had worked through communications director Hope Hicks who would be totally unqualified for the position in any but this administration. Trump listened to her and she could tamp down some of his more outrageous ideas. That was good.
The president, who had known Leibovich for decades and somewhat trusted him, ranted about the rigged election that denied him winning the popular vote. He also raved about how high his approval ratings were – 70%! The sample was of Tennessee Republicans. While the two were chatting, the president was watching Fox News.
By June, Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer were at their “sell by” date and were anxious to get out. One of Priebus’s final tasks was to schedule the first cabinet meeting. The session was a gush fest of praise for the president. These people were sharp enough to figure out how to stay on the boss’s good side. Trump boasted about how he had passed more legislation in a few months than any other president. He hadn’t – only a few small bills were enacted. Mike Pence summed up the comments around the table. “It’s just the greatest privilege of my life to serve as the vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people….” Pence was consistently obsequious. (Of course, on January 6, 2021, Trump supporters wanted to hang him; rolling over only gets you so far.)
While most of Trump’s cabinet and advisors toed the line, some were more muted in public and disdainful in private. Mike Pompeo played both ends of the praise/ridicule line as did some of the more credentialed cabinet members like secretary of state Rex Tillerson (“He’s a moron.”), homeland security secretary John Kelly (“He’s an idiot.”), and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster (“He’s a dope.”). Needless to say, these folks soon exited the White House.
January - December 2018 By now, the country had drawn lines. Many people hated what Trump was doing in breaking up families at the border and protesters hurled insults at Trump officials who were implementing that practice. Other policies attracted similar protests whenever a high-ranking official went out in public. All of this was good for business at the Trump Hotel, a safe haven for MAGA warriors. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan likened the tavern at the hotel to the bar scene in Star Wars. Trump people did not like Speaker Ryan who soon decided that life was better as a civilian in Wisconsin than as a powerful politician in Washington, DC.
Thoughtful Republicans like Senator Jeff Flake who resisted the Trump siren song tried to reach an accommodation with the president, but he was frustrated by the reality that every day brought a new “best thing” that the president found interesting. Of course, if you stopped praising the chief executive, a tweet storm of derision would descend upon your head.
As time went on, sober-styled Republicans realized that Trump was Trump. He was not going to change or listen to anybody but his toadies. John McCain, a sober Republican who liked to drink, was hated by Trump even before the senator was the deciding vote in keeping Obamacare.
John McCain died of brain cancer in August of 2018. Leibovich and McCain knew each other for over 20 years and they liked each other. One common observation about McCain by non-pols was that he was someone who “acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.” McCain had spent years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, so he was playing with house money since he had survived that. He was willing to buck trends and his party which is why Obamacare survived.
Senator McCain understood why his close colleague, Lindsey Graham, had totally sucked up to Trump – “He doesn’t want to get the crap kicked out of him by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.” McCain didn’t care about that, even before he was diagnosed with a terminal disease.
McCain carefully planned his own funeral and he saw it as a chance to humiliate Donald Trump. (Bob’s Note: Donald Trump is incapable of being humiliated. That wiring is not connected, which probably helped him get elected president.) There were six funerals all over the country, which Leibovich sees as a tad too many.
The guest list included George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom defeated McCain for president. It excluded Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. Trump’s secretary of defense, Jim Mattis was there, as was White House chief of staff John Kelly, and McCain’s friend Rudy Giuliani, who had not yet become radioactive.
The national media went nuts covering the ceremonies. It was their way of whacking the president, exactly how McCain had planned it. Former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw and Leibovich were hanging out at the main ceremony and both thought that the coverage was over the top even for someone like McCain who was a big deal in American political life. John’s daughter, Meghan, gave the eulogy and noted that America is great and didn’t need to be made great again, a knock on you-know-who.
Trump was indeed a pariah at the service, and that helped him with his base. They weren’t special enough to be invited to big deals like this and neither was the president who was once again a victim of people being mean to him, and, by extension, being mean to them.
Lindsey Graham needed to be liked and he needed to be liked to get re-elected, so he was willing to adulate Donald Trump who had nastily criticized John McCain at every opportunity. Initially Trump vetoed flying the White House flag at half-staff to honor McCain, but wiser heads prevailed. However, the president ordered the flag lowered less than two days after the funeral, a much shorter time period than normal, which Trump wasn't.
January 2019 By now, most sentient Republicans had given up any pretense of reeling Trump in or waiting for him to pivot. The president was on a roll. The economy was doing well and he said he was building his wall to keep illegals out of the country. He had watered down a lot of pesky environmental regulations and many business owners supported him.
Several aspiring politicians saw Trumpism as the key to future success. Ron DeSantis was a socially awkward congressman who was running to be governor of Florida. He jumped on the Trump train and even did an ad with his young daughter, with the candidate talking about how great President Trump was. The Donald noticed and gave his full support to DeSantis who eked out a victory and became governor.
Leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had high standards, wouldn’t go along to get along, so he quit politics rather than blindly support Trump. Ron DeSantis made another choice which boosted his political capital, made him governor of Florida, and set him up to run for president.
Many Republicans who could not support Trump left politics. Almost half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives left office between 2017 and 2020. The people who replaced them were full-bore Trump Messiah Syndrome acolytes. The GOP was gone.
April 2019 By now, Trump had totally taken over the party. His critics had either died (John McCain and George HW Bush), chosen not to run for reelection, or totally bought into Trumpworld (Ted Cruz, Mario Rubio, Lindsey Graham and many others). Virtually the entire Republican caucus in the House of Representatives got with the program, whatever that was on a given day. The very few Republican officials who did not support Trump were constantly harassed. Senator Susan Collins of Maine routinely faced death threats.
The party had changed. Half of Republicans now thought that Barack Obama was not born in the US and many said he was a Muslim. People got to make up their own facts.
Many elected officials and high-level operatives shared a nonchalance about their place in history for blindly supporting Trump. House-Speaker-in-Waiting Kevin McCarthy gave a blank stare when asked about his legacy. He just wanted to be Speaker. Rudy Giuliani and Lindsey Graham did a variation of “I don’t care. I’ll be dead.” All of these people had figured out what Donald Trump knew intuitively. You can lie and bluster your way through anything and eventually you'll wear your enemies down. There were very few consequences for anything. Nothing mattered.
November 2019 Trump made his famous phone call to future hero Volodymyr Zelensky, asking the Ukrainian president to get some dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden to help grease the skids for US aid. Trump’s behavior was inappropriate by any standard, and it led to futile impeachment proceedings. It was a foregone conclusion that the House would vote to impeach. There was also no way that senators in a political party dominated by Donald Trump would even think of voting to convict and remove him. It was all politics, with each side virtue signaling to their base.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was an outlier. He had had it with Trump and was publicly critical of him. He was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in the impeachment trial. The president called Mitt a “pompous ass” and a “bitter loser” which was fairly mild language. Maybe Don liked Mitt.
2020 Very early in the year, some thought that Donald Trump would use the impeachment attempt as an inflection point to become more open and presidential. That didn't happen. He went nuts ranting about his “nasty, dishonest enemies” ad infinitum. He also railed against the “top scum” of the FBI. (I find that ironic in that if FBI Director James Comey hadn’t outed Hillary Clinton about her sketchy email server a few weeks before the 2016 election, I’m pretty sure Trump would not have won.)
The Democrat presidential candidates were lining up to take on Trump. The Iowa caucuses in January were a complete mess. The technology couldn’t count the ballots. The one thing that was clear was that Joe Biden had done very poorly. This didn’t seem to matter to party elders who were counting on Joe because he was “a known quantity who scared the fewest numbers of people”, quite an endorsement.
In March, COVID hit and Donald Trump started to lose altitude. Leibovich wrote that Trump “became his absolute worst possible self at the worst possible time and that made everything more terrible for everyone.” The president’s daily pandemic briefings turned off a lot of moderate voters. His insistence that the virus would just disappear was wrong. Trump’s pushing quack cures helped do him in. George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 just added fuel to a culture wars fire that is still burning.
In August, the Republican convention nominated the president for a second term. Trump’s supporters got to speak at the convention which was held in a relatively small auditorium. They railed against the Democrats to an audience of the few true believers who actually showed up. Rudy Giuliani was the cheerleader-in-chief for the event. The White House hosted campaign events, which people thought was illegal before it was done. Trump’s acceptance speech assured us that the pandemic was over and the economy was in great shape. He was wrong on both counts, with COVID in full bloom and with the economy losing one-third of its gross domestic product over a few months. His fans loved it.
For the first time since 1850, the Republicans had no party platform beyond supporting the president. The Democrats, as usual, had a lot more ground to cover - “... progressives in need, interest groups to pander to, and Trump-averse women in the suburbs to accommodate.” The debates were predictable, with Trump breaking the rules and giving Joe Biden a chance to say what a lot of people wanted to say after a particular over-the-top Trump tirade – “Will you shut up, man?” That was one of the few memorable moments from the campaign.
The election was close but it was clear that a lot of people who had voted for Trump against Hillary were sick of him and his aggressive style of demeaning people. The president hurt his chances of winning three swing states by bad-mouthing three recently-deceased legendary politicians – John Mc Cain (Arizona); John Dingell (Michigan); and John Lewis (Georgia). Trump narrowly lost all three, but he wasn't going to start having impulse control at this stage of his life.
In the days preceding the election, Leibovich spent a lot of time in Georgia and South Carolina. Both states had competitive senate fights. The author hung around with old friend Lindsey Graham in South Carolina the day before the election. Graham was nervous - his race looked tight - but he was confident he’d win. The last thing he said to the author was, “I’m just glad this thing will be over tomorrow.” It wasn’t.
As we know, Trump refused to acknowledge that he lost, although there’s pretty good evidence that just about everyone in his circle told him that he had lost. He gave a speech and claimed to have won the election no matter what the reported numbers were. Chris Christie, an early Trump sycophant, called Trump’s speech “one of the most dangerous pieces of political rhetoric I have ever heard in my life.” Christie was prescient.
A few days after the election, former secretary of energy (before Trump fired him) Rick Perry was heading up the effort to find enough votes in swing states to make Trump a winner even after the election had been called. The author notes that nobody who knew Perry thought that he was particularly sharp. Mitt Romney recalled a phone conversation when former President George W. Bush said, “People thought I was dumb. Well, wait til you get a load of this guy.”
For the rest of 2020 and beyond, Trump was in full election result denial mode. He turned against his most loyal supporters like Chris Christie, VP Mike Pence, and Attorney General William Barr when they informed him that there was no election fraud. On December 19, Trump tweeted. “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.”
January 2021 The book goes into a lot of detail about the events of January 6 when the US Capitol was stormed by people who bought the Big Lie that the election was stolen. It’s not worth recounting much of what was written. There were opportunities to get in front of events, but people who should have been adults just didn’t want to be bothered to even try to get Trump to tell the rioters to back off. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows couldn't have done less to make things better.
Joe Biden was sworn in at the Capitol a few weeks after what would be called a terrorist attack in most countries. Many of Trump’s people insisted that the rioters were just asserting free speech, which most thoughtful people don’t think protects criminal acts. Over the next few weeks, many of the Republicans who had condemned Trump's role in supporting the insurrection toadied back to him. Kevin McCarthy desperately wanted to be Speaker. Nikki Haley wanted to run for president. Mitch McConnell kept his mouth shut after strong early criticism. He wanted to lead the Senate.
The thirteen Republicans who voted to accept the electoral college results on January 6 were vilified and had their families threatened. Liz Cheney was the most outspoken in condemning Trump. She’s had to spend tens of thousands of dollars for protection from thugs who want to harm her. Her position cost her seat but it cranked up her dignity.
The Republican line was that the liberal, biased mainstream media had made January 6 look worse than it was. This is nuts in that there is so much video, often taken by and proudly displayed online by the rioters, that it was clear what actually happened and what they were trying to do.
The end of the book talks about how the Republican Party of history is no more. The Trump party isn’t anchored in ideology or philosophy of governance. It’s all about brand and style and grievance. Loyalty to the leader is all that counts. Former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson said, “This is not the Republican Party anymore. It’s a cult.”
What’s unsettling is that the Democrats are so into Trump Derangement Syndrome that they still keep taking his bait and flipping out at things that, while offensive, aren’t all that important. Instead of doing the grunt election work to win the votes of real people, their leaders virtue signal and pontificate to keep the base happy and the contributions rolling in. Neither party is serious about actually governing. Neither party is serious about going out and figuring out what can be done to help improve the lives of millions of Americans who have fallen behind by many measures.
Bob’s Take
The Trump phenomenon. “Trump’s invasion of our politics had that very chicken-egg dilemma at its center. Was he an antidote to our politics or a manifestation? Whatever he was, his opponents were no match for it.” This quotation captures a major point of the book. Donald Trump did not create the conditions in the country that led to his presidency. He understood that for decades the political parties had been ignoring what we used to call Middle America.
Income for most Americans has steadily fallen over the past few decades. Even before inflation, buying a house or a car was beyond the grasp of many people. A lot of these people live in swing states – Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania – so appealing to them could make the difference in a presidential contest. Donald Trump figured that out.
The irony of DeSantis. Ron DeSantis was a low-key congressman who ran for governor of Florida. His campaign took off after Donald Trump endorsed him. Since DeSantis won by only a few thousand votes, the endorsement was critical to his success. Governor DeSantis quickly became a fully devoted Trump cheerleader. Now DeSantis is the main competition – perhaps the only competition – to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump made DeSantis governor which set him up as a serious contender. Now DeSantis wants to take the presidency away from his one-time best buddy. “NASTY!” the former president would tweet if he hadn’t been banned from Twitter.
The party's over. Between 2016 and 2020, half of the Republicans in the House left the party rather than support Trump. That speaks well of the old Republican Party in some ways – falling on your sword – but it opened the door for newly elected politicians to be all Trump all of the time.
Trump was savvy. He knew the media, including new things like Twitter. He knew that being outrageous would get him on every cable TV news network in his 2016 campaign. He knew that once he had established his celebrity as president, few elected Republicans would resist anything he did because they wanted to stay in office.
Keep your sense of humor. Mark Leibovich’s books are amusing as well as incisive. He laces lots of humor into his writing.
“The spotlight now shifts to incoming president Joe Biden, who takes the oath of office in front of a festive throng of 25,000 National Guard troops.”’ – Dave Berry, 2021 Year in Review.
Senator John McCain vacationed in Fuji in the South Pacific. Here’s his take on the locals: “They are lovely, gentle people even though they used to eat each other.”
A compelling chronicler of American politics. In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! - in America's Gilded Capital, which is a look at the carnival that Washington DC has become. Even if you hate politics, it’s worth reading for its humorous take on the nuttiness of the nation’s capital. He describes the wake of Tim Russert who hosted NBC’s Face the Nation and was touted as the real mayor of This Town. After a few minutes of solemnity honoring Tim, everybody started schmoozing in a networking frenzy, or a “netwaking” frenzy in this case. It’s a pretty funny book, albeit a depressing one if you hope for things to get better in DC.
