Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

by Mark Leibovich

Nor was this the GOP of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers, whose conservative “leaders” paid close attention to National Review and Wall Street Journal editorials. This was the party of Donald Trump, not George W. Bush. Fox News, not the Drudge Report. Steve Bannon, not William F. Buckley. And as far as McCarthy’s caucus was concerned, Marjorie Taylor Greene and not Liz Cheney. McCarthy was now concerned primarily with keeping the MTGs of the world happy, despite knowing full well she was nuts (“batshit crazy,” he described her to colleagues). He has to deal with the likes of Matt Gaetz, who when he first came to Congress worshipped Paul Ryan until he realized that Trump was much better for business. McCarthy has made no secret inside the caucus that he thought Gaetz was a “bozo” and a “sleazeball,” but as he often said (paraphrasing Hyman Roth in The Godfather: Part II), politics is the business he’s chosen. And this is the caucus he was given. “We all have to adapt.”