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

by Mark Leibovich

he was so close in 2015, after former Speaker John Boehner quit. McCarthy had been the favorite to replace him, until he did an interview with Hannity where he boasted that the Republicans’ investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attack had tarnished the then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and made her a weaker presidential candidate in 2016. Republicans had previously claimed—dubiously—that all they cared about was getting to the bottom of an attack on an American diplomatic compound in Libya that killed four Americans. McCarthy admitted otherwise to Hannity, which was factual but not something he was supposed to admit out loud, dummy. (This is what is known as a Kinsley gaffe, coined by the journalist Michael Kinsley, referring to when a politician accidentally blurts out the truth.) Recriminations against McCarthy were swift. He bled support from his caucus and wound up dropping out of the Speaker’s race.

When Cheney saw the photos from Mar-a-Lago, she was stunned. She had no advance word of McCarthy’s visit and no idea he was going. Why, she asked him, was he serving as an instrument for Trump’s rehabilitation, just eight days after Trump fled Washington in deep disgrace? The visit, she said, propped up Trump at a moment when they all could have moved on. “When we look back, Kevin’s trip to Mar-a-Lago will, I think, turn out to be a key moment,” Cheney said. It would, she said, go down as one of the most shameful episodes in a period full of shameful episodes.

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.”

“Unravels” is a word Cheney uses a lot. It signifies not just a set of bad outcomes (for example, losing elections, inciting insurrections) but also a spiral, of things only getting worse. That’s what’s occurred after January 2021. Far from being a line of demarcation against Trump, January 6 would result in a rehabilitation of the former president that would propel a narrative of denial, lies, and autocratic intolerance of dissent that has become the hallmark of the GOP. It has only accelerated since, as Trump has remained, by far, the most powerful leader, kingmaker, and saboteur in the Republican Party. It goes without saying that he had a great deal of help to get and remain in this position.

Stefanik was also a breathtaking opportunist, eager to move up in the ranks, and that would require adapting. It became clear during the first impeachment hearings that she seemed to view them as an audition for “rising star” status in the MAGA galaxy. As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Stefanik was initially viewed as one of the “serious” Republicans on a panel otherwise populated by bomb-throwing dimwits such as Gaetz, Jordan, and Nunes. That dream died quickly, however, as Stefanik fatefully toed Trump’s noisy line of defense throughout, engaged in conspicuous spats with Chairman Schiff, and collected huzzahs from the White House and recognition as a “team player.”

“I think you can basically tell a lot of the story of the GOP over the last several years by looking at two women, Liz Cheney and Elise Stefanik,” Adam Schiff said. Cheney, he said, had proven herself to be a person of great courage and character. Stefanik was the other extreme. “She basically just put up her hand and said, ‘Do you need someone to tell a Big Lie? Sure, I’ll tell any lie you want me to tell, just give me that position.’ ” Tragically, Schiff added, there are only two Liz Cheney types in the caucus—the other being Kinzinger. “There are two hundred Elise Stefaniks in the caucus. And you can’t even blame it on being uninformed, in the case of Stefanik. It’s just pure ambition, and nothing else matters. She just wanted the job.”

I was reminded of a 2019 New Yorker profile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, by Susan Glasser, in which she quoted a former American ambassador describing Pompeo as “like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” This image stuck with me (unfortunately) and also remained a pertinent descriptor for much of the Republican Party long after said ass had been relocated to Florida. Senator Scott would merely be the latest in a bombardment of heat-seeking missiles launched from Washington directly at the wide-targeted presidential posterior in Palm Beach.

If everything really unraveled on January 6, the continued unraveling had proceeded apace since then. It only got worse. It only gets worse. Biden, as advertised, restored a certain degree of normalcy and calmed things down. He screwed up a bunch of things, royally in some cases, but they have usually been within the normal contours of presidents royally screwing shit up (botching a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, bungling legislation, probably getting clobbered in the midterms). At least Biden doesn’t tweet in the middle of the night or lie about hurricanes or muse about extorting Greenland from Denmark or tout the wonders of bleach as a COVID treatment. He does not dump on authentic war heroes or civil rights icons after their deaths. He does not wish ill upon half the country. That’s all a win, as far as I’m concerned.

My mind sometimes jumps to one of the more hilarious Trump gaffes—few even remember it—from six months or so after the coronavirus spread to the U.S. in 2020. This was back when Trump was dazzling everyone daily with his scientific genius (“maybe I have a natural ability”) and generously sharing his ideas to a grateful and reassured nation. The coronavirus, Trump insisted in an ABC News Town Hall in Pennsylvania, would “disappear” even without a vaccine. He laid out his reasoning. “You’ll develop, you’ll develop herd, like a herd mentality,” Trump explained. “It’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen,” Trump said. “That will all happen.”

it was Everson who noticed that within a day of Trump’s infamous “Be there, will be wild!” tweet about his January 6 rally, the cheapest room at the Trump Hotel immediately jumped from $476 to $1,999. “Donald Trump didn’t just inspire the Jan. 6 riot,” Everson wrote. “He seems to have made money off it.”

Like Trump, Vladimir Putin takes what people let him take. He will do what he can get away with. The Russian president has now placed himself in league with some of history’s genocidal monsters, the likes of Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden, and a select group of others. He is isolated from every country and leader in the free world, with a few conspicuous exceptions that include the ex-president of the United States. Trump sounded as if he watched “genius” Putin’s slaughter of Ukraine with the same relish as he did his supporters’ ransacking of American democracy on January 6.

The book was full of these Captain Obvious critiques. Barr even served up the very fresh take that his former boss was an “incorrigible” narcissist. I gleaned this just from the excerpts and news stories, by the way. No chance I’m reading this book, though I’m sure the parts about Barr’s childhood and early legal career are awesome.

Trump was correct in his original assessment of so many Republican “leaders.” They have proven to be weak, conniving, and two-faced cowards. They fear Trump as much as they despise him. They fear his (and their own) voters as much as they have contempt for them.

A former Republican congressman told me recently that the party’s only real plan for dealing with Trump in 2024 involved a darkly divine intervention. “We’re just waiting for him to die,” he said. That was it, that was the plan. He was 100 percent serious.