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July 12 - July 13, 2022
met on December 14 to affirm Joe Biden’s victory. Soon, theoretically, it would be safe for the forty-sixth president and his “total pros” to inherit the whirlwind and restore order, for Tom Friedman to be welcome again back at the White House, for Democrats to get on with their lefty overreaches, and for the donors to start bitching about how Biden was not properly glad-handing them.
appointed “grown-ups” were becoming alarmed. Trump was “on the verge of looking like a sore loser,” Karl Rove cautioned on Fox News. (Karl always had a sixth sense about these things.)
year’s end, General Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was telling people he believed the president was in “serious mental decline.” Trump kept retweeting some account called @catturd2. As presidents do.
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official was quoted as saying in The Washington Post. The blind quote, oft repeated, became an instant classic in the genre of “takes that did not age well.”
democracy. But Trump always saw himself as a disrupter, with a mandate to “shake things up.” That’s what “his people” demanded. And he would never let them down, as he always said. Promises made, promises kept.
Like most people, I doubted Trump would ever get here. I never thought his campaign would amount to much beyond a whoopee cushion detonated in our polite Kabuki theater. And like most people, I was extremely wrong.
Far more compelling to me were the slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side, who got the free desserts at BLT. These were the careerists who capitulated to
You will almost certainly recall many of the episodes described in the chapters ahead. In all likelihood, you’d rather not relive many of them. I sympathize. There have been, and will be, exhaustive accounts
The idea is to tell the story of this ordeal through the supplicant fanboys who permitted Donald Trump’s depravity to be inflicted on the rest of us. I wanted
McCarthy was once flying with Trump on Air Force One and noticed that the president ate only the cherry- and strawberry-flavored Starbursts. In a move that made him a legend in the annals of Washington supplication, McCarthy arranged for a special gift jar of Starbursts to be sent over to the White House—with the oranges and yellows removed. The president was said to be touched by the gesture. This
His friend was slightly more reflective. “We’re just sick of being told what to do,” said the friend, a contractor named Michael Lopez. “Especially by y’all in the media.”
“This is getting a little hairy,” I said to Rubio, of the worsening turbulence. “Just think,” I went on, “I might be the last human being to ever have to listen to these talking points.” This might have been disrespectful on my part,
He deployed the humblebrag maneuver of preemptively ruling himself out to be Trump’s running mate. “I have never sought, will not seek and do not want to be considered for Vice President,” Rubio said in a Facebook post. I suspected Rubio did this in part to annoy Trump, which it did, of course.
“As I get closer and closer to the goal, it’s gonna get different,” Trump told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “I will be changing very rapidly. I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.” Part of the perverse beauty of Trump was that he could be weirdly forthcoming about how full of shit he was.
appreciated. Trump was adept at this game. He was, at heart, a hospitality guy whose default mode tended toward the solicitous shtick of a manager or maître d’. You need anything? Having a good time? It’s an honor to have you here. Trump just wanted
Also, it would be unfair to conclude that Trump admired dictators. “His approach to Putin, Erdoğan, Kim Jong-un, Xi, or whoever was always the same,” Christie said. “He felt like, if I’m nice to these people, they’ll be nice to me. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.”
Priebus went on to credit Trump for raising topics that “no one else was willing to talk about.” This was undoubtedly true: on this same day, Trump—at a rally in Anaheim—observed that “Mitt Romney walks like a penguin.”
That was another underappreciated aspect of what Trump represented, Murray said. They did not so much love Donald Trump or care to defend his character. His main appeal, simply, was as a tool of revenge. “He’s our murder weapon,” Murray said, channeling Trump supporters. “And I think that is a pretty short, accurate way of saying what function Trump served.”
“Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories.”
Rain fell through dark clouds as the new president strutted out, as if in a purple robe. Paul Ryan looked as if he were about to cry. Michelle Obama looked as if she had not slept in days. Everyone kept peeking at each other, exchanging uh-oh glances. When Hillary Clinton arrived, in her ceremonial capacity as a former First Lady, she was greeted with a “Lock her up” chant from the crowd. A clot of embedded protesters blew whistles and yelled “Not my president” while Trump was taking his oath.
In a job where every little slipup was accentuated, Spicer slipped up regularly. At one point, he claimed that Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” (fact check: extremely wrong). His job appraisals were across-the-board brutal.
“There’s something about Sean Spicer that inspires pity,” the Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote, and then proceeded to eviscerate him without pity.
visited the White House again in June, this time to see Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, a former Ralph Lauren teen model, and one of the more stalwart day-to-day conductors of this ordeal. She also had a dark sense of humor and knew full well the absurd predicament she found herself in, not to mention the insanity of the object at the center
had gotten to know Hope during the 2016 campaign and had also become friends with her dad, Paul Hicks, who had been a top PR executive at the NFL when I was writing a book about the league. Hope was then just twenty-eight years old and not remotely qualified to be a communications director for any White House except this one. But she had a distinct superpower in her ability to manage Trump, not unlike how a day-care provider might have a special knack for managing a particular toddler.
and Hope walked me out. As soon as we were outside, I asked her what the deal was with that Tennessee poll. “I mean, I had to give him something, right?” she said. “Whatever.”
Around this time, Priebus had unburdened himself to Bob Woodward about his workplace. “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody,” Priebus said. “That’s what happens.” That sounded bad.
this most conspicuously moral of Christian men attach himself so utterly to one of the most depraved creatures ever to inhabit our public life? “Phyllis Schlafly deciding to elope with Larry Flynt would have made more sense,” Bret Stephens wrote in the Times.
while Jonathan Swan of Axios followed with a fuller account attributed “to five sources in the room.”
The narrative was set early. Washington’s old, credentialed officers—a government in exile, they’d have us believe—were striking back, forcefully. They were armed with killer eulogies and hot cable takes.
At the very least, Brokaw was a commanding officer in the Greatest Generation of TV context givers.
belonged in this club. “It was almost as if it were a meeting of Washington’s political underground,” my Times colleague Peter Baker wrote in his funeral game story, “if the underground met in a grand cathedral with 10,650 organ pipes.”
Rooney was more amused by the prospect than anything else, mostly because DeSantis was known within the House Republican caucus as a socially awkward weirdo who had minimal profile outside his district. He
But then DeSantis, who graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School, undertook a simple strategy of transforming his identity into that of a panting and performative Trump-worshipping fanatic. His
“We’ve created a whole entertainment wing of the party,” Paul Ryan said. “This has given rise to amoral opportunists who have found they can scale politics much faster
While Bush 41 lay in state, Trump 45 spent the morning railing against “presidential harassment” from Democrats and escalating a trade war with China via Twitter as the Dow dropped by nearly eight hundred points in response. Or as we called this during Trump-era Washington, “Tuesday.” Also, Stormy Daniels was in town.
“Gross!” she protested. “What is wrong with you? I laid there and prayed for death.” There had to be a metaphor here.
She said she believed that the comfort Biden engendered could buy him ideological latitude. “I’m convinced that Biden could essentially adopt Bernie’s agenda, and it would not be a factor,” she said. “Just as long as he continued to say things like ‘malarkey.’ And just not be Trump.”
“DON’T LET THE DEMOCRATS TAKE YOU FOR GRANTED!” Don Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former Fox News anchor, screamed in an address to the mostly empty Mellon Auditorium.
“We love you,” he said, in the doting tone of a parent tucking a child into bed. “You’re very special.” I kept thinking about this “We love you—you’re very special” message. For all the effort that’s gone into understanding Trump voters, this seemed to go directly to the void many of them have come to feel about their own place in the country.
I spent January 6, 2021, in the same place I spent much of the previous year: at home, working remotely, glued to my laptop.
But Republicans wound up gaining thirteen House seats and reducing the Democrats’ margin to nine by the start of 2021.
It was kind of a lame trophy, to be honest—a puny silver bowl, roughly the size of the participation trophy my daughter got for her incredible hard work and dedication on the fifth-grade soccer team (great job, Franny!).
What’s more, many of Cheney’s longtime supporters say she has betrayed not only them but a basic code of the citizen solipsism that, in their view, should define leadership in the Trump era. Their main critique of Cheney is that she is not doing what they want her to do, which is to support their president.
The fringe has become the standard. As MSNBC’s Brian Williams said in signing off from his final show in December 2021, “The darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods.” This was certainly true within the GOP, though Williams framed it in terms of its poisoning effect on our broader national enterprise. “Grown men and women, who swore an oath to our Constitution—elected by their constituents, possessing the kinds of college degrees I could only dream of—have decided to join the mob and become something they are not,” Williams said. “They’ve decided
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We are now on a collision course with a decisive next chapter: Trump and 2024. The GOP did not stop him in 2016 and have barely reckoned with him in the six years since, despite everything.
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.
soon enough, 2024 won’t be a long way off.
Free idea: Someone should write an entire book of acknowledgments followed by an index and perhaps some photos. I’m certain it would kill in D.C. And I expect to be acknowledged. Undying thanks to
Sad but true, but I’ve spent more home-office time these last two years with my feline muses, Eloise and Iris Kolbrener. Sadder but true: I just acknowledged cats! Definitely time to wrap.
