Here are some highlights from this hilarious 2022 book by Mark Leibovich:
* McCain also had an impressive capacity for grudges. He went years without speaking to New York Times reporters after our paper published an article in February 2008 that suggested he’d had an affair with a Washington lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. Both parties denied a romantic involvement, and Iseman went on to sue my employer. (She later dropped the suit, after the Times agreed to print a note to readers saying the story did not mean to imply a sexual relationship.)
* He was fond of cold assessments about life and death and legacies. “ This will all be over someday, and no one’s gonna give a shit who I used to be,” McCain would often say, in so many words. But he clearly did give a shit, at least about the choreography of his last act. To ensure a proper send-off, McCain took a direct role in planning his memorial services, all six of them (multiple funerals are an essential flex for any proper D.C. bigwig). There was the service at North Phoenix Baptist Church, the public viewing at the Arizona Capitol, the ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy, the one at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, the wreath laying at the Vietnam Memorial, and the granddaddy of them all at the National Cathedral, preceding the burial back in Annapolis.
Following his terminal diagnosis, McCain convened regular Friday sessions to plan his departure rites. He made his wishes known about pallbearers, hymns, prayers, eulogies, and eulogists. He wanted his program to feature a murderers’ row of speakers. They included the forty-third and forty-fourth commanders in chief—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—both of whom had inflicted defeats upon McCain in his two presidential campaigns. “ It was almost as if he was planning someone else’s funeral,” McCain’s longtime campaign adviser Rick Davis observed. “He was really excited about it.”
Along with his wife, Cindy, McCain dictated who should be invited and, more to the point, who should not be. Palin did not make the cut. Neither, for various reasons, did some of his higher-profile aides from 2000 or 2008 (John Weaver, Mike Murphy). To no one’s surprise, the forty-fifth president topped John McCain’s final shit list.
* In death, as in life, John M C Cain stood for another cherished American asset: media overkill.
The cable networks kicked into their “Special Report: A Nation Mourns” modes. No shortage of trained observers were eager to pregame the National Cathedral service.
“A statement about the bigness of America,” MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt would declare of this solemn observance. Or maybe, Hunt allowed, it could all be taken as “a funeral for civility.” This one could go either way.
The pundit-historian-theologian Jon Meacham, who would eulogize Bush 41 in this same church two months later and would go on to write speeches for Joe Biden, ministered through his live shots. You know it’s a momentous Washington ceremony when Meacham gets called in. Where did this Great Deceased Man fit into the American story? Only Meacham knew for sure.
* Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican bulldog who turned hard against Trump and whose emphatic cable diatribes made him a Never Trump icon, was another stalwart of McCain commentary. “John McCain was a great patriot,” said Schmidt, who was a top aide to the 2008 presidential campaign. “He more perfectly loved this country than any man I’ve ever known.” McCain, however, did not “perfectly love” Steve Schmidt by the end, for a variety of reasons, and Schmidt, too, wound up among the uninvited.
“This was John McCain’s way of shoving it up Donald Trump’s ass,” the greenroom eminence Al Hunt told me outside the basilica. “Leon Panetta just told me that.” Yes, he did, and quite conspicuously. Panetta practically shouted the words and did the old Italian fuck-you arm salute for good measure, drawing stares outside the church.
The pageant called for every sober sage on deck. Tom Brokaw came down from New York. We chatted in front of the church before the ceremony. People kept spotting him and thanking him for his service, though Brokaw himself had never actually served, at least in any wars. He had, however, penned a blockbuster book— The Greatest Generation —about those who did serve, which was not nothing. At the very least, Brokaw was a commanding officer in the Greatest Generation of TV context givers.
* No way Donald Trump 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.”
But if it was really a “rebellion against the president’s worldview,” it would be a brief and bloodless one. You could also make a case that Trump’s pariah status at an event like this was precisely why his base loved him so much. The assembled Washington respect payers had collectively nurtured all the notions, false promises, and wars that put Trump in the White House to begin with—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, deficits, gridlock, cynicism, decadence, and anything that fit under the foul heading of “the Swamp.”
In his eulogy, Bush instructed mourners to always imagine McCain whispering over their shoulders. The capital never lacked for dead voices said to be exhorting us to greatness. “We are better than this,” Bush said, quoting the mythic figurine of McCain’s ghost. “America is better than this!”
That felt unsettled. But we all have stories we tell ourselves.
* Graham had minimal regard for Trump as a serious thinker and moral human being. That was evident to anyone Graham spoke with privately. But he also reserved a certain awe for his new patron. He couldn’t believe how Trump could endure the crises he did or got away with what he got away with. It created a mystique around Trump, especially among politicians, who tend to be rule-bound by nature, mindful of precedents, and terrified of being shamed. Trump had no such inclination toward rules or common respect and no capacity for shame or embarrassment. He was a pure and feral rascal. It gave him the advantage of being bulletproof in his own scrambled head.
Some of the most hard-boiled politicians I knew, people who dealt with all kinds of schemers and scoundrels in their careers, reserved a perverse curiosity about this president. “Trump is an interesting person,” said Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate leader who did battle with Las Vegas mob bosses as Nevada’s gaming commissioner in the 1970s. “He’s not immoral, but he is amoral. Amoral is when you shoot someone in the head, it doesn’t make a difference. No conscience.”
* One outcome of great interest to Graham was winning a fourth term in the Senate. This required him to speak one way in South Carolina and another way when being interviewed by a reporter in Washington who was onto him. “You just showcase your issues, right?” Graham said.
Well, sure. Graham was hardly the first politician to “showcase” different themes and postures before different audiences. But Graham spoke out of both sides of his mouth with such gusto it was rather audacious. He could squeeze Trump like a teddy bear in South Carolina and then—safely back with the people who are so smart in Washington—boast of playing him like a tuba on the golf course.
Graham was happy to lay out exactly the game he was playing. He knew I was versed in the election-year “showcasing” he was now engaged in—that I was one of the “people who are so smart ” that he derided earlier in the week. I was also one of the convenient devices “who hate us ,” although nothing about Graham’s cozy manner with me suggested that he really thought I hated him or his constituents.
* I’d heard a million versions of this excuse: that Trump was too inept to shake down a key ally (Ukraine), too undisciplined to plot to overturn an election, too naive and childlike to abide by basic governing standards.
* 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.
* “The Senate is like a country club; we’re like a truck stop,” Kevin McCarthy was always saying. This overlooked that the Republican side of the truck stop was attracting more and more racists, freaks, and extremists who once would have been consigned to darker corners of the rest area.
* “You have a situation where the leader of our party models the worst behavior imaginable,” another outgoing Republican member of Congress told me. “And if you’re a Republican in Washington, the idea is basically to make yourself as much of a dickhead as possible in order to get attention and impress the biggest dickhead of all, the guy sitting in the White House.”
I asked the outgoing congressman—very nicely, even a tad aggressively—whether I could attach his name to this excellent quote. “No fucking way,” he said. Why? “Because a lot of these dickheads are my friends. And I might have to lobby them one day, too.
“I know, it’s depressing.”
* [Stormy] Daniels, the suddenly very famous porn actor, had dropped into town to promote her memoir, Full Disclosure, which was not your typical political memoir in the way that, say, Henry Kissinger’s memoir would be. The book included a lot about her difficult childhood, her abusive relationships, and her entry into the world of adult film, where the former Stephanie Clifford would rechristen herself Stormy Daniels. The stuff about her childhood and relationships and professional journey was ignored in favor of the spicier details, such as the part where Daniels compared the shape of Trump’s penis to a mushroom (“smaller than average,” “unusual,” “like a toadstool”).
On his show a few nights earlier, Jimmy Kimmel had helpfully presented Daniels with a tray of actual mushrooms and invited her to pick the fungus that best resembled the presidential member (she picked the smallest). At one point, Kimmel referred to Daniels “making love” to Trump, which understandably set her off.
“Gross!” she protested. “What is wrong with you? I laid there and prayed for death.”
* “There is no doubt that the president and I have extremely different styles,” [Susan] Collins said. It was always amusing to hear elected Republicans who were plainly appalled by Trump try to paper over their differences with him as a matter of “style”—if only he wore different shoes or something. Or the ever-present, ever-lame “I don’t like his tweets” complaint, as if Trump’s use of the medium itself were the issue.
* In 2015 and 2016, more than half of Republican poll respondents were still saying that they believed Barack Obama was a Muslim, and probably not born in the United States, too. The instinct—by the media, by the GOP grown-ups—was always to consign this to a fringe view, or a “settled question” (which of course only required “settling” because Trump had previously questioned Obama’s country of origin nonstop). It was not a polite or uplifting topic. It hardly mattered that they were ugly and demonstrable lies. But the reality was, these views, or “suspicions,” existed solidly in the Republican mainstream, even after Obama had been president for nearly two full terms.
“We had a Muslim president for seven and a half years,” said Antonio Sabato Jr., the underwear model, reality show character, and big Trump supporter. Sabato made this claim in an interview with ABC, just before delivering a speech on the first night of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
“It’s in my heart,” Sabato said, when asked what the source of his claim was. “I see it for what it is. I believe that he’s on the other side . . . the Middle East. He’s with the bad guys.”
* It was not clear where “LOL, Nothing Matters” began, but the refrain started popping up on Twitter in the early Trump years. The phrase packed an exasperated tone, an acknowledgment of the consequence-free environment that Trump had fostered.
The longer Trump survived without ramifications, the easier it became for him. No scandal could ever be processed before the next one came along. Outrage fatigue was his best enabler.
* People would inevitably invoke “the nuclear codes” whenever Trump kicked it up to next-level bonkers.
* The most fascinating aspect of watching Romney in the Senate was seeing him toss an increasing number of fucks out the window. (He would word that differently.)
* Friends and aides first noticed a change in Trump after he contracted COVID-19. The doctors at Walter Reed pumped him with Canseco levels of steroids. Trump’s physical condition improved, but he seemed more paranoid and erratic in the aftermath.
