{"id":145549,"date":"2022-10-07T15:59:38","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T23:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=145549"},"modified":"2022-10-08T16:21:42","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T00:21:42","slug":"thank-you-for-your-servitude-donald-trumps-washington-and-the-price-of-submission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=145549","title":{"rendered":"Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this hilarious 2022 book by Mark Leibovich<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019d 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.)<\/p>\n

* He was fond of cold assessments about life and death and legacies. \u201c This will all be over someday, and no one\u2019s gonna give a shit who I used to be,\u201d 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.
\n 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\u2019 row of speakers. They included the forty-third and forty-fourth commanders in chief\u2014George W. Bush and Barack Obama\u2014both of whom had inflicted defeats upon McCain in his two presidential campaigns. \u201c It was almost as if he was planning someone else\u2019s funeral,\u201d McCain\u2019s longtime campaign adviser Rick Davis observed. \u201cHe was really excited about it.\u201d
\n 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\u2019s surprise, the forty-fifth president topped John McCain\u2019s final shit list.<\/p>\n

* In death, as in life, John M C Cain stood for another cherished American asset: media overkill.
\n The cable networks kicked into their \u201cSpecial Report: A Nation Mourns\u201d modes. No shortage of trained observers were eager to pregame the National Cathedral service.
\n \u201cA statement about the bigness of America,\u201d MSNBC\u2019s Kasie Hunt would declare of this solemn observance. Or maybe, Hunt allowed, it could all be taken as \u201ca funeral for civility.\u201d This one could go either way.
\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

* 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. \u201cJohn McCain was a great patriot,\u201d said Schmidt, who was a top aide to the 2008 presidential campaign. \u201cHe more perfectly loved this country than any man I\u2019ve ever known.\u201d McCain, however, did not \u201cperfectly love\u201d Steve Schmidt by the end, for a variety of reasons, and Schmidt, too, wound up among the uninvited.
\n \u201cThis was John McCain\u2019s way of shoving it up Donald Trump\u2019s ass,\u201d the greenroom eminence Al Hunt told me outside the basilica. \u201cLeon Panetta just told me that.\u201d 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.
\n 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\u2014 The Greatest Generation \u2014about 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.<\/p>\n

* No way Donald Trump belonged in this club.
\n \u201cIt was almost as if it were a meeting of Washington\u2019s political underground,\u201d my Times colleague Peter Baker wrote in his funeral game story, \u201cif the underground met in a grand cathedral with 10,650 organ pipes.\u201d
\n But if it was really a \u201crebellion against the president\u2019s worldview,\u201d it would be a brief and bloodless one. You could also make a case that Trump\u2019s 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\u2014Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, deficits, gridlock, cynicism, decadence, and anything that fit under the foul heading of \u201cthe Swamp.\u201d
\n 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. \u201cWe are better than this,\u201d Bush said, quoting the mythic figurine of McCain\u2019s ghost. \u201cAmerica is better than this!\u201d
\n That felt unsettled. But we all have stories we tell ourselves.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019t 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.
\n 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. \u201cTrump is an interesting person,\u201d said Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate leader who did battle with Las Vegas mob bosses as Nevada\u2019s gaming commissioner in the 1970s. \u201cHe\u2019s not immoral, but he is amoral. Amoral is when you shoot someone in the head, it doesn\u2019t make a difference. No conscience.\u201d <\/p>\n

* 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. \u201cYou just showcase your issues, right?\u201d Graham said.
\n Well, sure. Graham was hardly the first politician to \u201cshowcase\u201d 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\u2014safely back with the people who are so smart in Washington\u2014boast of playing him like a tuba on the golf course.
\n Graham was happy to lay out exactly the game he was playing. He knew I was versed in the election-year \u201cshowcasing\u201d he was now engaged in\u2014that I was one of the \u201cpeople who are so smart \u201d that he derided earlier in the week. I was also one of the convenient devices \u201cwho hate us ,\u201d although nothing about Graham\u2019s cozy manner with me suggested that he really thought I hated him or his constituents.<\/p>\n

* I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p>\n

* \u201cThe Senate is like a country club; we\u2019re like a truck stop,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

* \u201cYou have a situation where the leader of our party models the worst behavior imaginable,\u201d another outgoing Republican member of Congress told me. \u201cAnd if you\u2019re 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.\u201d
\n I asked the outgoing congressman\u2014very nicely, even a tad aggressively\u2014whether I could attach his name to this excellent quote. \u201cNo fucking way,\u201d he said. Why? \u201cBecause a lot of these dickheads are my friends. And I might have to lobby them one day, too.
\n \u201cI know, it\u2019s depressing.\u201d<\/p>\n

* [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\u2019s 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\u2019s penis to a mushroom (\u201csmaller than average,\u201d \u201cunusual,\u201d \u201clike a toadstool\u201d).
\n 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 \u201cmaking love\u201d to Trump, which understandably set her off.
\n \u201cGross!\u201d she protested. \u201cWhat is wrong with you? I laid there and prayed for death.\u201d<\/p>\n

* \u201cThere is no doubt that the president and I have extremely different styles,\u201d [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 \u201cstyle\u201d\u2014if only he wore different shoes or something. Or the ever-present, ever-lame \u201cI don\u2019t like his tweets\u201d complaint, as if Trump\u2019s use of the medium itself were the issue.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2014by the media, by the GOP grown-ups\u2014was always to consign this to a fringe view, or a \u201csettled question\u201d (which of course only required \u201csettling\u201d because Trump had previously questioned Obama\u2019s 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 \u201csuspicions,\u201d existed solidly in the Republican mainstream, even after Obama had been president for nearly two full terms.
\n \u201cWe had a Muslim president for seven and a half years,\u201d 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.
\n \u201cIt\u2019s in my heart,\u201d Sabato said, when asked what the source of his claim was. \u201cI see it for what it is. I believe that he\u2019s on the other side . . . the Middle East. He\u2019s with the bad guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

* It was not clear where \u201cLOL, Nothing Matters\u201d 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.
\n 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.<\/p>\n

* People would inevitably invoke \u201cthe nuclear codes\u201d whenever Trump kicked it up to next-level bonkers.<\/p>\n

* 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.)<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s physical condition improved, but he seemed more paranoid and erratic in the aftermath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t