Why Do So Many Republicans Tolerate Donald Trump?
Mark Leibovich’s “Thank You for Your Servitude” asks
why establishment Republicans failed to prevent a hostile takeover of their party.
By Geoffrey
Kabaservice
Published
July 13, 2022
Updated
Aug. 6, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/books/review/thank-you-for-your-servitude-mark-leibovich.html
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVITUDE: Donald Trump’s
Washington and the Price of Submission, by Mark Leibovich
In June
2017, the New York Times chief national correspondent Mark Leibovich visited
the White House and was unexpectedly ushered into the Oval Office, where he
found President Donald Trump watching (what else?) “Fox & Friends.” Trump
issued a perfunctory denunciation of Leibovich’s then-employer and launched
into his familiar litany of grievances and obsessions. “I had heard this all
before,” Leibovich reflected later, “and was ready for it to end after about
two minutes.”
The problem
that Leibovich (now a staff writer at The Atlantic) faced in interpreting
Trump-era politics was that its lead figure was so monotonous and monomaniacal
(albeit dangerous and deranged) that the author couldn’t repeat the formula he
used to such entertaining effect in his 2013 book, “This Town,” which profiled
the Washington insiders and A-listers circling around the Obama White House.
Instead, Leibovich’s new book ingeniously shifts the focus to the Trump
International Hotel, the president’s “flagship payola palace” that operated
from 2016 to 2022 just a few blocks from the White House.
Through its
glittering atrium lounge passed the Republican Party’s major politicians, leaders,
fixers and influence-peddlers — “the careerists who capitulated to Trumpism to
preserve their livelihoods,” as Leibovich puts it. It was the critical venue
for Trumpian deal-making and social climbing, and hosted some of the plotting
sessions that led to the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, the Jan. 6
insurrection and both of Trump’s impeachments. The hotel was the Trumpian
version of the Washington “swamp.”
“Thank You
for Your Servitude” concentrates less on the MAGA true believers — the likes of
Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene — than on the twisted and tormented
souls in the Republican establishment who could have prevented Trump’s hostile
takeover of the party but didn’t. Such Republicans, in Leibovich’s assessment,
“made Trump possible” and they “refused to stop him even after the U.S. Capitol
fell under the control of some madman in a Viking hat. It was always
rationalization followed by capitulation and then full surrender. The routine
was always numbingly the same, and so was the sad truth at the heart of it:
They all knew better.”
Sally
Rooney’s latest novel, a reckoning with race and sisterhood in Chicago and a
rumination on the limits of technology on human life are some of the paperbacks
in our latest roundup.
Martha
Hickson, a librarian, said that when book ban attempts turned into personal
attacks she became so stressed she couldn’t sleep and lost 12 pounds in a week.
So why did
they go along? The usual Washington factors of greed, ambition and opportunism,
for starters. Kevin McCarthy, who unwisely spoke to Leibovich at length and
with considerable candor, made clear he would endure any humiliation at Trump’s
hands and sacrifice any principle in pursuit of becoming House speaker. “Once
McCarthy wins,” in Leibovich’s view, “nothing else matters: He will have made
it.” Senator Lindsey Graham turned from Trump critic to lapdog out of a desire
“to try to be relevant,” he told Leibovich, as well as a pragmatic
understanding that his re-election depended upon Trump’s blessing and his base.
Others submitted out of both fear and fascination; Leibovich notes the mystique
that Trump, as “a pure and feral rascal,” held for rule-bound, easily shamed
politicians.
“Thank You
for Your Servitude” is extremely funny in spots, although much of the humor has
a whistling-past-the-graveyard quality. Like the Comedian in Alan Moore’s
graphic novel “Watchmen,” Leibovich was shocked out of his previous cynicism
and absurdism (to some extent at least) by the enormity of Trump’s threat.
Unlike “This Town,” Leibovich’s new account has heroes: Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney
and the late Senator John McCain. McCain’s courage and integrity in standing up
to Trump posed a stark contrast to what Leibovich calls “everything the White
House and its saps and weaklings had become under the 45th president.”
Geoffrey
Kabaservice is the vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center
and the author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the
Destruction of the Republican Party.”
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