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Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission by [Mark Leibovich]

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Mark Leibovich

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The #1 New York Times Bestseller

“He’s one of the best chroniclers of politics today.” –Jake Tapper
“This is a really funny book.” –Kara Swisher
“His writing is so damn good.” –John Berman
“Really fascinating...There are so many revelations.” –Anderson Cooper
“The new must read summer book.” –Stephanie Ruhle

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller This Town, the eyewitness account of how the GOP collaborated with Donald Trump to transform Washington’s “swamp” into a gold-plated hot tub—and a onetime party of rugged individualists into a sycophantic personality cult.

In the early months of Trump’s candidacy, the Republican Party’s most important figures, people such as Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, were united—and loud—in their scorn and contempt. Even more, in their outrage: Trump was a menace and an affront to our democracy. Then, awkwardly, Trump won.

Thank You for Your Servitude is Mark Leibovich’s unflinching account of the moral rout of a major American political party, tracking the transformation of Rubio, Cruz, Graham, and their ilk into the administration’s chief enablers, and the swamp’s lesser lights into frantic chasers of the grift. What would these politicos do to preserve their place in the sun, or at least the orbit of the spray tan? What would they do to preserve their “relevance”? Almost anything, it turns out. Trump’s savage bullying of everyone in his circle, along with his singular command of his political base, created a dangerous culture of submission in the Republican Party. Meanwhile, many of the most alpha of the lapdogs happily conceded to Mark Leibovich that they were “in on the joke.” As Lindsey Graham told the author, his supporters in South Carolina generally don’t read The New York Times, and they won’t read this book, either. All that cynicism, shading into nihilism, led to a country truly unhinged from reality, and to the events of January 6, 2021. It’s a vista that makes the Washington of This Town seem like a comedy of manners in comparison.

Thank You for Your Servitude isn’t another view from the Oval Office: it’s the view from the Trump Hotel. We can check out any time we want, but only time will tell if we can ever leave.

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351 pages
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English
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Penguin Press
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July 12 2022
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From the Publisher

Mark Leibovich reveals the secrets, confessions, and humiliations of the sycophants

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The Problem

August 2015-March 2016

E veryone had a theory about why it was their turn.

Chris Christie kept pushing the idea that voters tend to favor presidential candidates who represent the biggest departure from the incumbent. He was their departure. "That is the argument people make to me about why I should run," Christie told me, just before he started his prolonged public campaign of "looking at it." "They say, 'No one could be more the opposite of Barack Obama from a personality standpoint than you. Therefore, you're perfect.'"

Governor Perfect had built-in assets. New York-D.C. media and GOP donor types loved him. He was great on WFAN and a superstar banterer in the TV greenrooms. He was a merciless but familiar brute, like the New Jersey Turnpike. He would stay within certain lanes, unlike Trump. But if you were sick of the same old robots, clowns, Clintons, or Bushes, Christie was your viable off-ramp.

I ran into him in Cleveland before the first Republican debate of the 2016 campaign, or "cycle," as the pros call it. It was a Fox News production, billed on the chyrons as "The Rumble in the Rust Belt." Christie arrived at Quicken Loans Arena a few hours before the cattle call. He tossed out towel-snapping insults at reporters, comparing us to jackals, snakes, maggots, and other beloved creatures.

As he entered his backstage holding area in Cleveland, Christie compared himself to a penned-in bull, eager to make America his china shop. I wished him luck.

Likewise, Rand Paul, who was entering the arena at an adjacent loading dock. He had heard that libertarians were, at long last, "having a moment" in America. Why not him? He was younger, slicker, and less of a crank than his patriarch dad, Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas and a three-time presidential candidate. Rand had even gone straight enough to get elected to the Senate, from Kentucky. He was an odd duck, no question, but was he any worse than Ted Cruz? John McCain once referred to them both as "wacko birds."

Cruz was at the debate, too, convinced this was his moment. He was elected to the Senate in 2012 and in short order proved he had zero interest in achieving the kinds of things senators had traditionally prided themselves on, like passing laws, getting committee assignments, and earning the respect of colleagues. These were never distinctions that would impress the Fox News bookers, or the blood-lusting "base," so he never saw the point. Becoming a maximum nuisance was far more productive for his purposes.

He would do things like promise to shut down the government unless Obamacare was killed. This was never going to happen, for many reasons, two being that the president was still named "Obama" and the Constitution still granted him veto power. Cruz's colleagues knew this was a wasteful and self-destructive effort that would succeed only in "stirring up the crazies" (another McCain term).

"If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you," Lindsey Graham once said. No one exactly rushed to Cruz's defense, either, unless you counted this "defense" from Senator Al Franken, who maintained that he did like Cruz, or more than most of his colleagues did. "And I hate Ted Cruz," Franken said-important caveat.

Still, Cruz's unpopularity in Washington was a defining asset, to his mind, in that it lent him credibility as an irritant. It offered proof that he was not concerned about fitting in with these grimy swamp creatures. He was happy to play the turd in the Republican punch bowl. His problem was that Trump proved to be an even bigger turd, glowing orange and impossible to miss.

At the risk of pushing this metaphor WAY too far, Jeb Bush was the innocuous lemon slice in this punch bowl. Trump dismissed Bush, the former Florida governor, as "low energy," a brutally effective descriptor for a candidate whose logo included an exclamation point-"Jeb!"-in a desperate attempt to inject vitality.

Bush had been anointed the early "establishment favorite" by those who anointed such things. He was accustomed, by birthright, to such deference from professional Republicans. Trump never bothered with deference, at least when it came to Bush, as opposed to, say, Putin.

Neither did Marco Rubio. The former Speaker of the Florida House had been a protŽgŽ of Governor Jeb's years before, which compelled a few media Freuds to trot out the trusty oedipal clichŽ about son overtaking Dad. Others preferred the Rubio-as-Judah construction. Who did Marco think he was, anyway, not waiting his turn?

What the media geniuses all agreed on was that Trump's turn was about to end. His noisy parade float would assuredly run aground in Cleveland, because there was no chance that he could share a stage with a supposedly elite field of Republicans without having his basic ignorance exposed.

Plus, the serious anchor people had arrived and would make certain of it: in particular, Fox News' Megyn Kelly, one of the three moderators, had fashioned a formidable reputation for herself as a "real journalist," armed with tough but fair questions. She also met the minimum Fox requirement of being attractive and blond, the Roger Ailes equivalent of spelling your name right on the SAT.

"You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' 'slobs,' and 'disgusting animals,'" Kelly said, asking Trump to kick things off.

And we were off.

Again, you might recall some of this. Sorry to rehash. These episodes can feel as old as time and as endless. They're worth going over here, though, if only in brief and as a reminder of the low point where Trump began, to counter the dumb trope from his apologists that somehow Trump devolved as the campaign wore on. "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell wrote. This was always right in front of the Republican Party's nose.

Trump would suggest the next day that Kelly's "nasty" demeanor toward him at the debate was because she was getting her period. Not classy!

This alone would make him irredeemably toxic to women voters, right? No less an authority than the former First Lady Barbara Bush would weigh in to say as much, and wasn't Babs a Grande Dame/Sacred Cow Republican at some point?

What's more, an even greater authority, Twitter, agreed, so this had to be true: the clown was dead!

Long live the clown!

The power of Twitter to codify misguided groupthink had become much greater in 2016 than it had been the last go-round, in 2012. This gap between wise-guy Twitter and Trump World reality was all too evident when I attended my first rally that summer. The pageant featured a packed crowd of seventeen thousand at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. Thousands more snaked around several city blocks and fed into an overflow mosh pit.

FUCK POLITICAL CORRECTNESS! screamed the big banner held by a guy in front of me in the metal detector line. I tried to interview him but got nowhere.

"Fuck the media," the man told me. (I recognized the sentence structure.) "And fuck Megyn Kelly." I tried to tell him that I was not Megyn Kelly, but he was not impressed.

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."

"America is being pushed into a corner," echoed Matt Yelland, a sixty-year-old electrical engineer, just before Trump took the stage. That was a common sentiment among Trump supporters, who loved his disregard for Republican manners and sacred cows. "Trump didn't get into politics to play by somebody else's rules," Yelland said. He could care less that Trump would not commit to supporting the GOP's eventual nominee, the kind of thing that "party leaders" considered sacrilege but that many real voters believed was proof of Trump's unwillingness to be bullied. He didn't care, either, about what aspersions Karl Rove was casting upon their hero on Fox News-well, Trump himself cared, but that was just Trump (being Trump).

"Karl Rove is a totally incompetent jerk," Trump railed from his Dallas stage. The crowd went nuts at the put-down, which was itself remarkable: the "architect" of George W. Bush's political rise being abused at a Republican campaign event in Bush's home state of Texas.

Where were the GOPÕs designated adults and influencers to restore order? Erick Erickson, editor of RedState, a leading conservative publication, tried. He disinvited Trump to the annual RedState Gathering of presidential candidates in Atlanta that weekend. Take that, Donald.

"If your standard-bearer has to resort to that," Erickson said, referring to the Megyn Kelly/period unpleasantness, "we need a new standard-bearer." Alas, Trump was undeterred.

It kept going. Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, was beside himself, but trying to be comforting in public, for the sake of the children and, more important, the donors. This robust debate was healthy and natural and part of the process, he kept saying. Privately, he tried to reassure everyone: this would not last; Trump would implode soon enough.

The other candidates figured the same. "I don't think a lot of the people on that stage were convinced that Trump would stay," Christie recalled to me later. "What we were all trying to do strategically was stay alive so that we'd be viable if one of two things happened: either Trump gets out, or he does something disqualifying. Everyone up there had the same theory of the case."

Bad theory. Nothing changed, except Trump started winning primaries. Where was Jeb? Wasn't he supposed to be the front-runner? His heart was never in this. The exclamation point was always more of a question mark.

Bush was gone soon after the voting started. Same with Christie, but not before he obliterated Rubio in a debate in New Hampshire, taunting him for his cyborg adherence to "memorized thirty-second speeches." It was classic Christie, beating up the smaller, less threatening target (Rubio) while winning favor with the real bully (Trump).

Trump sought out Christie after the debate, threw his arm around him, and praised the governor for "destroying" Rubio.

Trump won New Hampshire in a rout; Christie finished sixth and quit the race with zero delegates. Trump called him on the night of the primary and told him he loved him. This was obviously meaningful to Christie, who recounted the exchange fulsomely in his memoir. He then turned around and planted a big wet kiss of an endorsement on Trump's powdered forehead.

This was a much bigger deal than Christie's paltry vote total would suggest, because it offered Trump a seal of approval from a big-name Republican. Christie kept talking up his long friendship with Trump, how they had so much "history" together and how loyalty was always very important to him. "Where I come from, friendship is important," Christie said. "Loyalty is everything." (Yep, friendship and loyalty, totally unique to New Jersey.)

The whole "we go WAY back" thing is always a red flag from would-be tough guys. And there was always a sense with Christie that no matter how hard he sucked up to Trump, he was destined to wind up like one of those peripheral hangers-on from The Sopranos whose limp corpse wound up getting tossed into an icy swamp.

Still, Christie had a seemingly limitless appetite for, among other things, being humiliated by Trump. This was true of a lot of people, but Christie was special in this regard. Trump mocked him for his weight ("No more Oreos"), ordered him around, and basically treated the former Garden State governor like Mr. French, the portly and exasperated butler from the old show Family Affair.

Not everyone was moved by Christie's claim of loyalty to his dear old friend Donald. "An astonishing display of political opportunism" was how Christie's own campaign co-chair Meg Whitman described his heel turn.

Christie's support "gave a stamp of credibility to a thoroughly uncredible candidate," wrote Tim Miller, Bush's former communications director. "Like every other pathetic, podgy, scared, insecure bully who has ever disgraced a schoolyard, Chris Christie talks a big game."

Christie was a bit stunned by this blowback, but that was the price he paid for the rebound relevance Trump offered him. "This is politics," he said. "You make certain judgments."

Trump is Ònot who we are,Ó Rubio declared, deploying a royal ÒweÓ that apparently did not include the Republicans who kept voting for Trump by massive margins. Things were getting desperate enough for Graham to say heÕd even support Cruz before heÕd support Trump.

Cruz called Trump "utterly amoral" and a "pathological liar" (basically true) after Trump described him as a sleazy asshole whom everyone in the Senate hated (also true). For good measure, Trump suggested Cruz's wife was ugly and his father was somehow caught up in the John F. Kennedy assassination.

The party elders were now rallying to Rubio as their preferred Trump alternative. I met up with the Florida senator in Nevada, a few days before that state's Republican caucuses in February. We were sitting aboard his campaign plane-on a short flight from Reno to Las Vegas-and I was detecting a slight whiff of Marco-mentum in the recirculated air. "This was a great day for us," Rubio kept telling me. His undertaking was as urgent as ever, he said, because he knew the GOP elders were counting on him to stop Trump. He had their endorsements to prove it. He vowed to be worthy of everyone's trust.

We were surrounded on the plane by a retinue of Rubio-backing Nevada dignitaries: the state's lieutenant governor and a former governor, a congressman, and a senator. It seemed as if every hour brought a new endorsement of Rubio from another vintage piece of the Grand Old Furniture: Lamar Alexander, Bob Dole, a senator from Indiana, the governor of Arkansas. Together, this cavalry of grown-ups would lock arms around Rubio and save the GOP from its bender with the casino owner. This had all gone on for far too long.

The night before at a rally in North Las Vegas, Rubio strode onto a stage crowded with a bunch of new brand-name validators: seventeen in all. They included a buffet of Nevada pols, someone from a reality TV show called Pawn Stars, and Donnie Wahlberg: once a New Kid on the Block, now all in for Marky Marco.

This brief Pyrrhic hot streak for Rubio in Nevada epitomized the insane fantasy that an all-powerful Republican "establishment" could swoop in and impose its will. They would anoint their choice and unleash their onslaught of elder gravitas, and Trump would never know what hit him.

"You can sort of feel it coalescing," Rubio said as he waved his hand around the campaign plane, showing off his growing entourage. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Mark Leibovich is a recipient of the National Magazine Award for profile writing. He is the author of four books, including the number one New York Times bestseller This Town, about the political culture of twenty-first-century Washington, D.C. He recently joined The Atlantic, after a ten-year stint as chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. Before arriving at the magazine in 2012, Leibovich covered national politics in the Times' Washington Bureau. He previously worked at The Washington Post and the San Jose Mercury News. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09T995J6Y
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press (July 12 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3415 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 351 pages

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Top reviews from Canada

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Amazon Customer

All you can do is laugh...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 16, 2022

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A humourous look at the dumpster fire that was the Trump presidency and its sycophantic enablers.

Helpful

Welcome to the Extraordinary World of Trumpian Politics

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 23, 2023

I highly recommend this book for what it says about the world of American politics and Donald Trump's rise to and fall from power. In a nutshell, the author effectively argues that it usually takes a supporting cast of prominent loyalists to vault a political aspirant to high office. In Trump's case, his rise to power has been largely predicated on many of his key supporters originally buying into the notion that he had the means to make America great again. When MAGA was unable to get Trump re-elected in 2020, the new rallying cry claimed the election was stolen. The unsuccessful attack on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, by Trump supporters, to overturn those legitimate election results is a solid reminder that those who put Trump in office in the first place have a lot to answer for. Plenty of satire to sharpen the wits here.

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M Clark

A catalog of hypocrisies

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on October 24, 2022

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Leibovich takes a close look at the people who supported Trump and provides a remarkable catalog of their hypocrisies. He records what they said at one time and then how they totally reverse themselves later in order to remain in Trump's good graces. It is a demonstration of the lack of principles in the Republican party.

Masriki

Minions

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is a Donald Trump book that’s not really about Donald Trump, but his slavish minions who so often contort themselves to justify Donald Trump’s unhinged behavior. And in this narrative, those in the court of the Loud, Nutcase King are in many cases so much more interesting than the king. (Personal favorite: Lindsey Graham was a “Gilligan to Donald Trump’s Skipper.”)

This is all the more interesting since Thank You for Your Servitude goes back to when other GOP Republican presidential hopefuls treated Trump with comparative kid gloves and failed to call out his obvious lack of knowledge and his thug behavior. They needed the votes of his crazy followers when he inevitably dropped out of the GOP presidential primaries. Because how in the world could a majority of even the most naïve voters take someone that obviously unqualified as anything other than the clown he so clearly was? His competitors just knew they wouldn’t have to hold back on calling him on his BS or pretend to take him seriously for very long, as long as they could suck up to his gullible voters after he inevitably dropped out. Then they wouldn’t have to pretend he was within even a mile being emotionally stable or having any idea what he was doing.

The book covers much more than this, but it's most interesting in retrospect, since we all know how that worked out.

119 people found this helpful

moviebuff

GOP Destruction Explained

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 17, 2022

Verified Purchase

We often ask “why did the GOP become so taken over by Trumpism”? This book lays out interesting, convincing reasons that go toward explaining this disaster. Very well written and following the factual time line it runs through the 5 year period 2015 to 2021 bringing back to life that rollercoaster ride of events. I don’t often find a book I can’t put down but this was one. Highly recommend it.

39 people found this helpful

Joseph A. Cari, Jr.

poignant

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 16, 2022

Verified Purchase

This book so captures the essence of trump, his Supporters and his lackeys. A must read.

The author’s style of writing is terrific,,

36 people found this helpful

C

A witty roasting of politicians that first hated, but then sucked up to Trump

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

*Note – I have no political party affiliation, and I always try to review books from a neutral political perspective. I focus only on the content of the book, not the politics of the author*

This book is divided into 23 main chapters, with a total of about 302 pages, not including the Acknowledgements.

In this book Mark Leibovich, former “chief national correspondent” for The New York Times magazine, describes how politicians in Washington responded to Donald Trump. Leibovich covers Trump’s campaign and time in office, starting back in August 2015, all the way up to more recent events in March 2022. Leibovich has a distinct writing style that is a bit sarcastic, and he is always trying to inject a bit of dry humor into his skewering of hypocritical politicians. Leibovich’s main targets are Republican politicians that first mocked and insulted Trump, and then quickly sucked up to him once he won the election. He shares some remarks from politicians that he interviewed over the years, as well as other public comments that illustrate the general sentiments on Capitol Hill.

Having said that, at least this author has a bit of a sense of humor; and his witty barbs directed at hypocritical politicians might even produce some smiles on both sides of the isle. Still, I would imagine this book will get mostly positive reviews from left-leaning readers, and mostly negative reviews from the right, whether you are/were a Trump supporter or not. As a neutral, non-affiliated reader, I would give this book about a 3.4 / 5. It isn’t really unbiased, and doesn’t contain a great deal of new information or insight, but at least parts of it are somewhat amusing.

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Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission Kindle Edition

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