"It’s been said before, but can never be emphasized enough: Without the complicity of the Republican Party, Donald Trump would be just a glorified geriatric Fox-watching golfer."https://t.co/2tWm1EFIjE
— Mark Leibovich (@MarkLeibovich) July 7, 2022
Not for everyone — I dutifully read Leibovich’s This Town for a BJ Book Club, in an earlier era, and that was quite enough for me. But his new book *will* be talked about, if not (explictly) as yet one more indicator that the ‘DC Establishment’ has decided to cut its losses with TFG.
An excerpt from Thank You for Your Servitude:
… The [Trump International] hotel gave every impression of being a tight and well-managed operation, in contrast to the proprietor’s side hustle down the street. Lots of Washington reporters would hang around the establishment, too. We could always pick up dirt that Trump and his groveling legions tracked in. The place was crawling with them, these hollowed-out men and women who knew better. You might catch Rudy rushing out to smoke a cigar, red wine staining his unbuttoned tuxedo shirt (that was the night of the Mnuchin wedding, I think). Or see Trump’s favorite pillowy-haired congressmen—fresh off their Fox “hits”—greeting the various Spicers, Kellyannes, and other C-listers who were bumped temporarily up to B-list status by their White House entrée.
But the guests who stood out for me most were Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy and the busybody senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham. I would sometimes see them around the lobby or steakhouse or function rooms, skipping from table to table and getting thanked for all the wonderful things they were doing to help our president. They had long been among the most supplicant super-careerists ever to play in a city known for the breed, and proved themselves to be essential lapdogs in Trump’s kennel…
I will admit I never loved the Trump story. This sometimes surprises people. I have been covering Washington for many years; I’ve been accused of being a “keen observer” of the capital. Surely, I must have been thrilled to have such a ridiculous piece of work at the center of it all, right?
Well, no. I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure…
The GOP’s shame, ongoing, is underscored by the handful of brave Republicans willing to speak the truth about Trump in public, before the January 6 committee and on the panel itself. The question now is whether they have any hope of wresting some admirable remnant of their party back from Trump’s abyss before he wins the Republican nomination for president in 2024 or, yes, winds up back in the White House…
A good omen, after its fashion: Savvy Mr. Leibovich has adjudged the smart money bets on memory-holing TFG.
Early on, when wary Republicans were still publicly dreading where the Trump experiment might lead, you’d hear flashes of concern over how it—or they—might be adjudicated by those ever-hovering future historians. As his own presidential campaign was ending in 2016, Marco Rubio predicted that there would one day be a “reckoning” inside the GOP. “You mark my words, there will be prominent people in American politics who will spend years explaining to people how they fell into this,” Rubio told The New York Times. (Update: Rubio cleaned up his act, became a stalwart Trump patron, and we’re still waiting on that reckoning.)…
… McCarthy can be sensitive to perceptions that he is a lightweight whose career trajectory is owed purely to his Olympian brownnosing and backslapping capabilities. “I like that reputation,” McCarthy claimed to me, not persuasively, “because it helps people underestimate me.” McCarthy had come close to becoming speaker before, in 2015, but a Benghazi-related gaffe knocked him out of the running. Now the ultimate job is again within reach. Blinders on. Legacies are for losers. McCarthy learned from the master.
“My legacy doesn’t matter,” Trump told his longtime aide Hope Hicks a few days after the 2020 election, according to an account in Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. “If I lose, that will be my legacy.” This became the essential ethos of Republican nihilism. By lashing themselves so tightly to Trump, Republicans could act as if the president’s impunity and shamelessness extended to them. His strut of cavalier disregard became their own…
No Republican spoke with more contempt for Trump during the 2016 primaries than Graham did. He called him a “complete idiot,” and “unfit for office,” among other things. But then Trump became president and deemed Graham fit to play golf with him. Suddenly Graham was getting called a “presidential confidant.” Colleagues would ask if he could deliver a message to the president, maybe score someone a birthday call or grease the skids for an endorsement tweet. “I try to be helpful,” Graham would say. The arrangement also proved “helpful” to Graham’s goal of continuing to represent deep-red South Carolina in the U.S. Senate. It got him into the clubhouse. It kept him fed and employed and on TV…
Graham was always saying how important it was to “get the joke” about Trump. “Getting the joke” is a timeworn Washington expression, referring to a person’s ability to grasp a shared truth about something best left unspoken. In the case of Trump, the “joke” was that he was, at best, not a serious person or a good president and, at worst, a dangerous and potentially criminal jackass.
“Oh, everybody gets the joke,” Mitt Romney assured me in early 2022 when I asked him if Senate Republicans really believed what they said in public about how wonderful Trump was. “They still are very aware of his, uh, what’s a good word, idiosyncrasies.”
Yes, politicians will sometimes say different things in front of different audiences. No big shocker there. But the gap between the public adoration expressed by Trump’s Republican lickspittles and the mocking contempt they voiced for him in private could be gaping. This was never more apparent, or maddening, as in the weeks after the 2020 election. “For all but just a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew that the election was fully legitimate and that Donald Trump was a joke,” Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, told me last year. “The vast majority of people get the joke. I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke. Lindsey gets the joke. The problem is that the joke isn’t even funny anymore.” The truth serum is not exactly flowing, either…
Watching the procession of GOP genuflectors, I was reminded of Susan Glasser’s 2019 profile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in The New Yorker, in which she quoted a former American ambassador describing Pompeo as “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” This image stuck with me (unfortunately) and also remained a pertinent descriptor for much of the Republican Party long after said ass had been re-homed to Florida.
“McCarthy started all of that,” Liz Cheney told me last summer. She’d had no advance warning of McCarthy’s visit to Palm Beach, and was stunned when she saw the photos. She confronted McCarthy: Why? She told me he explained that “the Republican Party was changing, and they all had to adapt. It was no longer the party of Dick Cheney.” This did not go over well…
My final visit to the hotel, in February, coincided with the exact hour Russia was launching its invasion of Ukraine. It was one of those horrifically riveting news nights—flashes and explosions on TV and the sick mystery of what destruction might be concealed by the smoky darkness. Like Vladimir Putin, Trump will take what people let him take. He will do what he can get away with. The courage and character of Ukraine stands in perverse contrast to America’s cowering Republican Party, whose resistance might as well have been led by the Uvalde police…
I will keep saying this: Liz Cheney thinks TFG and his servile minions broke the permanent Republican Party, and it wasn’t their party. If she can’t hold her seat in Wyoming, she can at least crush her enemies, see them driven before her, and enjoy the lamentations of their coatholders…
C Stars
Public service message: Donate to the WIS DEMS fundraiser on your right!!
Alison Rose
Yeah…saying that to Liz Fucking Cheney is like holding a flashing neon sign above your head that says I HAVE A DEATH WISH.
trollhattan
I think “golfer” requires scare quotes of its own. Bankrupt carnival barker abandoned by family would be Trump, non-presidential edition.
Poe Larity
Party of Nixon teabagging Cheney, SecDef reasonoid Cheney or 1% Enhanched Torture Vice-Fuhrer Cheney?
West of the Rockies
I suspect there will be a number of these Republican Party post-mortem tomes. This one does sound very interesting. I hope the Republican party becomes a global cautionary tale about how greed and corruption and dishonesty and hatred destroy a thing from within.
oatler
C’mon! America is a buddy movie!
Kent
The moment that the institutional GOP could have easily dispensed with Trump was November 6th 2020 (give or take) when it was clear that Biden had won the election.
GOP senators, governors, congressmen, etc. could have all started congratulating Biden in mass like they would have in any normal election and that would have completely taken the sails out of Trump’s efforts to steal the election. Instead they just fucking sat on their hands to a person (except for maybe Romney) and did nothing.
I can kind of get the impeachment votes. That was partisan. But not their failure to endorse the results of the election in November 2020. That was pure cowardice and frankly treasonous.
Ken
Very few people know that Dos Equis fired their first advertising agency after they pitched a campaign based on “The most pathetic men in America”. The rest is history…
West of the Rockies
@Kent:
They could also have ejected Trump after his “I like soldiers who don’t get captured” bit. That statement revealed his cruelty and stupidity and lack of honor and empathy.
debbie
@Alison Rose :
Exactly. She will let go when she decides. Which is fine because she will not stop until she has achieved total success. Win win for us and for the country.
Anyway
@C Stars:
Public service message: Donate to the WIS DEMS fundraiser on your right!!
Done.
RepubAnon
Britain’s Conservative Party kept Boris Johnson in power – until it threatened their own election chances. So it is with the Republicans- they’ll keep fluffing Trump until they see election losses looming.
I recommend Jonathan Pie’s YouTube rant Bye Bye Boris for a view of how the Conservatives propped up Boris – until they did not. They kept him on until they saw election losses looming.
Of course, the British don’t have control over certifying voting results.
Mike in NC
I read the article yesterday and thought the best part was about how Kevin McQuarthy and Linseed Graham were “essential lapdogs in Trump’s kennel”. Brutal. Trump still commands a massive entourage of spineless ass-kissers and boot lickers.
Anyway
@Kent:
Agree completely. To me that showed the rot in the institutional GOP and there was no honor at all in their elected reps (state, federal, local). All they want is power and to beat the libs. Nothing else matters.
trollhattan
I agree WRT the Republican establishment, who (at least the smart ones) will happily divest themselves of the Orange Thing but their problem–a big one–is their Trump-loving bed partners who will not let go of Donny and Trumpism. They co-opted insane people to win elections and redirecting them may well prove impossible.
“Really, guys, Ted Cruz and Trump are practically the same guy” is a thing that will not sell.
Anyway
And two seconds after I complete the donation process I start receiving texts with more bleg …. gack!
Alison Rose
@debbie: She’s the human equivalent of a bear trap.
debbie
Great tweet showing how Mitch beats Chuck ALWAYS:
https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1545560847279263745?s=21&t=bpTPeR3SIP5fS9Vi_9ZnKw
Ruckus
@Kent:
The republican party of the early/mid 20th century was sort of like that. But it devolved from there. This we see now was set in motion a number of decades ago. This concept that there is a monied ruling class and a following working class is not in any way new. That is what the republican party, the real people in charge of the republican party is all about, going back to there being a monied power class and a working class. They want a republic, they definitely do not want a democracy. A democracy takes them out of the picture, makes the every day adult in charge of their own lives, and that is exactly what republicans do not want. If you are in charge of your own life and can decide what you want to do, get paid to be productive in a reasonable manner, that makes them just like you, not obscenely wealthy and in charge. It makes life equal, and that is against everything they stand for. It’s what all this bullshit that the far right states are doing, all the laws that have been reenacted are about, all the you don’t own your own body, because they don’t think you do. You and I and everyone else at the bottom are supposed to make new workers, subservient workers for barely subsistence wages, have zero control over our own bodies because that is the only way they will become wealthy. They lack the actual requirements of creativity, actual work, positive work, well paying work, they have to be in control, not equal, because they aren’t. What can all those people that stormed the capital building actually do, in real life? Anything positive? Look at the hard right people in congress, what are their positive aspects? Anything?
Tony Jay
@RepubAnon:
Look again. Flobby is still Prime Minister. He might have stepped down as Tory Party leader, but there’s nothing (currently) stopping him running again and it’s not out of the question that the vicious divides within the Party will give him a route to being reselected by the insane Tory membership.
It’s a bit like Trump still being President for a few months after November 2020, except Flobby hasn’t actually lost an election – yet.
Geminid
@West of the Rockies: I think that by this point it was too late for Republican elites to stop Trump. Their voters got away from them.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Tony Jay: Sounds like Lord Flobalob isn’t quite a true lame duck yet, unlike TFG after the results came in? I mean, by December 2020, the results were in, Biden had clearly won, but TFG was just refusing to accept it, which led to the January 6 lynch mob.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Geminid: That’s the entire problem of the GOP and TFG – they’re not going to turn on him until they perceive him as a net liability. Cheney and Kitzinger are obviously at that point, but for the rest, they obviously think that maintaining ties with him are still a net benefit, even now. I think that’s part of what the January 6 Committee is trying to break.
kindness
With the recent Supreme Court’s crusade against a secular & free America, I don’t think any Republican has a chance in 2024. Not even DeSantis and I think DeSantis will easily beat Trump then.
The Christian Taliban showed their hand and America doesn’t like it.
James E Powell
@West of the Rockies:
If memory serves, big shot Republicans – including FOX – tried to eject Trump, but he was immensely popular with their primary voters. They built their voter base of ignorant, hateful bigots and – surprise! – they went for the ignorant, hateful bigot candidate.
C Stars
@Anyway: aw dang, I hate that. I have them blocked on text & email, but still get calls sometimes soliciting donation which is very irritating. Still and all thank you for donating!
trollhattan
@Tony Jay: I listened to his, whatever it was because it was not a resignation, in real time and came full stop with this:
and in the last few days I have tried to persuade my colleagues that it would be eccentric to change governments
when we are delivering so much
and when we have such a vast mandate and when we are actually only a handful of points behind in the polls
“It would be eccentric?” My humble takeaway is he plans to remain at Number 10, only they don’t know it yet.
Kent
I don’ remember when that was, the campaign? That would have required convincing voters. But the moment after the election was the exact moment when GOP politicians could have moved on simply by the simple act of congratulating Biden for his win. They all chose not to.
dww44
@Kent: I don’t think either impeachment trial was partisan. The perception that it was can be laid at the hands of the hyper- partisan Republican party. In both instances there were attempts to hold Trump accountable for actions that were either criminal or unethical or both. These acts were visible to anyone paying attention. It’s not the fault of the rest of us that the Republican party and Trump voters were willfully blind.
Geminid
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I think Republican elites know Trump’s a liability, but they’re afraid of alienating his voters. Republicans found out in the Georgia Senate runoffs how a dropoff in turnout among trump fanatics can sink them. I’ve said this before: Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove would have Trump poisoned if they thought they could get away with it.
I think this particular Republican dilemna may be easing some, though. My sense is that Trump’s attraction to Republicans is slowly but steadily fading. The Republican politicians who still fall over each other to win Trump’s primary endorsements could be lagging indicators.
The establishment’s more general problem will still remain. They were fighting with the Tea Party types before Trump “answered the casting call” (as the late M.D. Russ put it), and that fight will continue even if Trump keels over tomorrow.
Tom Q
@dww44: Republicans wouldn’t like anyone looking closely at the first impeachment trial right now: the subject matter — withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine’s president unless he ginned up a game scandal against Biden’s son — would come far more easily and damagingly into focus for the American public than it did 2-3 years ago.
Ken
@trollhattan: I thought “eccentric” was a good thing in the UK? Or at least used as a general-purpose excuse for the right sort of people — “Oh yes, he killed and ate those women, but he’s just eccentric. After all, he is an Eton man.”
Johnson’s use of “mandate” also reminds me of Charles Stross’s Laundry novels, though I think Stross introduced the Mandate character — who later becomes PM — back when Johnson was still mayor of London.
trollhattan
@Ken: Fun insights, particularly “the Mandate character.”
Two peoples separated by a shared language. :-)
jonas
True. Unfortunately we don’t live in a direct democracy where a simply majority vote settles the question. Nobody likes the Talibangical right, but they’ve still got an edge in the Electoral College and the Senate and that’s the problem.
Another Scott
@Kent: It was 2015.
McCain didn’t thank TFG for his bigly state funeral in 2019, either.
TFG wasn’t a fan.
(groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
I don’t mean the trials were partisan. But the votes in the Senate were. It was portrayed that way as is pretty much every impeachment. There was immense pressure on GOP senators to vote with party.
But the simple normal act of congratulating the winner of an election is just the normal American thing to do and always has been. That isn’t a partisan act. But it is something that was beyond the reach of every GOPer except for I think Romney. And if they had done so it would have completely let the air out of Trump’s “stolen election” bullshit.
My point is that the easiest and most pain-free moment in time for the institutional GOP to defy the “base” and move on from Trump would have been in the days after the election when the all could have congratulated Biden in mass and then started working on the transition. They all chose not to. That was an unpatriotic choice and it led directly to 1-6.
Captain C
@Geminid:
Given that TFG is probably about 2 Big Macs away from a heart attack, one would think that two slimeballs, including one as slick as Rove (and with as many shady contacts) and one as conscienceless as the Moscow Turtle, would be able to get this done and make it look like a fairly convincing natural death.
Not that I’m recommending this or anything, but if anyone needs a convenient heart attack ASAP, it’s TFG.
lowtechcyclist
@West of the Rockies:
Or after the “Lock her up!” chants, or after “I alone can fix it,” or after Mexicans being rapists, or after…
He showed them who he was, with great frequency and intensity. They decided to hop on his ride anyway.
Kent
@lowtechcyclist: The 2016 campaign was full of endless moments when Trump showed us who he was. As was his entire presidency. But the actual moments when the collective institutional GOP could have easily tossed him out and moved on were actually few and far between. The impeachment vote of course. And the moment I point out right after the election. But they didn’t really have control over the nomination process. The MAGA base did and they kept voting for Trump no matter what GOPers would say. and many many of them did criticize Trump during the primary.
I’m not talking about the whole GOP electorate. I’m talking about the institutional GOP. Their last best moment to be rid of him was directly after the election. That was the moment to flush him down the toilet and move on.
Geminid
@Captain C: They would need an accomplice close to Trump…
….[Melania:] “Donald! You still haven’t tried on that nice pair of silk underwear Karl Rove sent you.”
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@lowtechcyclist: I was appalled by Trump from the moment he came down the escalator, but could possibly (straining hard) sort of understand how someone could support him (since some seemingly reasonable, as far as I knew, nice, respectable people I knew supported him). But after he started locking kids up in cages down by the border, I was DONE with any Trumpists. Fuck them all. Cowards and traitors, not to mention racists and misogynists. And fuck any politicians who supported him in public (while dissing him in private). Cowards and no morals or moral compass at all, except to stay in power.
Tony Jay
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
He’s a lame duck in that the necessary steps have been taken to end his period in power, and all he has to do is respect the well-worn process for replacing him.
But, like Trump, he don’t wanna go, so fuck the process, and fuck what he’s supposed to do. If there’s a way he can break the system to retain power, he’ll do it.
@trollhattan:
None of that speech was an accident. He didn’t resign. He ungraciously and rudely took a temporary step back from being Tory leader while his ‘friends and colleagues’ came to their senses and realised they couldn’t do without him.
He’s got Blair-level messianic delusion turned up to 11, and who, exactly, is going to stop him living the dream?
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Tony Jay: I saw a short video last night reviewing his career since before Eton. He has been a bully and a wanker all his life, hasn’t he? A small matter, given everything else, but I especially can’t believe all the women who have slept with and gotten pregnant by him!
Baud
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
trollhattan
Refuse to get vaccinated, receive discharge. What about a general opining on the first lady? Looks like we get to find out.
ColoradoGuy
T**** reveals the profound need to crawl and grovel before authority in the Republican Party. It’s in the base, but it’s in the so-called leadership as well. It reaches nearly North Korean dimensions, and like the DPRK, is the product of decades of indoctrination and hero-worship.
I think it started with the hagiography of Reagan, and that is somewhat understandable, because he created the modern GOP, much more than non-GOP people are aware. His setting aside of the FCC Fairness Doctrine opened the door to Rush Limbaugh and the construction of a nationwide AM hate-radio network which is still very powerful and has no Democratic equivalent. Reagan took down the solar panels on the White House, a powerful message to the fossil-fuel industry, and the PR industry of climate-change denialism. He made it an article of GOP faith that climate change was a “hoax” perpetrated by nefarious socialist scientists. Going further, he normalized anti-science attitudes throughout the party, which dovetailed with the appeal to the new base of Southern and rural white evangelicals.
That’s why they worship Reagan. He created not just their party, but an entire world-view, which was further refined and amplified by Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich as Reagan fell into his unseen dotage. This hero-worship transformed the GOP faithful into a search for another hero, someone who could complete the Long March to an America of the Nineteenth Century (as imagined by Disney).
Tehanu
@West of the Rockies:
Sure, they could have, but … remember when Dump, a grown man, mocked the disabled reporter who asked him a question he didn’t like? Making faces and holding his own arm up to imitate the man’s disability? His audience cheered and laughed. I feel sure they all went home and told their kids to make fun of the special ed kids at school the next day. The party powers weren’t going to dump Dump when they saw how the voters ate that shit up.
lowtechcyclist
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
I thought Trump should have been impeached over this, back before the stuff he actually WAS impeached over. This was child abuse on an industrial scale.
I know we’re not supposed to piss on the Dems around here, but did any House committee ever have any hearings about this or do any investigation into it? During the 2019-2020 Congress, we couldn’t pass any legislation, but the House did have this power. If they ever used it to investigate the child separations and kids in cages, I missed it.
I still want a few thousand charges of child abuse to be brought against Stephen Miller, with the only question being the degree of Trump’s complicity.
lowtechcyclist
@ColoradoGuy:
This. Not to mention, the success of Rush and his imitators paved the way for Fox News – they proved that there was a substantial audience for this sort of thing, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t transfer to TV.
So Murdoch didn’t have to worry whether this would be any sort of gamble on his part, it was a gimme.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: A quick search turns up this and this. But I am sure that is is easier to imply that the Dems did nothing than to do a quick google.
Another Scott
@ColoradoGuy: I don’t think the history you present is quite right. I know RW talk radio was a thing in the late-60s, early-70s (and likely much before – remember Father Coughlin?). I remember listening to Neal Boortz on WRNG in suburban Atlanta in the early ’70s…
Wikipedia tells me that appeals court judges Scalia and Bork decided that the Fairness Doctrine didn’t apply to teletypes, or at least the FCC didn’t have to enforce it there….
Carter’s solar stuff on the White House was water heaters, not PV solar panels (though I note you didn’t say PV it’s what people think of when they hear “solar panel”).
Carry on. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Tony Jay
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
I know. Protected and promoted at every turn, symbiotically embraced by a national media establishment that created a completely fictitious romantic legend for him to inhabit and exploit.
Have you seen the women he’s mated with? They’re almost always products of the self same incestuous Oxbridge caste system as Flobby. Their standards for attractiveness in a mate are as far removed from human norms as amoebas or some of the more exotic fungi.
trnc
@Alison Rose :
Of course, the worst part is that it is absolutely the party of Dick Cheney – corrupt, refusing to acknowledge how govt has benefit them, projection, double standards – he was the king of it all.
geg6
@trollhattan:
Good. He also hates the 1/6 Committee. Or just Liz Cheney maybe. Problem with women?
Geminid
I was checking out @RonFilipkowski and he showed a screenshot of a statement on TruthSocial by FL-11th CD candidate Laura Loomer. Ms. Loomer claimed that “like a dog with a bone, I am totally rabid.”
Incumbent Dan Webster is expected to win next month’s Republican primary, unless his opponent bites him.
Jay
@Another Scott:
Technically, “pre heaters”. We had 4 evac ( vacume) panels when we lived in the bush above Kamloops. Basically the amount of energy required to turn piped or well water, ( 56-58 degrees into hot water) is reduced by the square for every 5 degrees F.
In the peak of summer ( June to September), our hot water heater used 0 propane, because the “water”, ( antifreeze, pumped to the storage tank, in a closed loop), heated all the hot water we needed, plus some. In winter, the solar array fed not just the storage tank, but also the underfloor radiant heating.
We went from 4 tanks a year of trucked in propane, to 1, once the system was up and running. Power was supplied by 1kw worth of solar panels for the pumps, thermostats and valves.
Paid for itself in the first year.
Wilson Heath
The party whose dogma resists the very idea that there are any collective action problems gets caught choking on one.
If it weren’t likely to kill us all it would be hilarious.