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Sunday July 10, 2022
Donald Trump and the Doormat Duo: Mark Leibovich's Perfect Essay on GOP Cowardice and Opportunism
There is a great Mark Leibovich essay about Trump and his GOP toadies on The Atlantic site, called “The Most Pathetic Men in America: Why Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and so many other cowards in Congress are still doing Trump's bidding,” which ... right? Right from the start—pathetic, cowards—it doesn't pull punches the way much of the press has done for the last seven years. It's a fucking breath of fresh fucking air and everyone should read it. You get the feeling if the press was this honest, or less dishonest, we wouldn't be where we are.
Turns out it's from Leibovich's upcoming book, “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission,” which I've already ordered.
The essay is both insidery and brutal—a good combo. Leibovich is protecting no source. Here's a standalone graf that'll serve as a primer:
Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history's stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I'm genuinely asking.
For the last seven years everyone's pretended that this is a legitimate figure, a legitimate American leader, but this is the world as I see it, the world—I would argue—that's closer to what is actually true. And it's fucking time someone fucking said it.
Then he gets into the lies, and the lying liars: the ones who legitimized this crybaby, the GOP, particularly Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, whom he dubs “the doormat duo.” He doesn't pretend they're the same. Graham has always had the need to glom onto a father figure, and for the first two decades of his career that was John McCain, and for the last five it's been McCain's opposite, Donald Trump, and this massive contradiction has never seemed one on Graham's little head. McCarthy, meanwhile, comes off as just another sad, dull opportunist, but more so. Both men want power, want to stay in power, want to be relevant. Country be damned.
Both men, in the parlance, get the joke:
“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.”
And 80 million people aren't in on the joke. If the Dems don't use this to talk to Republican voters directly, they're nuts. “They're in on the joke and you're not. Maybe, to them, you are the joke.”
Everybody in the GOP “got the joke,” and everybody in the GOP “humored him” after he lost the 2020 election, hoping he would simmer down, or maybe he would eventually just leave the stage and life would return to what it was. Then Jan. 6 happened. Lebovich says what I said/hoped back then: “January 6 had to be the end of the line for Trump, right? Surely, this would be the moment when the fever broke.”
Leibovich tags the moment the fever returned: McCarthy's groveling visit to Mar-a-Lago on January 28:
So, there they were, Donald and his Kevin, side by side again, reunited and it felt so good. In the photo that shot across social media, the old besties held the same clenched smiles and seemed to both be sucking in their tummies like bros of a certain age do. McCarthy's visit set off a parade of ring-kissing pilgrimages. Graham headed down to Florida again and again, so often that his host couldn't help but marvel, “Jesus, Lindsey must really like to play golf”...
And there we were. And there we are.
“When we look back, Kevin's trip to Mar-a-Lago will, I think, turn out to be a key moment,” Liz Cheney told me when we talked again this April. It would, she said, go down as one of the most shameful episodes in one of the country's most shameful chapters. More than anyone, McCarthy ensured that the Republican Party would remain stuck in its 2020 post-election purgatory, still working to placate America's neediest man.
The book comes out July 12.