On March 3, 2016, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, spoke defiantly before the Senate Judiciary Committee. President Obama had just nominated Merrick Garland to replace the recently deceased Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, but Graham told members he would not support the nominee. The next presidential election was too near, he argued, and the incoming president should fill the vacancy, not Obama. Despite there being no precedent for such a stance, Graham claimed he would argue the same in the final year of a Republican president’s term.
Challenging Americans to take him at his word, Graham declared that, if he ever reversed course, “I want you to use my words against me.”
Four years later, Americans got that chance. In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died with Election Day just five weeks away—much closer than when Scalia died. Nevertheless, Trump asserted he had an “obligation” to appoint a new Justice “without delay.” This prompted Graham, who was now the chair of the Judiciary Committee, to declare via Tweet: “I will support President @realDonaldTrump in any effort to move forward” in filling the vacancy.
Despite widespread cries of hypocrisy, Graham faced no real consequences for his lie.
Despite widespread cries of hypocrisy, Graham faced no real consequences for his lie, winning reelection the following month and continuing on as committee chair. Meanwhile, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the high court just eight days before Election Day.
Mark Leibovich recounts the episode in his scathing new book Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission. As egregious as Graham’s flip-flop on Garland was, readers might miss it—not because it’s poorly told but because it’s buried among so many other reversals. The sellouts are endless.
As he did in 2013’s This Town, Leibovich skewers Washington’s corrupt culture, but while then his primary target was the mainstream media, now it is the suck-ups and nihilists who made the disastrous and potentially criminal presidency (pending, among other things, the findings of the January 6 Committee) of Donald Trump possible.
These suck-ups and nihilists are primarily Republican politicians, and Leibovich focuses on the most prominent ones: Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Reince Priebus, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, Devin Nunes, Rudy Giuliani, and others all take well deserved pummelings. Each example is disturbingly similar. To a man (almost all the book’s targets are men), each politician initially considered Trump a joke and called him out on his bigotry, bullying, or lies. But as Trump’s popularity with his base soared and it became clear that he would become the Republican nominee, they rationalized Trump’s behavior, and then ultimately embraced him obsequiously.
Liebovich recounts how John McCain once scolded Graham after he morphed into one of Trump’s biggest suck-ups: “Do you really have to keep saying how great of a fucking golfer he is?”
A longtime political reporter at The New York Times and now a staff writer at The Atlantic, Leibovich focuses on Trump’s enablers rather than Trump himself because he felt he understood Trump’s political style well enough. “Far more compelling to me were the slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side,” Leibovich writes. “These were the careerists who capitulated to Trumpism to preserve their livelihoods.” His book, Leibovich says, “is about the dirt that Trump tracked in, the people he broke, and the swamp he did not drain.”
Indeed, the book is Exhibit A of why so many people hate politicians. Leibovich’s subjects are utterly bereft of any ideals other than self interest, and through revealing interviews, Leibovich occasionally even gets them to admit it. Graham, for example, says he wanted to remain “relevant” by embracing Trump; McCarthy is portrayed as enamored with celebrity and determined to be speaker of the House at nearly all costs; Rubio embraced Trump despite his frequent protestations that Trump was too unhinged to trust with the nuclear codes.
Leibovich’s judgment of Rubio applies to many: “He was another in the parade of leaders willing to discard every principle they once held for the purpose of remaining in office.”
The book is Exhibit A of why so many people hate politicians.
This all makes for disquieting reading, but Thank You for Your Servitude is also peppered with biting dark humor to partially make up for it. Leibovich hilariously attacks Trump’s claim that he “drained the swamp.” Few writers are more familiar with the D.C. swamp than Leibovich; his book This Town was an expose of the incestuos nature of Washington’s elite—particularly the “revolving door” between government, industry, media, and lobbyists. The idea that this culture improved under Trump is indeed laughable, as independent reporting has shown: a 2018 report by Public Citizen found that the Trump Administration embraced lobbyists far more than previous administrations.
“The only thing Trump drained was patience,” Leibovich blasts. “If anything, he merely perfected the notion of ‘the swamp’ and refashioned it in his own unscrupulous image. He turned the swamp into his own gold-plated jacuzzi.”
While the book’s villains are all Republicans, so are its heroes. Many progressives are wary of lauding Senator Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, or Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, too enthusiastically for standing up to Trump. This is understandable given their voting records (Cheney voted with Trump 93 percent of the time). But Thank You for Your Servitude resounds most loudly in its discussion of accountability, and Leibovich reminds us that bipartisanship in that regard is crucial. He chillingly describes the “consequence free environment” that Trump has fostered, and how Trump supporters have become increasingly menacing while the Trump-led GOP eschewed policy goals to become a party primarily about “revenge,” as one critic put it.
There is an undeniable whiff of autocracy in all of this. Unless Trump is held to account for the attempted January 6 coup, much worse may be in store. Republicans such as Cheney, Romney, and Adam Kitzinger are helping Democrats bring that accounting to bear. While Leibovich's book is a damning portrait of politics at its worst—leaders who elevate self interest over public service, mendacity over truth-telling, nihilism over idealism—it also provides a brief glimpse of politics at its best, which is fighting for what’s right no matter the risks to one’s career, friendships, and even personal safety.
There aren’t many Republicans left in this latter category. But our democracy may depend—at least in part—on the few who are.