Tag Archives: "Thank You for Your Servitude"

How Unlikely Is It That It’ll Be Trump v. Biden in ’24?

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Biden vs. Trump 2024 would be the rematch nobody wants

I believe I have previously mentioned my fanboy enthusiasm for the work of Mark Leibovich, formerly of The New York Times Magazine and now, like just about every other four star journalist/writer, at The Atlantic. Leibovich’s classic book is “This Town” a truly “inside” view of the D.C. cocktail party/power culture, where politicians, lobbyists and big name journos regularly-to-constantly schmooze, clink glasses and incestuously buff up each other’s bona fides. It was as hilarious as it was dismaying.

His most recent, “Thank You for Your Servitude”, released last fall, was all about the truly craven GOP toadies — can you say Lindsey Graham fast enough? — who have taken out triple mortgages on what little soul they ever had to defend Donald Trump on everything he’s ever said or done. Which means committing character suicide five times a day.

Anyway, Leibovich being Leibovich with his Times/Atlantic pedigree, gets all sorts of people who really should know better to talk to him. And almost all play laughable word games to lay out their imagined resolution for what we’ll call “the Trump problem.” A chaotic epoch that nearly all of them wish would end … like yesterday … no matter how much they defend him publicly.

What Leibovich leaves for his punchline conclusion is that there is actually a detectable consensus, though only a couple party pros dare say it out loud.

And that is … they wish (and hope) the guy just up and dies. Face first into a bucket of KFC wings. Whatever.

You laugh. But they’re serious. I ask you, what do you think mouldering stalactites like Mitch McConnell really think is their best way out of the constant Trump quagmire?

This all came to mind again the other day when a couple of us were talking about the last time the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were set a year and a half or more before the election? How far back do you have to go in our lifetimes? Adlai Stevenson and Ike in ’56? In every other election cycle the presumptive tickets shifted significantly over the 18 to 24 month “home stretch.”

And yet … here we are in June of 2023, 16 months before the next election and the hardened assumption is that our choices will again be Trump and Joe Biden. One guy is 81 and while competent moves like a guy who is, well, 81. Opposite him is a guy, nigh onto morbidly obese and demonstrably erratic mentally, who has just turned 77 and is under more legal pressure than John Gotti, with indictments piling up faster than tickets on an overparked delivery van in lower Manhattan. (I have personal experience with that one.)

My point here is to warn against certainty in this situation and prepare contingencies.

Trump looks strong. He is making his usual boatload of money off the Mar-a-Lago indictment. (And again, what is in anyone’s mind who writes a $50 check to a guy who says he’s a billionaire?) His poll numbers vis a vis Ron DeSantis and the other GOP munchkins remain daunting. Sixty-plus percent of Republican voters say they believe he won the 2020 election. He looks invincible, and as we all know, could campaign all next year wearing an ankle bracelet. (Hell, he could sell replicas at his MAGA merch tables.)

But … it is very hard to imagine Trump bears up physically under the stresses that are compounding by the hour. And mentally … well, he’s Trump. But as some have pointed out, a big part of his appeal to his celebrity-obsessed base is that he’s “fun” or at least “entertaining”, two, um, virtues less evident with every droning, monotonous, whiny speech, like the buzz-killer he delivered in Bedminister after this week’s indictment.

Thankfully, his main competition over in the Pissed Off White Victim bubble is De Santis who has all the charm and entertainment appeal of a medieval executioner.

And Biden … well, face it. 81 is 81 and serious things regularly happen to 81 year-olds with the best health care money can provide. What happens with even a minor stroke? Or some other age-related infirmity? Should Biden be so incapictated he’s unable to run, try imagining the Democratic scramble — even this month, much less next summer or later, to produce another unifying candidate. Kamala Harris? Mmmm, I kinda doubt it. Mayor Pete? Gavin Newsom? Bernie?

Minus Trump, how do you assess a DeSantis match up against Biden? How many “swing voters” would reflexively gravitate back to the young, smarter, more disciplined, Trumpy-but-not-Trump Republican? Would his cynical, cro-magnon policies like that six-week abortion ban and all-the-guns-you-can-eat really deter critical suburban women?

I don’t know, but because I embrace the gloom, it’s stuff I think about.

Have a nice day.

Liz Cheney Ain’t Going Nowhere in This Republican Party

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There are easily a dozen ways to help you understand Liz Cheney — daughter of the spawn of Beelzebub and Darth Vader and holder of the most famous name in Wyoming politics — losing by 40 points to the GOP’s latest example of terminal cynicism. But spending a couple days with Mark Leibovich’s new book, “Thank You for Your Servitude” helps square the edges and color in between the lines.

I’m an unabashed fan boy for Leibovich’s writing and style of reporting. If you’ve read nothing by him — he recently moved to The Atlantic after 16 years with The New York Times — start with “This Town”, his 2013 classic. It’s a [Tom] Wolfian dissection of the DC social scene, where TV anchors, pundits, well-heeled reporters, society grande dames and perpetually self-serving politicians interwine incestuously to reap the benefits of the prestigious game of … mmm, public service. Written during the Obama administration, it’s a scene-setter for characters and fault lines that cracked wide open during the Trump epidemic.

Having just finished “Thank You for Your Servitude” — (thanks again to Sir Richard the Noble for sending it over as a gift) — Cheney’s predicament was not only fully predict-able, but perfectly understandable as well. She is, as many have said, a creature from a party, an “ethos” if you will, that quite literally no longer exists. In interviews with the likes of Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy and various other modern Republican “leaders”, Leibovich lays it out with kind of morbid hilarity.

I quote mark “leaders” because they are all quaking in terror of the Trumpy base. From Mitch McConnell on down each of them live as a hostage in a Circus Maximus where a mere whispered criticism of a character all regard (but only in private) as a ludicrous fop has become an excommunicatable offense.

Chatter this morning is where Cheney goes from here? She seems to have hinted at running for President. But how? And as what?

Delicious as it would be to have her up on a debate stage with Landslide Donny, I see no one imagining how she mounts a primary campaign as a Republican, if only because of security concerns. As it was in her home state of Wyoming, with her family name slapped on countless buildings, she didn’t dare announce her campaign visits more than a couple hours in advance for fear of locked and loaded Trump-o-nauts showing up to protect their … you know … freedoms … from radical socialists like … Liz Cheney.

So maybe she runs as an independent? Walking point for a reimagining of Daddy Cheney’s kind of conservative politics? The kind with all the sweet tax cuts for Halliburton board members, evisceration of social safety nets, deregulation for any drilling operation that sees money in national parks, wildly disproportionate paranoia about feckless dictators and … gotta love this … the mythical Unitary Executive, where buffoons as unqualified as, oh I don’t know, a multiply bankrupt reality TV “star” can do whatever he damn well pleases once “POTUS” is part of his official title.

Face it, independent = futile, electorally. Although given Cheney’s standing via the January 6 committee she’d be guaranteed plenty of free media if Trump himself is in the 2024 race.

And if Trump isn’t? Well, as Leibovich points out repeatedly in his book, even absent Trump the Candidate, no Republican who hasn’t bent the knee, slurped the lifted loafer and kissed the sprawling booty of Donald J. will have any traction with the cult of chronically pissed off D+ students who have total control of the party today and for the forseeable future. There simply is no infrastructure for a new-breed-like-just-the-old-breed Republican like Liz Cheney.

If Trump declines to serve again, the Republican base circa 2024 is primed for a much smarter and far uglier version of a loathsome freedom(s) fighter. I give you Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, etc. ad infinitum.