Mark Leibovich - Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trumps Washington and the Price of Submission

Big Game

Citizens of the Green Room

This Town

The New Imperialists

December 2020

The view from the Trump International Hotel was bleak by the end. It had been a steady fall from its peak, when the atrium lounge had become the social center of Washington, at least Donald Trumps Sodom and Gomorrah version of it. I was sitting alone at the lobby bar on a Friday night, finishing a shrimp cocktail. My reporter colleagues and I had been dropping by semi-regularly for four years, starting when the property opened in 2016. Sometimes I would meet friends here, or sometimes I would come in alone and observe what our radiant laboratory of self-government had become under the current ownership.

The venue made for a nice addition to downtown, situated in the Old Post Office Building, on what had been a dead stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. It gave every impression of being a tight and well-managed operation, unlike the proprietors side hustle down the street. But the scent of abandonment had been creeping in since Election Day. First, the coronavirus ruined the business, and then the hotelier himself finished the job by doing something unforgivably off brandlosing.

We were a week or so into December, and the hotels chandeliered concourse was empty except for some bored bartenders. A few North Carolinians in Make America Great Again caps had just departed, and a bunch of Proud Boys were posing for a team selfie next to the Trump sign out front. They appeared to be in town for a Stop the Steal rally scheduled for the weekend, one of the preliminaries to the Big One. I could hear a faint Four more years chant petering out over a distant megaphone. Roger Stone, the felonious Nixon-era menace and longtime Trump acolyte, greeted a group of supporters near the entrance.

For the most part, though, the scene felt pretty well played out. Trumps usual collection of pet rocks had stopped showing up at the hotel weeks before. There was no sign of any Rudys, Bannons, or Lewandowskis; no Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin or his wife, Louise Linton, or the tiny dog she kept in her tiny purse (an actual, breathing lapdog); no trace of the Trump leg-humpers from the House; and no hint of the Sean Spicers, Kellyanne Conways, or any of the other Washington C-listers who were bumped temporarily up to B-list status by their proximity to Donald J. Trump.

The grand mezzanine offered them a relatively safe space in an otherwise hostile city. There is a comfort level at the hotel, said Rudy Giuliani, who practically lived here, usually at the BLT Prime steak house, which at busy hours became a petting zoo for Trumps guys. He had his own table, delineated by the Rudolph W. Giuliani, Private Office nameplate.

I would see Rudy rushing off to smoke a cigar outside, pressed for time but always grinning for photos and resting his hand a bit low on the skirts of his lady friends. Here, Giuliani was restored to being Americas Mayor again, and the Trump Hotel was his new Ground Zero. No one would hassle him over his legal troubles or blame him for getting the president impeached (a time or two) or suggest that maybe he should switch to club soda, before it got too late. It was definitely getting late.

In its time, the Trump Hotel was full of people racing the clockthe grandkids dashing around the concourse, playing tag with Uncle Barron. You could pick out the Made Men in the lobby, Trumps adult children strutting around as if they owned the place. Don Jr. and Eric would be nursing drinks, with those stiff Trump smiles and simultaneously bloated and angular cheeks. At close range, they flashed scared and darting Trump eyes, as if bracing for a light fixture to fall. You could tell the boys really wanted to be recognized, especially by Dad.

The likes of Senator Lindsey Graham would look so powerful in here and feel so appreciated. Over four years, he had made himself a top deputy in service to the Alpha. He never looked more enthralled than when he was skipping from table to table at the Trump Hotel getting thanked for all of the wonderful things he had done for our great president. There might be some Turkish businessman chasing after him, trying to get a meeting with the boss down the street, or some Oath Keeper wanting an autograph. Lindsey always said he tried to be helpful.

No one would pester him at the hotel with those tiresome What happened to Lindsey Graham? questions that so many of his judgy old Washington friends were asking. They were lucid enough to remember the dead-eyed, chubby-cheeked South Carolinian when he served as John McCains proud sidekick, bathing in all of McCains reflected glory and honor and moral authority. This was before McCain died and Graham would, in his mind, trade up to become one of Trumps favorite golf amigos. Maybe it brought him some grief, but also big cachet at the palace, and free drinks.

I once asked Graham a version of the What happened to you? question: how he could swing from being one of Trumps most merciless critics in 2016 to such a sycophant thereafter. I didnt use those exact words, but Graham got the idea.

Well, okay, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, itd be odd not to do this, he said, a bit defensively. I asked what this was. This, Graham said, is to try to be relevant. Being hooked on Trump made him relevant. It was a hell of a drug, and he had to keep his dealer happy. Nearly all elected Republicans in Washington needed Trumps blessing, and voters, to remain here. If you dont want to be reelected, youre in the wrong business, Graham told me. I have never been called this much by a president in my life. He admitted that it would be hard to give that up.

They all said as much. I could get Trump on the phone faster than any staff person who worked for him could get him on the phone, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader would brag, flush with relevance.

What would you do for your relevance? Thats always been a definitional question for D.C.s prime movers, especially the super-thirsty likes of Lindsey and Kevin. But never did it render itself in such Technicolor as during the Donald Trump years. How badly did you want into the clubhouse, no matter how wretched it became inside? Was it enough to turn the Republican Party into an authoritarian griftocracy or yourself into an accomplice to a national trauma? Could you live with that?