Mark Leibovich > Quotes

“The nation’s leaders keep throwing out the word “Washington” as a vulgar abstraction. Nothing new here: the anti-Washington reflex in American politics has been honed for centuries, often by candidates who deride the capital as a swamp, only to settle into the place as if it were a soothing whirlpool bath once they get elected. The city exists to be condemned.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“The life cycle of public disgrace has been condensed to where the actual offense gets washed away, leaving just a neutral sheen of notoriety.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“a sinner is pleading to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates: “Wait, those weren’t lies,” the sinner says. “That was spin!”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Cynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“The president’s stump speeches could carry the forced air of a Van Halen reunion tour with Sammy Hagar in for David Lee Roth.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“God could not be reached for comment. But let us at least agree that He is quite obviously attuned to the doings of politics and media. That is why so many would-be leaders say they are being “called upon” to run for president, and why eulogists lean so heavily on the trope that God runs an HR department that recruits people like Sunday hosts and yachtsmen into heaven.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“This Republican party dances to whatever tunes come into Mr. Trump’s head,” wrote Edward Luce of the Financial Times.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“Trump in the White House could “change the character of the generations of Americans that are following” and might result in “trickle-down racism,” “trickle-down misogyny,” and “trickle-down bigotry.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“This was a pure case of governing by intimidation, which is the essence of authoritarianism.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing,”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“the capital commandments of self-interest, self-importance, self-enrichment, and self-perpetuation.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Far from being a line of demarcation against Trump, January 6 would result in a rehabilitation of the former president that would propel a narrative of denial, lies, and autocratic intolerance of dissent that has become the hallmark of the GOP.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“Washington read”: the act of telling someone, “I didn’t read your book but did praise it on TV.”)”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“GOP voters were the opposite of Trump’s kryptonite; they were his superpower.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“You know you've made it in D.C. when someone says that--"It isn't clear what he does"--about you.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“It’s one small lie, followed by a demand for a bigger lie and a bigger concession, a bigger moral lapse,”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“In the next picture, Reagan is saying, “Haley, have I ever told you the one about the two Episcopal preachers?” “No, sir, Mr. President.” “One of the preachers said to the other, ‘Times have really changed, haven’t they? I never had sex with my wife before we were married, did you?’ “And the other Episcopal priest said, ‘I don’t know, what is your wife’s maiden name?”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Rubio became just another dispiriting casualty of Trump’s moral slaughter of the Republican Party. He was another in the parade of leaders willing to discard every principle they once held for the purpose of staying in office.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“Empathy, he finally assured me, “will be one of the strongest things about Trump. “When I’m in that position,” he continued, “when we have horrible hurricanes, all kinds of horrible things happen, you’ve got to have empathy.” Trump then returned to watching himself on the flat screen.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“Trump did not come close to passing muster with the Membership. He was, for starters, not considered sufficiently solvent or transparent to proffer a serious bid. Football owners, as it turns out, get a much closer look at a candidate’s finances than electorates do.”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“The worst thing about pro football is that a lot of it has nothing to do with football. It has so much business and hair spray crusted over it: so many sideshows and expert panels “breaking things down for us” and a whole lot of people you don’t want to deal with or watch on TV [...].”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“We had a Muslim president for seven and a half years,”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“This attachment has endured through the years and withstood a steady helmet-slapping of cognitive dissonance over whether I should know better than to keep following this sport as closely as I do. Scary research on posthumous football brains has been as impossible to miss as the testimonials from still-living retirees about the sad state of their bodies. (To wit: “My life sucks,” Jim Plunkett, then sixty-nine, told the San Jose Mercury News in 2017. “Everything hurts.”) If you love football, you get good”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“At the brunch, I told her I had been in Alaska a few months earlier. And she opened her mouth wide in a look of genuine surprise, as if no one had ever gone to Alaska before. “Why didn’t you look me up?” she said, again sounding sincere. I made a joke about not wanting to get shot. She made me promise to look her up in Wasilla next time. (How does one “look up” Sarah Palin in Alaska, anyway? Is she listed? Can we become texting buddies?)”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“The party did not bother to even produce a new platform, for the first time since 1856.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“(ALL THE PRESIDENT’S YES-MEN—AND THEIR MASCARA!)”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“Republicans have gone from being a party that touted virtue to being the most squalid and grubby expression of institutionalized self-interest in the modern history of the American republic.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“who was sitting here before him in full flesh and makeup.”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“Rail attendants dismiss excited train hobbyists as “foamers” (foaming at the mouth as they board their choo-choos).”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Everyone marveled--between courses at The Palm--at how out of touch Mittens was.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital