And, as compared to many of Leibovich’s staid New York Times colleagues who produced said scoops, it was fun to read. It was character assassination that wielded ethnography as the weapon - not earth-shattering scoops revealing malfeasance, but the human peculiarities that enabled misconduct in the first place. The book had pierced the veil of political propriety to reveal Washington for what it is: a sycophantic symphony of self-promoters who line their pockets and professional reputations at the expense, very often, of the American voter. I am one of many young(ish) political journalists not ashamed to confess This Town inspired my decision to join the profession. “Oh, Michael Flynn is going to be the National Security Advisor? Never mind.” Hadn’t This Town, after all, been a damning account of the capital’s creatures of comfort, of Republicans and Democrats who performed partisanship and public service as they gained wealth and fame doing neither? The delusion departed as quickly as it had arrived. “Maybe this was the shock to the system This Town needed,” Leibovich says of his thought process. In the days after Trump’s 2016 shock victory, Leibovich considered that a reality television president who had once spanked a porn star with a magazine cover bearing his own face could actually be a good thing. “That premise was way too light.” Instead, he produced a “less fun book,” one that chronicles how Trump “turned the swamp into his own gold-plated Jacuzzi,” as he writes in the book’s introduction, and how the characters of This Town capitulated to Trumpism to preserve their livelihoods. “ This Town, in retrospect, feels like a comedy of manners,” he says. He’d set out to write a This Town for the Trump era, only to discover the deep cynicism at the premise of his 2013 hit wouldn’t cut it for his encore. There’s no shock to this revelation after reading through Leibovich’s latest. “I’ve been tired of the Trump story for a long, long time.”
“I’m absolutely tired of this story, no question,” he sighs. Leibovich had chronicled this milieu of Washington in a 2013 bestseller by the same name, and when Donald Trump steamrolled into the capital city in January 2017, he undertook a sequel, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission, out on July 12.Īnd how was the journalist responsible for popularizing “This Town” feeling about it after four years of Donald Trump?
The honeyed wood paneling, sienna leather, and $34 wagyu steak salad screamed “This Town,” shorthand for the circle jerk of Washington lobbyists, lawmakers, and lackeys who ostensibly run our global superpower. I met Mark Leibovich on a Friday in June in exactly the sort of place I’d expect to find him: At BLT Steak, a power lunch spot three blocks from the White House in the heart of downtown D.C.
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