thank you for your servitude by mark leibovich

And that’s the challenge.īeckerman: You always seem to notice the peripheral things that end up being the most revealing. There are ways to see them and hear them that others might not. But once you get inside the tent, there are ways to draw people out. If you make ground rules, you make agreements, be good to your word. Leibovich: I always thought there was a pretty simple answer to this question: Don’t burn people. This must be a dynamic that you’re constantly negotiating: How far can you go without burning the people whom you actually need to do your reporting? But journalists struggle with this, too, that fear of losing access that leads to lobbing softballs. At a certain point, I think you reach immunity.īeckerman: Your new book’s big theme is sycophancy in our politics. There are a few people who snub me around town, but not that many. So everyone sort of claimed it as their own. And it was written in such a way that Republicans or conservatives thought that it was an indictment of big government, while liberal Washington and liberal Democrats thought it was an indictment of big money in politics. Mark Leibovich: Basically, when This Town came out in 2013, a lot of people were saying, Oh, well, you’ll never eat lunch in D.C. Gal Beckerman: So how does it feel to become D.C.’s greatest contemporary sociologist? Do you still get invited to parties? This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. I talked with Leibovich about the people he calls the “collaborators” and whether he has a grand “banality of evil” theory to explain their behavior. What made them tick? That was a journalistic question with some mystery to it. Far more interesting were those who stood next to Trump and enabled his rise-the Lindsey Grahams and Kevin McCarthys-those who should have known better. “I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure,” Leibovich, a staff writer for The Atlantic, writes in an excerpt.

What distinguishes Mark Leibovich’s new book about the Trump years from all the many, many others is that he started it with an unusual premise: He was bored with Trump.

Thank you for your servitude by mark leibovich