This Town, A Decade Later

This Town, A Decade Later

August 13, 2021

Julia Ioffe julia@puck.news via h.ckdlv.net 

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A “One-World, Bipartisan Racket”: D.C. a Decade After This Town

Mark Leibovich, my friend and fellow Odessan Jew, is the author of many wickedly insightful profiles for the New York Times and its Magazine. But it was his iconic 2013 book This Town that I think will be his lasting contribution to the cannon of American political writing. (If you haven’t read it, remediate that immediately.) I reread it recently and was again humbled by the fluency of his writing and the sharpness of his anthropological analysis, an elegant fileting of an entire social class. Revisiting the opening chapter alone—the Kennedy Center funeral of NBC anchor Tim Russert and the “power mourners” trying to keep the veil of performative grief from slipping to reveal the furious networking they were doing at the somber event—was enough to make me wonder what had delusion led me to believe that I could ever write.

I confess that, when Mark’s book first came out, I thought it was funny—I mean, what did Tammy Haddad do for a living anyway?—but mostly went over my head. I didn’t see the problem with Washington. Washington was fucking great. The book came out less than a year after I’d moved here from Moscow, where, in their admiration of American democracy, my Russian friends and colleagues helped inflate my crush on America. Seen from abroad, from a country that had dabbled with liberalization before slipping back into brute authoritarianism, America looked fantastic. Not perfect, no, but, unlike Russia, grappling with its past and striving for a more perfect union, with the nation’s first Black president moving into a White House built by slaves. Washington was the seat of that—and I was in awe of it.

The city was full of young, over-educated people who were as idealistic as they were technocratic. I’d become friends with someone only to see them get tapped to become the Assistant Secretary of Something Important and I’d get invited to the swearing in. That was so cool! As was feeling needed as the person freshly out of Russia whose opinion was always in demand by Very Important People and on various Highly Rated Cable News Shows. It felt great, and I loved Washington for making me feel that way.

In the years since, I’ve soured on the place. It became hard not to see what Leibovich had described: the duality of it all, the cynicism peeking out from under the high-mindedness, the accommodationism of the Trump years masquerading as even-handedness, the nauseating combination of performative pearl-clutching and gaslighting of those of us who saw where this was headed. The selfishness. The smallness and the provincialism. The profound inability of this town, whether by design or by sheer ineptitude, to meet this moment.

And so when I sat down to re-read This Town ahead of my conversation with Leibovich, the book resonated in a totally new way. The power mourners, the ass-kissing, the bullshit, my god! After a decade in this town, I finally saw the book for the masterpiece it was. Thankfully, Leibovich—or Leibo, as he is ubiquitously known in Washington, the nickname itself a totem of #thistown—is working on a sequel: Washington of the Trump era, about how this town has changed (and hasn’t) in the decade since Leibo first sat down to write the book. This week, we spoke all about it and the resulting conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, was a delight.

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Julia Ioffe: It’s been nearly a decade since This Town came out. How has this town changed and how has it remained the same?

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​Mark Leibovich: In my more self-congratulatory moments, I would say that that book—and it really was a long time ago—was about the swamp that Trump was kind of vowing to drain. Not that I think for a second that he read the book or had any sort of nuanced sense of what that world like was like, but he definitely picked up on a very palpable disgust that a lot of people out in the country had for what they perceived Washington to be, which was this kind of one-world government, bipartisan racket in which everybody stays and everybody’s friends, and everyone gets rich while America keeps crumbling. But again, he was not the first to discover the boogeyman value of the swamp. Nancy Pelosi, in 2006, was talking about draining the swamp. This is not a coinage that he should get any credit for.

But the look and feel of Washington over the last five years has been very much the same. I mean, there might have been this big reality show that was going on in the White House that was very disruptive and very dangerous in many ways, but it was still a town that just kept getting wealthier and wealthier. Government kept growing, deficits kept growing, the defense budgets kept growing, lobbying kept growing. The swampiness, or things that we would perceive to be the swamp, and the self-dealing world of Washington only absolutely flourished.

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If anything, it seemed like the Trump people fit right into it, like, when Corey Lewandowski left the White House and immediately set up a lobbying shop that charged super high rates, or when Mark Meadows and Stephen Miller set up their own Popular People’s Front of Judea. [For the uninitiated, this is a Monty Python reference]

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The Trump Hotel was the den of the whole thing. It really was not subtle at all. I wrote a book about football a few years ago, which I know you read cover-to-cover—twice. But I remember I was reporting it and I went to the Super Bowl in Houston in 2017 and I think that was two weeks after Trump was inaugurated. I somehow wound my way into this big fat cat owners tailgate party right before the game and who should I see standing right behind New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones but Corey Lewandowski! Who told me that he was there on Microsoft’s dime—who knows if that’s true or not—but there was Corey waiting to thank Mr. Kraft for all the fine friendship he’s provided for Mr. Trump over the years or whatever he was doing. I just remember Corey was marveling at how easy the money was for a guy who, you know, he wasn’t at the White House, but he was certainly seen as Trump adjacent. It was not subtle at all.

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The other thing I noticed in rereading This Town was how you describe Obama coming to town, ragging on the swamp and the political culture of D.C. It made me think about how almost every presidential election is a “change election,” and how everybody comes here, like you said in the book, either to make a difference or to shame this culture and be different from it. But then they all end up just getting sucked into it and becoming swamp creatures. What are the mechanics of that?

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If you are a political operative or someone who came to Washington on the back of Barack Obama or Donald Trump or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or whoever, there are going to be incredible opportunities for you in D.C.—the financial and also lifestyle and just sort of the brand, right? I remember Reince Priebus. I used to talk to him when he was RNC chair. I had written a story about him and had kept in touch with him. And it’s towards the end of the 2016 election, and I asked him pretty jokingly, because it didn’t look like Trump was going to win, so, what ambassadorship do you want when Trump wins? And he said, I want to be ambassador to Wisconsin. So, you know, his big thing was, I’m just a kid from Kenosha, right? I love Wisconsin, blah, blah, blah. And of course, Reince Priebus immediately took a job in the White House.

He had a fairly familiar Trump trajectory in that Trump didn’t like him during the campaign, and then all of a sudden, he was “my Reince” or whatever he called him. And then all of a sudden he was fired by tweet—

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And left on the tarmac.

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And left on the tarmac in the rain and had to find a ride somehow. Classic story. So that’s how the administration story ended for him. And then, of course, he stayed in Washington. He’s got a good job at some big law firm and, of course, his ambassadorship to Wisconsin never really panned out.

Same thing with Paul Ryan, right? I mean, Paul Ryan was like, Oh, I’m not a Washington guy. I’m just a guy who raised my family in Wisconsin. And of course, Paul Ryan had spent 20 years in Congress. He was a Hill staffer and he spent more than half his life in D.C. and then he retired. Basically, he said, my family clock is ticking. This is in 2018 and he says, my kids are teenagers. And that’s all ostensibly true and I have no doubt that he wanted to see his kids more. So Paul Ryan went back to Wisconsin, served his term, and I think he moved back to Washington within a year of that. I don’t know if this family’s with him, but, you know, he’s still here, in Washington. Barack Obama literally himself still lives in Washington right now. Of course, many people think he is pure, and, well, you know, his girls were still young and they wanted a place to come home to and he needed a place to write his memoir. But look, Barack Obama is still in Washington. Hillary Clinton still has her place on Whitehaven Avenue. The warm bath is as inviting as ever, no matter what party you led or who you’re working for.

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You nodded at this in This Town, but you’re also still here, and as much as you like to say that you’re above the fray, you’re also still here. And you have a comfortable life here.

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I do. I do. I plead totally guilty. I mean, look, I’ll even go a step further: I like Washington. It’s a great place to raise a family. We have great friends. You know, life has happened there. I mean, Washington is a very nice place for life to happen to a person, right? Sure, it’s great to get out of town, but it’s also really good to live here. And I certainly don’t hate that. I remember the glib thing I was saying after the book came out, that, Oh, I’m not going to be very comfortable in Washington anymore! They’re going to run me out of town and I’ll have to go to New York or something. But I didn’t think I was ever serious that that was going to happen—and it didn’t.

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I don't know if this is a question for you, but I think visitors to Washington always notice that people here are extremely poorly dressed. Why do you think denizens of #thistown are so terrible at dressing themselves?

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I can’t believe you’re asking me that. I am someone who lowers the bar. During July, there’s a spasm of social activity. A lot of these Trump books were coming out so I go to the book parties. And I showed up in shorts and, like, what is wrong with shorts?! And I was like the only one wearing shorts and everyone yelled at me. So I think the fact that I’m even being asked a clothing related question is in itself a horrible indictment of the clothing culture in Washington. Are people really that badly dressed in Washington?

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[laughs]

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I guess they are. I mean, it’s not Paris, it’s not Milan. To be honest with you, it seems a little tired. I mean no disrespect to the question, I just think that, in the same way that like, Oh, it’s Hollywood for ugly people is an incredibly, incredibly trite way of looking at Washington. But look, it’s a culture that I think fashions itself, so to speak, as a culture that does Important Work. So there’s the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which fashions itself as “nerd prom,” which is stupid because it’s not nerd prom. The people who preen on the red carpet at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner are not nerds. These are people who care about their hair and nerds don’t care about their hair. There’s also this idea that, we’re nerds, we’re doing serious work. We are too busy to care about our appearance. We are people of substance. But fuck that, right? I mean, that’s just not true. It’s just not what the dude in the green room or the woman in the make-up chair think about. They want to look good. I just hate the idea that we’re wonking out when we’re talking about who’s raised how much money in Iowa. It’s like part of the whole self-congratulatory shtick of people who want to make it sound like they’re doing work of substance.

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You’re writing a sequel of This Town, and one of the biggest changes has been the advent of Twitter and Facebook, of social media in general. How do you think that has changed the culture of this place?

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It’s made it more of a small town. The idea that social media is this expansive, democratic way of getting everyone involved in the conversation: I think it’s true on a level, but I also think that people now kind of cocoon in social media communities. A lot of journalists, a lot of political people all follow the same people. So you don’t have to be at Cafe Milano or the Capital Grille or in the Speaker’s lobby to be privy to what people are saying. And so in that sense, it intensifies the echo chamber in a way that I think can be accessible.

But it also can be very destructive because I don’t think conventional wisdom is smarter now because we have all the more people weighing in via social media than it was, you know, 20 years ago when we were declaring that America was not ready for a Black president or that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That argument was made over and over and over again and was proven wrong over and over and over again. And I would extend that to Donald Trump will never be elected president. It continues to be wrong. I do think that social media makes people think they’re a lot smarter than they are, which has never been a problem in Washington. It just fosters a level of ridiculous self-assurance and a lot of people that claim to know what they’re talking about.

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Washington’s revolving door seems to have evolved. Before, people would run for president or try to make a name for themselves so that they could go back and run for governor or the Senate seat in Arkansas. But now they run for office to land a lucrative FoxNews gig. Or, if you were an Obama staffer, it was to land a Silicon Valley gig, right?

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So there’s a seamless revolving door that had a Trump imprint on it. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who no one really knew outside of Arkansas, can become a Trump footsoldier overnight and now she can run for governor of Arkansas and have a pretty good chance of winning. And Hope Hicks can go right into Fox and make a ton of money and then go back into the administration. One of the consequences of this is that there seems to be a lot less outrage now that one of Biden’s top aides is Steve Ricchetti, who was a lobbyist for many years, and whose brother is a lobbyist now. I think the bar of outrage has been both raised and lowered by the Trump administration.

I'll say this: the door, she revolves. And it goes in any number of directions. It goes from K Street to network deals to TV deals to speaking deals to book deals to back into the administration, to the White House. I mean, it’s alive and well. Though I do think that one of the things that the Trump years introduced is that you do sort of have to calibrate your outrage to what really is important and what really is destructive to democracy. And I think we have a whole different appreciation for how dangerous that might actually be.

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In This Town, you wrote about Andrea Mitchell and how she is married to the establishment that she’s covering and vacationing and having dinners with people she’s ostensibly writing about. I moved here from a place where the government and the people writing about it had a much more hostile kind of insider-outsider relationship; it had a kind of moral clarity about it. And a decade after moving here, I continue to be surprised by how many journalists in Washington are insiders and how much they’re part of the show.

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I think it sounds really weird to say, but during the Trump years, I do think the lines of demarcation were much more clearly drawn. I think we’re still trying to feel our way through what the Biden administration is going to mean for this. But I think it can be too cozy. I think there are parts of this that can be very unhealthy.

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What can be unhealthy about it?

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Well, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner! Just the fact that we’re all part of the same deal, the fact that, you know, we’re all friends here. I do think that there were many, many parts of the Washington journalist-politician axis that can get way out of whack as far as coziness goes. And it’s something we all have to fight against and probably should have fought against a lot harder back at the time. But I also think that, you know, that’s dangerous and it’s also extremely dangerous to have a president who calls us the “enemy of the people,” who kicked people off of planes. There are different degrees of unhealthiness in the relationship and I just don’t think that, you know, Andrea Mitchell showing up at a party or me showing up at a party with a senator and having a drink with them or something is really that bad in the scheme of things.

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Kara Swisher has described post-Trump D.C. as “straining toward normalcy.” Do you think that the C-SPAN-ness of this administration is going to last? Or is this just a pause before the rest of the storm?

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I don’t think the Trump era is over by any stretch—and I’m not just saying that as a journalist who finds the story interesting. I think that, arguably, the biggest story of the last five years is—one of them has been told, which is Trump in the White House and, you know, the president is seething and blah, blah, blah, it’s all been happening in broad daylight. But the big piece of this is the sea change of the Republican Party and the fact that it’s become an extremely different entity that still controls at least half of Washington and much of the cable environment and the talk radio environment and Facebook. But the emergence of the Trump right is, to me, the story. It’s an enduring story. It’s the story in Washington even though Trump might be ensconced in Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump could not have happened without the Republican Party. He continues to not be able to happen unless Kevin McCarthy doesn’t go down to Mar-a-Lago. That is the ongoing reality. However you want to look at it, that is the ongoing horror show of what more traditional Republicans are dealing with.

I think the other piece of this is that Biden has definitely benefited from a honeymoon. I think the idea that, like, oh, there’s no honeymoon because covid numbers are up and the economy is a mess and impeachment—I mean, yeah, that all happened, it was a very eventful few months. But I also think that it has definitely benefited from the deep breath being taken collectively by many Americans, not just the press, not just people in politics, because of the fact that there probably won’t be an insurrection on the Capitol tomorrow—but, you know, there might be one in a few years! The Biden administration is obviously pretty pleased with itself in its own way. They have a tendency that certain Democratic administrations have to expect that they will be given the benefit of the doubt, that everyone should be utterly respectful of their professionalism at all times and agree to their ground rules and so forth. And I don’t think that’s going to last or should last. I think the administration is doing a whole lot right now that is going to cry out for levels of transparency that don’t currently exist.

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And last question, which is just something I’m fascinated by personally as somebody who both loves and hates writing: your writing feels so effortless and witty. Is it effortless to write like that? What is your writing process like? Is it tortured or do you just love writing and it flies out of your fingers?

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First of all, thank you. If there is any sense of effortlessness that sort of jumps off the page, it’s completely at odds with the process. I am just as tortured and procrastinating and neurotic as anyone, which is why I am always in it. I just do not like sitting down at a computer and writing because it’s the hardest part of the whole thing; reporting is such a joy. The writers who I like reading least are those who have this kind of effortless process, because I think effortlessness is something that I’ve certainly been jealous of on deadline, but I don't know. The dirty little secret—though I don’t think it is a secret as anyone who sits anywhere near me in my various offices over the years can say, is it’s just not easy. I stare at the screen. I agonize. I second-guess. I third-guess. I second-guess my editors, I third-guess my editors. It’s not that I’m a pain in the ass—

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Yeah, I’m sure you’re a joy to work with.

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Yes, I’m a collegial colleague as anyone can attest, but yeah, it is not easy so any impression of effortlessness is a pure lie.

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Well, folks, that’s it for this week’s installment. Tune in next week for a very special guest and remember to subscribe!

Good night, tomorrow will be worse,

Julia

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