Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission

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 Trump’s 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 proprietor’s 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 brand—losing.

We were a week or so into December, and the hotel’s 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. Trump’s 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 Trump’s “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 America’s 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 clock—the grandkids dashing around the concourse, playing tag with Uncle Barron. You could pick out the Made Men in the lobby, Trump’s “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 McCain’s proud sidekick, bathing in all of McCain’s reflected glory and honor and moral authority. This was before McCain died and Graham would, in his mind, trade up to become one of Trump’s 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 Trump’s most merciless critics in 2016 to such a sycophant thereafter. I didn’t use those exact words, but Graham got the idea.

“Well, okay, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d 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 Trump’s blessing, and voters, to remain here. “If you don’t want to be reelected, you’re 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? That’s 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?

Relevance always comes with a price and a shelf life. Either you’re in power or you’re out, well positioned or not. Traditionally, the local biorhythm is cyclical, a revolving membership of bodies orbiting in and out of the sun, depending on which party controlled the sun. But the sense of borrowed time was acute at the Trump Hotel. Everyone was always rushing around the lobby, trying to maximize their haul before the sun set.

At least there was some expectation that after Election Day, or whenever Trump finally gave up the ghost, things might finally calm down a little bit.

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Okay, Election Day might have been optimistic.

I returned to the Trump Hotel a few days before Christmas. The state Electoral College delegations had all met on December 14 to affirm Joe Biden’s victory. Soon, theoretically, it would be safe for the forty-sixth president and his “total pros” to inherit the whirlwind and restore order, for Tom Friedman to be welcome again back at the White House, for Democrats to get on with their lefty overreaches, and for the donors to start bitching about how Biden was not properly glad-handing them.

Then, the inevitable backlash: the polls tanking and the Carter comparisons replacing the LBJ comparisons and the “concerns about Biden’s age” kicking in. And the dump Kamala rumors and all the new variants. I hate to be jaded here, but—oh, what the hell—these things do tend to run in patterns.

But what if the old patterns no longer applied? What if Trump had pounded all the familiar assumptions into oblivion and Republicans into submission? He was, after all, not conceding defeat yet and still going on like a maniac about disappearing ballots and corrupted voting machines and CRIMES OF THE CENTURY! Everyone kept wondering how long this postelection meltdown would last. Some of the GOP’s self-appointed “grown-ups” were becoming alarmed. Trump was “on the verge of looking like a sore loser,” Karl Rove cautioned on Fox News. (Karl always had a sixth sense about these things.)

I was sitting in the hotel watching the bar TVs. The cadaverous faces of Senators Graham and Mitch McConnell filled the screens. The muted Newt Gingrich popped up for his “hit.” Was that Bill Bennett taking his turn? Yes, Bill Bennett, the Reagan-era secretary of education whose bestselling morality tome, The Book of Virtues, lent him a lifetime gravitas as America’s conservative conscience—and who had since refashioned himself as a reliable evangelist for the most immoral and unvirtuous figure ever to occupy the White House. “I believe this election was fixed,” he parroted a few days earlier. It was always such an honor for President Trump to have Mr. Bennett’s support.

Other Serious People kept describing Trump’s gambit to remain in office as a “last-gasp attempt.” This was another Big Lie. There was always another gasp with Trump. Before it was over, there would be dozens of courtroom clown shows, 147 Senate and congressional Republicans voting to not certify Biden’s victory, a mob spearing and pummeling a police officer with an American flagpole (Old Glory still attached), seven dead (two Capitol cops by suicide in the days following), ghastly videos, hundreds injured and arrested, and another impeachment. We were a nation choking in gasps.

I kept staring up at the TV. Giuliani was now gulping up more air on Fox. He flailed his arms and was doing his best to go down fighting, or go through the motions thereof. Trump loved to see people fighting for him on TV. It was like a pixelated therapy for him. He felt seen. Rudy had become the president’s favorite therapy dog.

At this point, though, the situation had gone well beyond just another episode of All the President’s Feelings and Moods. No one expected Trump to depart with any particular grace or statesmanship or loser things like that. But this was getting scary. Trump was now talking about some massive protest rally that he envisioned for D.C. on January 6. His words and his crowds were becoming more desperate and belligerent. It felt as though things were building toward something “not very nice,” as Trump might say.

By year’s end, General Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was telling people he believed the president was in “serious mental decline.” Trump kept retweeting some account called @catturd2. As presidents do.

The caseworkers continued to preach patience. “Give it time,” Lindsey kept telling everyone. He knew Trump had lost, quite obviously. He was just giving Trump the “space” he needed to come to grips with it. Likewise, McCarthy explained to squeamish colleagues that by echoing the president’s stolen election claims on TV, he was merely trying to “manage” Trump until the defeated president could accept reality—always a shaky proposition with him.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official was quoted as saying in The Washington Post. The blind quote, oft repeated, became an instant classic in the genre of “takes that did not age well.” It was held up as a dark marker of where things stood for a party that stood idly by while Trump solicited foreign campaign help and mocked war heroes and disabled reporters and entire ethnic minorities and it only got worse. “Humoring him” had essentially become the GOP platform.

But “humoring” was also too passive a descriptor for what Republicans had been doing long before Trump arrived. They had for years pushed and weakened the barriers that Trump would later obliterate. Newt Gingrich never hesitated to destroy opposition to his Republican Revolution, no matter what norms or whose reputation he had to torch; nor would he hesitate, a quarter century later, to suggest possible jail time for the January 6 investigators. Gingrich’s House GOP descendants became eager saboteurs of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, willing to shut down the government or play brinksmanship with the debt ceiling or (on the Senate side) blockade a Democratic president’s Supreme Court nomination. They mostly ignored Trump’s ugly questioning of his predecessor’s citizenship, and accommodated a growing white nationalist element in their ranks.

Still, certain lines and traditions were sacred, we were told. Trump would certainly abide by the word of the courts and the sanctity of elections. The conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt—one of those “thoughtful” Trump defenders who was still allowed on Meet the Press—tried to reassure. He went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast and told everyone to relax, there would most certainly be a peaceful transfer of power because that’s how we roll here in America, greatest country on earth. “I would just say to everybody: It will be fine,” Hewitt said, another “take” that did not age well. The podcast aired on the morning of January 6.

Okay, just make it to January 20; then everything will be fine. That would become the next benchmark. Just land the damn plane. Surely the situation would quiet down as soon as Trump took his final ride on Air Force One down to Palm Beach, with TVs set to Fox News. He would savor one last favorite in-flight breakfast of grilled sirloin on a bed of cheesy grits with two over-easy eggs oozed over a buttermilk biscuit. Maybe he would fire off a late last-minute pardon of Judge Jeanine’s ex for relaxation, after Bible reading.

Trump would leave behind a city stunned and locked down: a razor-wire fence encircling the Capitol, plywood covering downtown, and twenty-five thousand National Guard troops protecting the government from the president’s own supporters—not a great look for a healthy democracy. But Trump always saw himself as a disrupter, with a mandate to “shake things up.” That’s what “his people” demanded. And he would never let them down, as he always said. Promises made, promises kept.

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I was always most fascinated during these years by the view from the Trump Hotel—much more so than by Trump himself. Like most people, I doubted Trump would ever get here. I never thought his campaign would amount to much beyond a whoopee cushion detonated in our polite Kabuki theater. And like most people, I was extremely wrong.

But I still never found Trump to be that captivating as a stand-alone character. As my Times colleague David Brooks wrote: “We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”

Trump had been around forever, and his political act was largely derivative. His promise to “drain the swamp” was treated as some genius coinage, though in fact the platitude had been worn out for decades by both parties. Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” as far back as 2006, just as the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 had vowed to “Make America Great Again.”

Far more compelling to me were the slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side, who got the free desserts at BLT. These were the careerists who capitulated to Trumpism to preserve their livelihoods. They did what they had to do to keep dining out here. If nothing else, they talked a tough game.

“I know how to deal with bullies,” Chris Christie used to boast back when he was still a self-respecting New Jersey governor and presidential candidate. “You can either sidle up to the bully, or you can punch them in the face. I like to punch them in the face.” No one pushed around a tough-guy governor from Jersey—except, apparently, a whining, spray-tanned drama queen with dyed orange hair from Queens.

Christie promptly ended his campaign in 2016, sidled up to Trump, and won a good seat at the table for the better part of four years. He was always strangely in awe. They all were, the Lindseys and Rudys and Lyin’ Teds and Liddle Marcos. They all had their reasons and their weaknesses.

Trump served as a big mirror to the political world he was surrounding in full. He imposed his own character study, and the results were endlessly depressing. The Republican Party became like a political version of that Stanley Milgram experiment on obedience from the 1960s. Milgram, a Yale behavioral psychologist who had studied collaborators of the Holocaust, assigned his subjects the role of “teachers” and instructed them to administer electric shocks upon innocent neighbors ostensibly in the next room. The force of the shocks was apparently becoming more and more painful as the victims screamed and begged them to stop. Yet most of the teachers (65 percent) kept following instructions to continue.

“The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes,” Milgram concluded. “He therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.”

Republicans demonstrated much of the same fealty during the Trump years. They became deft at believing they were guilty of no dereliction. (If asked, Milgram’s subjects would claim that their actions were not as harmful as they appeared.) They forged ahead and convinced themselves it was fine, maybe even brave. They were doing the work needed to help their president stand athwart the woke tide.

“The cliché says that power always corrupts,” wrote the biographer/historian Robert Caro. “What is seldom said,” Caro continued, “is that power always reveals.” Power reveals the most about those who enable its abuse. Republicans became the party that made Trump possible and that refused to stop him even after the U.S. Capitol fell under the control of some madman in a Viking hat.

It was always rationalization followed by capitulation and then full surrender. The routine was always numbingly the same, and so was the sad truth at the heart of it: they all knew better.

“I was always amazed at how Trump completely ate the Republicans’ lunch, and how they just allowed it to happen,” said Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California. But they also knew that if they stayed on the right side of Trump, the “good Republicans” could always do business here. There was no better anchor tenant for these times than the Trump Hotel.