Quotes from Mark Leibovich

a sinner is pleading to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates: "Wait, those weren't lies," the sinner says. "That was spin!

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.

You know you've made it in D.C. when someone says that--"It isn't clear what he does"--about you.

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,

Washington read": the act of telling someone, "I didn't read your book but did praise it on TV.")

This was a pure case of governing by intimidation, which is the essence of authoritarianism.

the capital commandments of self-interest, self-importance, self-enrichment, and self-perpetuation.

who was sitting here before him in full flesh and makeup.

now known as Governor Ron DeSantis.

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?)

Trumpism is, at heart, not a philosophy but an enemies list.

Nunes's once-promising career in Congress had been given over fully to being a house organ for Trump.

It's one small lie, followed by a demand for a bigger lie and a bigger concession, a bigger moral lapse,

No benign deity plucks television news show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then hastily compensates their friends and family by displays of irradiated droplets in the sky.

GOP voters were the opposite of Trump's kryptonite; they were his superpower.

The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.

We had a Muslim president for seven and a half years,

The I Told You So impulse was strong. "And, while we're at it," Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review, "maybe turning your party over to Generalissimo Walter Mitty, his hideous scheming spawn, and the studio audience from Hee-Haw was not just absolutely aces as a political strategy.

Expecting a Republican to do the tough and right and uncomfortable thing in the face of Donald Trump was like betting on the Washington Generals.

contempt for anyone who voted for him.

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.

Everyone marveled--between courses at The Palm--at how out of touch Mittens was.

His epic career of ups and downs, feuds, outrages, and swift descent into shamelessness and desperation made Giuliani the master creature of the Trump Swamp.

This Republican party dances to whatever tunes come into Mr. Trump's head," wrote Edward Luce of the Financial Times.