Quotes from Mark Leibovich

Trump did not come close to passing muster with the Membership. He was, for starters, not considered sufficiently solvent or transparent to proffer a serious bid. Football owners, as it turns out, get a much closer look at a candidate's finances than electorates do.

The party did not bother to even produce a new platform, for the first time since 1856.

As Jonathan V. Last wrote in The Bulwark on October 8, "Go write this down: after November 3, the price of GOP politics is going to be an insistence that, actually, Donald Trump did win the election and/or would have won if it hadn't been stolen/rigged.

Relevance always comes with a price and a shelf life.

The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).

Rail attendants dismiss excited train hobbyists as "foamers" (foaming at the mouth as they board their choo-choos).

Rubio became just another dispiriting casualty of Trump's moral slaughter of the Republican Party. He was another in the parade of leaders willing to discard every principle they once held for the purpose of staying in office.

Don't worry, Malcolm," President Obama told his Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, when the latter expressed concern to him about Trump's early GOP primary successes. "The American people will never elect a lunatic to sit in this office.

Trump, too, would pass, like a kidney stone.

Republicans have gone from being a party that touted virtue to being the most squalid and grubby expression of institutionalized self-interest in the modern history of the American republic.

Trump was correct in his original assessment of so many Republican "leaders." They have proven to be weak, conniving, and two-faced cowards. They fear Trump as much as they despise him. They fear his (and their own) voters as much as they have contempt for them. It

If you think about it, a president blowing off the Correspondents' Association dinner might be a political boon in this anti-Washington day and age, a nod to the "average Americans.

Bottom line: any ambivalence Graham had over Trump's conduct (for example, for trashing his best friend to the grave and beyond) was eclipsed by his desperation to remain a U.S. senator.

Football is the "secret vice" of the civilized, wrote William Phillips in the journal Commentary in 1969. "Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.

Brady has compared playing football with "getting into a car crash every Sunday—a scheduled car crash." I've heard players use this image before, and doctors who have treated football injuries.

The worst thing about pro football is that a lot of it has nothing to do with football. It has so much business and hair spray crusted over it: so many sideshows and expert panels "breaking things down for us" and a whole lot of people you don't want to deal with or watch on TV [...].

There is an expression here on Capitol Hill," Issa told me. "'Don't ever get between a member and a camera.'" That can be particularly harrowing in the case of Issa, who had purchased a T-shirt for Bardella that said: "It's all about me.

a mantra she attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: women in politics, she said, "need to develop skin as tough as a rhinoceros hide.

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S YES-MEN—AND THEIR MASCARA!)

In the next picture, Reagan is saying, "Haley, have I ever told you the one about the two Episcopal preachers?" "No, sir, Mr. President." "One of the preachers said to the other, 'Times have really changed, haven't they? I never had sex with my wife before we were married, did you?' "And the other Episcopal priest said, 'I don't know, what is your wife's maiden name?

Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).

With its architectural grandeur, Senator Gore said, our capital would someday "make wonderful ruins.

Far from being a line of demarcation against Trump, January 6 would result in a rehabilitation of the former president that would propel a narrative of denial, lies, and autocratic intolerance of dissent that has become the hallmark of the GOP.