Mark Leibovich Wants to Be Proud of His Country

The “Thank You For Your Servitude” author on his new book, those who empowered Donald Trump and whether we’re going to make it through this.

Mark Leibovich is the sort of journalist — and person — I admire and am inherently drawn to: He’s foundationally, constitutionally, No Bullshit. He’s a dean of the Washington press corps but also outside of it, a tapped-in reporter who’s a creature of the swamp while still being able to view it and comment on it with a rictus grin. His incredible book This Town remains the most vivid, darkly hilarious chronicle of a political establishment — and a political system — so removed from the world the rest of us live in that it at times reads like science fiction.

But his new book, Thank You For Your Servitude, has something new from Leibovich: palpable anger. It’s still funny, of course: Leibovich has the ear of a star reporter but the wit and prose stylings of a merciless satirist, Mort Sahl meets Ben Bagdikian — Hunter S. Thompson if he had his shit more together, knew his way around a green room and went to a ton of Red Sox games. But what’s different about this book is the outrage that creeps in around the edges of every page. Leibovich is appalled by Donald Trump, but moreso by the boot-lickers and…