Mark Leibovich
Photo: © Doug Mills, New York Times
Mark Leibovich is a recipient of the National Magazine Award for profile writing. He is the author of four books, including the number one New York Times bestsellers Thank You For Your Servitude and This Town. He recently joined The Atlantic, after a ten-year stint as chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. Before arriving at the magazine in 2012, Leibovich covered national politics in the Times' Washington Bureau. He previously worked at The Washington Post and the San Jose Mercury News. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.
Thank You for Your Servitude
The #1 New York Times Bestseller
“He’s one of the best chroniclers of politics today.” –Jake Tapper
“This is a really funny book.” –Kara Swisher
“His writing is so damn good.” –John Berman
“Really fascinating...There are so many revelations.” –Anderson Cooper
“The new must read summer book.” –Stephanie Ruhle
From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller This Town, the eyewitness account of how the GOP collaborated with Donald Trump to transform Washington’s “swamp” into a gold-plated hot tub—and a onetime party of rugged individualists into a sycophantic personality cult.
In the early months of Trump’s candidacy, the Republican Party’s most important figures, people such as Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, were united—and loud—in their scorn and contempt. Even more, in their outrage: Trump was a menace and an affront to our democracy. Then, awkwardly, Trump won.
Thank You for Your Servitude is Mark Leibovich’s unflinching account of the moral rout of a major American political party, tracking the transformation of Rubio, Cruz, Graham, and their ilk into the administration’s chief enablers, and the swamp’s lesser lights into frantic chasers of the grift. What would these politicos do to preserve their place in the sun, or at least the orbit of the spray tan? What would they do to preserve their “relevance”? Almost anything, it turns out. Trump’s savage bullying of everyone in his circle, along with his singular command of his political base, created a dangerous culture of submission in the Republican Party. Meanwhile, many of the most alpha of the lapdogs happily conceded to Mark Leibovich that they were “in on the joke.” As Lindsey Graham told the author, his supporters in South Carolina generally don’t read The New York Times, and they won’t read this book, either. All that cynicism, shading into nihilism, led to a country truly unhinged from reality, and to the events of January 6, 2021. It’s a vista that makes the Washington of This Town seem like a comedy of manners in comparison.
Thank You for Your Servitude isn’t another view from the Oval Office: it’s the view from the Trump Hotel. We can check out any time we want, but only time will tell if we can ever leave.
Interview on Moyers & Company
Praise for Big Game
“The high point of any monster movie, whether you’re talking “King Kong” or “Jurassic Park,” comes at the moment when you finally get a full view of the giant beast. You’ve caught a glimpse or two, heard a roar in the distance, but when you finally see the monster’s full immensity, it’s a sight to behold … and you wonder how in the hell your little heroes are going to survive its fury Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times, an exceptional new behind-the-scenes book by Mark Leibovitch, is a monster movie disguised as investigative journalism. Running from 2014 right on up to this year, Leibovitch’s narrative presents the NFL’s owners and commissioner in all their bumbling, well-meaning, self-serving, self-satisfied glory … and shows in high definition how unprepared they were for the monster that stomped in to demolish everything they hold dear.” —Yahoo! Sports
“What we have here are 349 unflinching pages detailing the NFL’s rampant boobery . . . It probably took a reporter like Leibovich to write a historic book like this. A top-flight journalist who’d gorged on a product for decades parachutes into the factory to see exactly how the product is made and who’s making it. The findings are mind-numbing, stomach-turning and stupefying. But the product is still so delicious.” —NBCSports.com
“Enlightening and entertaining . . . Boston fans will savor an abundance of material about the hometown team. The chapters involving the Patriots (among them, ‘Beware the Pissed Off Pretty Boy,’ ‘“I’m Drunk, I’m Stupid, I’m a Pats Fan”, the Man Told Police’) are filled with delectable tidbits.” —Boston Globe
Praise for Citizens of the Green Room
“Mark Leibovich profiles are like flaming Dr. Pepper shots. They’re great… Leibovich’s profiles, read en masse, lay bare Washington’s formative paradox: You can’t fix D.C. unless you go there, and you can’t do well there without becoming everything that’s broken about it.” —Slate
Praise for This Town
“This Town reads like the endgame chapters of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire…In addition to his reporting talents, Leibovich is a writer of excellent zest. At times his book is laugh-out-loud (as well as weep-out-loud). He is an exuberant writer, even as his reporting leaves one reaching for Xanax…Vastly entertaining and deeply troubling.”—Christopher Buckley, The New York Times Book Review
“This Town is funny, it’s interesting, and it is demoralizing … I loved it as much as you can love something which hurts your heart.”—John Oliver, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
“It’s been the summer of This Town. What lingers from This Town is what will linger in Washington well after its current dinosaurs are extinct: the political culture owned by big money.”—Frank Rich, New York Magazine
“Many decades from now, a historian looking at where America lost its way could use This Town as a primary source.” —Fareed Zakaria
“Here it is, Washington in all its splendid, sordid glory…[Leibovich] seems to wear those special glasses that allow you to x-ray the outside and see what’s really going on. Start to finish, this is a brilliant portrait – pointillist, you might say, or modern realist. So brilliant that once it lands on a front table at Politics & Prose Leibovich will never be able to have lunch in this town again. There are also important insights tucked in among the barbs…So here’s to all the big mouths, big shots, big machers, and big jerks. In case you’re wondering, Mark Leibovich is on to every one of you, and his portrayal of This Town is spot on.”—David Shribman, The New York Times
“In his new book This Town, Mark Leibovich commits an act of treason against the Washington establishment… Thoroughly entertaining… Leibovich is a keen observer and energetic writer.”—Reid Pillifant, New York Observer
“This Town is a frothy Beltway insider tell-all …rollicking fun and sharply written. A big, sprawling fun beach read of a book—snappy and well-crafted.”—Susan Gardner, The Daily Kos
“This Town is as entertaining for the broader picture it paints of a capital that corrupts even the most incorruptible as it is for the salacious gossip that dominated early reviews. Books like Leibovich’s are important resources for historians who, a century from now, will use This Town as a trove of background information for a pivotal period when our politics became poisonous.”—Reid Wilson, The National Journal
“Leibovich delivers the reportorial goods. He is in all the parties, and supplies a wildly entertaining anthrolopogical tour.”—Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
“Leibovich has written a very funny book about how horrible his industry can be…Uncommonly honest.”—David Weigel, Slate
“[Leibovich] is a master of the political profile…This Town is as insidery as Game Change.”—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
“Intensely anticipated…. [Leibovich] has a real affection for many of his characters… [and] also throws a few unapologetically hard punches.”—Ben Smith, Buzzfeed
“Witty, entertaining….the book is enlightening on how journalism is practiced in Washington…This Town could also be source material for your book about what’s wrong with these horrible people and – more importantly, but also much more difficult – how to fix the culture that led to their ascendance….This Town is a funny book, but it should probably make you as angry and depressed as “Two American Families.”—Alex Pareene, Salon.com
“For the sweaty, twitching, huddled masses of Washington gossip addicts, This Town is rife with such shiny nuggets, the literary equivalent of crack.”—Lloyd Grove, Newsweek/The Daily Beast
“Corrosively funny and subtly subversive…. siren song of money and pseudo-celebrity ….irresistible.”—Walter Shapiro, The American Prospect
“Like a modern-day Balzac to US capital power players….hilarious….perceptive.”—Richard McGregor, Financial Times
“A rollicking, if disconcerting, read.”—Denver Post
“Provides a lancing, often hysterically funny portrait of the capital’s vanities and ambitions.”—The New Yorker
“A common trope among conservatives is the “cocktail party scene,” which Republican reformers encounter when they go to Washington and which lures them into selling out their beliefs. This Town provides plenty of evidence not only that those worries are grounded, but that it’s far worse than we imagined….[U]nusual and refreshing…. [A] successful and needed undertaking…. Leibovich enlivens his tedious subjects with a funny and vivid writing style…. he’s also an engaging storyteller. The last quarter of This Town, which dishes on Leibovich’s encounters with the major players from the 2012 election, is undeniably good reading… If you want to understand why you should wake up quivering with white-hot hatred for elite Washington, This Town is well worth your time.”—Matt Purple, The American Spectator
“[A] sharp-eyed, funny and elegantly written takedown of Washington’s crass, insidery, back-scratching (by journalists and politicians alike) culture…. [T]he Tony Soprano of journalists…but with a heart.”—Margaret Carlson, Bloomberg News
“This book has to be the book of the summer, open on the fat or flat bellies of Washington’s privileged political elite at Rehoboth, Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. Even if they are in it, or are looking for themselves in it with dread or delicious anticipation, a Washington version of narcissism, “This Town” is not to be missed.”—Dan Simpson, Pittsburgh Post Gazette
“Not since Truman Capote’s “Answered Prayers” knocked New York society on its heels with its thinly fictionalized revelations of real players who had thought the author was their friend has a book so riled a city’s upper echelons.”—Lois Romano, Politico
Events
Join Mark on his tour for Thank You for Your Servitude.
