Last summer, when I kicked off this letter from Washington, I turned to my old friend and drinking buddy, Mark Leibovich, for a conversation about #thistown. If he weren’t so kind and supportive a colleague, if he weren’t so damn interesting and fun to talk to, I would be absolutely unable to read his writing out of pure, neon green envy. And I have told him this to his face.
I mean, who can forget his blistering, bullseye coinages, like “power mourners,” from his book This Town? The book, like all of Mark’s political journalism, is satire in its most perfect—that is, deliciously vicious—form. (I had to take a minute to compose myself when I got to the description, in Mark’s terrific new book, Thank You for Your Servitude, of Stephen Miller as “the president’s droopy-eyed deportation zealot.“)
