Eight Profiles in Cowardice: Jacob Weisberg on Bezos, Bush & the Other Collaborators of the MAGA Age

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Earlier this week, there was an interesting op-ed in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg on books seeking to shame people, elites in particular who caved into Trump. She mentioned, a guest we had earlier on the show, Susan Neiman, who has a new book out called Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, in which she connects personal greed with people who compromised and embraced Donald Trump. And in Goldberg's piece, she also and, really, it was the focus of the book, talks about another book, which is out this week, Profiles in Cowardice by my guest, Jacob Weisberg, who is a very famous writer, publisher, troublemaker, is talking to us from New York. Jacob, congratulations on this book.

00:01:26 Jacob Weisberg: Thank you, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:29 Andrew Keen: Obviously, when we think of profiles in cowardice, we think of JFK's Profiles in Courage, the book that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 [ed.: published 1956; the Pulitzer was awarded in 1957]. Is that the focus of the book, to compare and contrast our current age with JFK's?

00:01:51 Jacob Weisberg: Well, not in that sense. I had to take the book as a departure point, and I'd like the structure of it, of picking eight representative figures who stand in for different parts of the problem. But Kennedy's book, you know, was written in a different era. It was written at the height of the McCarthy era, in fact. And what's part of what's interesting about the context is that JFK was far from courageous on McCarthyism. Quite the contrary, he sort of took a dive and avoided even voting or saying how he would have voted on the censure vote that finally began to bring Joe McCarthy down. He was also, not at all courageous on civil rights in that era. And I think he wrote the book in part because he wanted to give himself courage by looking to examples of earlier previous senators, and all the profiles in that book are of senators, who had taken decisions against their own interests, who had sacrificed their careers or risked their careers because of principles they thought were important. And it's interesting that, substantively, these are not at all people, Kennedy would necessarily have agreed with on the substance

00:03:06 Andrew Keen: of the I'm putting on the screen the

00:03:09 Jacob Weisberg: Yeah.

00:03:09 Andrew Keen: The characters that, JFK, wrote about in this book, including John Quincy Adams, Sam Houston, Robert Taft, as you said.

00:03:19 Jacob Weisberg: Yeah. I mean, Taft, thought that the Nuremberg trials were a terrible violation of constitutional democracy and of and an example of victor's justice. And well, there's an argument about all that, but I don't think Kennedy agreed with it. But he admired that Taft was willing to resist his own party, which is in fact the Republican Party, over that issue. And so it's a kind of it's sort of a model and such a touchstone, I think, because that book, he's the only president, ever won a Pulitzer Prize, even though the book, had a ghostwriter. But I think it, you know, it really sort of sets the, people use that term in Washington all the time. He's a profile in courage. But it's very rare because essentially what they're saying is someone was willing to make a political sacrifice for something they believed in. And it's often used ironically in the sense of there goes another profile in courage, i.e., not at all. You know, someone who's totally unwilling to take any risk to do something that they think is important.

00:04:21 Andrew Keen: Jacob, just after the First World War, the great sociologist Max Weber gave a very famous speech in Munich, warning radical students about what he called approaching politics in a Sermon on the Mount way. He suggested that they needed to be a little bit more practical to, maybe put their morality in their pocket, their back pocket. Is the book that you're presenting and so many others like, Neiman's Call It Evil. I mean, it came out this week as well. So two books on relatively similar subjects coming out of the same week, and we have another one coming out later this week. Are you all doing what Weber warned against, turning politics into a Sermon on the Mount? Every political action of one kind or another, either an action taken or not taken is a moral one?

00:05:17 Jacob Weisberg: I hope not, Andrew. I think I'm very comfortable with political compromise. We live in a world of political compromise, but there are core issues on which we can't compromise, and that is how our system basically functions and that we share certain values around democracy and human rights. And that's where Trump has transgressed and been like pretty much any other certainly modern president in that he's rejected the premises of some of the fundamental premises of the system, such as that you let people vote and follow the results of elections. And you know, that's why I think this becomes a moral question because Trump has tried to govern as a dictator or a king, and he has, ignored the constitutional role of Congress even in, cases where Congress would vote for the things he wanted. He believes that it's more important that he be able to rule by executive order or an emergency decree. And that's why I think it does become a kind of moral question whether you support that, whether you accept it. And the people I write about in the book are people generally who, at some earlier point, often in Trump's first term, actually did stand up to him and see him as a danger and resist him. And then in the second term, have sort of given up and, given in to him. And that's how I see the larger picture, and I wanted to kind of find these representative figures stand in for these different institutions that I think have been weak. But you know, I'm not a crusader. I'm not someone who goes through life thinking every political issue is a moral value. To the contrary, I think we have to have compromise to make progress on most day-to-day political issues.

00:07:10 Andrew Keen: What exactly is cowardice? I looked it up, on Wikipedia and where else, and we got the image of the Cowardly Lion from the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in contrast. Courage, is presented in terms of bravery. Is cowardice a kind of evil?

00:07:32 Jacob Weisberg: It's so interesting. I was just glancing at that definition, and it is defined typically as the opposite of courage, which is in fact how I mean it. But I think it's a negative attribute. It's an absence. It's a lack. It's something you don't have, as opposed to something that is kind of itself has its own definition. Of course, there are different kinds of courage and different kinds of cowardice. And what I'm talking about here is not what people will commonly understand to be physical courage and physical cowardice. I'm talking about a kind of moral courage and moral cowardice, which is, I think, the kind of more difficult, phenomenon. And interestingly, I at the beginning of the book, I quote this observation by Mark Twain who said, you know, why is it that physical courage is so common and moral courage is so rare? And I think that tends to be true. You know, there are many people who would be physically brave in many situations that have been physically heroic, but who shrink away from making certain kinds of hard decisions.

00:08:38 Andrew Keen: Are we fearful? I mean, I mentioned Weber. Hobbes, of course, in his Leviathan, his great political work, maybe the founding political work of the modern age, suggested that we are, by definition, fearful, which accounts for our willingness to make compromises in politics and enter into civil society. Is fear then, Jacob, a condition, a human condition? Is it something that we all fight against, whether it's moral or physical?

00:09:09 Jacob Weisberg: Well, the, you know, the Hobbesian picture of the transition from the state of nature is, of course, a very, you know, idealized rather than any kind of historically grounded portrait of how humanity developed. But these basic emotions of fear, including physical fear, of greed, of ambition, these are yes. These are what motivate most people most of the time, and trying to explain people's actions without respect to them tends to provide kind of inadequate explanations. But I do also think I mean, you've already quoted Weber a couple of times, you know, key figure in modern sociology looking at how people actually behave in the real world. And one of the things you observe about this kind of political behavior in the real world is that it's very herd-like, and it's very determined by context and peer groups. And people tend to copy those around them and emulate those around them, which is why people sometimes say that, you know, courage is contagious, and cowardice is contagious too. And I think we've had these kind of social waves, going back and forth. And the problem is that I think we've been, since Trump's second election, in a wave of cowardice where people have decided partly by observing what others like them are doing, that there's no real p— possibility or no viability, to standing up on principle.

00:10:44 Andrew Keen: So it's a kind of contagion, COVID 2.0?

00:10:49 Jacob Weisberg: I think so. I mean, it's really interesting. You can see this really well, I think, if you look at the sort of tech overlords, who in Trump One were really not in his camp. But after January 6, they acted almost as one, to throw Trump off all of the social media platforms, and they all said that they would cease making any political contributions to Republicans who, after January 6, still voted against certifying the election. And then you kind of thought I mean, I agreed with what they were doing then, but I couldn't help but notice even then that, you know, they all suddenly thought the same thing that was quite different from what they'd all thought a few months earlier. And now lo and behold, they all think more or less the same thing again. It's the opposite of that. You know? They've gone back to supporting Republicans who don't think January 6 was a big problem, and they're all in business with Donald Trump. And you can say that's just realism, but part of the way they defend it is by saying, well, we have no choice because we exist in a competitive world where if we stood up, it would create a competitive advantage for the people we're trying to win against in the marketplace.

00:12:10 Andrew Keen: I wonder if there's a thin division perhaps between courage and cowardice. I was in, Kenya a couple of years ago, and I went to that famous river where all these innocent animals rush across in order to escape, crocodiles or lions, whatever they're escaping. And it's always the first ones that are courageous and then the others that are maybe, if not cowardly, certainly not courageous. When it comes to Silicon Valley, for example, should one acknowledge somebody like Andreessen, who was one of the early people to jump on the Trump bandwagon? In other words, if you go against common opinion, Jacob, should we credit people even if we don't admire how they do it?

00:13:10 Jacob Weisberg: Well, fair enough, Andrew. But I think when the decision is totally self-interested, standing up to and not even standing up to, but making some kind of departure from your peer group. It doesn't look to me very courageous. You know, I think, Andreessen was maybe more public because, he was so outspoken on Twitter and so on. But his opinions were pretty representative of group of people we've gotten to know a lot better now. You know, David Sacks and the people who've been advocating for crypto and who've been at the center of this, you know, utterly kind of corrupt, business around crypto, that's all tied up with the president and his family. But you know, and Andreessen was speaking for the other members of his firm for you know, some of this started, I think, when he was trying to defend Facebook from charges that, it had some responsibility for, the manipulation that took place around the 2016 election, which, by the way, I think they did have some responsibility for it. So, you know, it's hard for me. I mean, you I take you to the sort of general drift of what you're saying, which is that you it's not really very fair to just call cowardice things that you substantively disagree with. And I've tried very hard not to do that, in the book. In fact, I give sort of a lot of time and space to trying to understand the perspective of these people and why they made may have made the decisions they did. Partly because I think none of us can barely be confident that in the same kind of situation or in a parallel situation, we would just do the right thing. It's very easy to think you would do the right thing if you never have to make a choice that involves cutting yourself off from your peer group or giving out losing your job or sacrificing income or, you know, all of these things that are vulnerabilities for the people who have succumb to Trump in the second term.

00:15:14 Andrew Keen: The book has eight main characters, one of which is a certain Jeff Bezos. You had an interesting piece in Vanity Fair, last week calling him Rocket Man, how Jeff Bezos' space race against Elon Musk made him cozy up to Trump. Is then, in a sense, Jacob, is courage going against one's own interests, sacrificing one's monetary wealth, is that the sin of Bezos not to be able to— [unclear]? I mean, he as you kind of suggest, in the first term, he bankrolled the Washington Post. He made it one of the key media defenses against Trump lying. Did he succumb to his own self interest? Is that what, at least in his case, cowardice is?

00:16:10 Jacob Weisberg: Let's talk about the first term Bezos for a minute. So I think he would that he would absolutely conform to the JFK definition of courage, which is making a difficult decision against your self interest. Trump came after Bezos because he didn't like The Washington Post coverage, which was very tough on him, but it was basically the kind of accountability journalism you need in a democracy for it to succeed and flourish. He took a $10 million— $10 billion contract away from Amazon. The Pentagon was on the verge of awarding. And that was Jeff Bezos can afford it. I mean, he was until, the SpaceX IPO probably the richest man in the world. But you know, $10 billion is a lot of money for a company like Amazon, and I'm sure there were a lot of people who worked for it there who are extremely unhappy about losing it. And he didn't flinch. And in the second term, he did flinch. He went on bended knee to Mar-a-Lago and gave Melania $40 million for her ridiculous documentary about being the first lady. But so, you know, you asked the question, well, you know, is that cowardice or is it something else? I try to give some definition to this, but try to understand why he changed, what changed. I think what changed is his the thing that is closest to his heart, the thing that he cares about most is putting human beings into space. And this has been a through line and a thread, since he was a kid really reading science fiction. But he's always had this fascination and even a kind of obsession with it. His high school graduation speech was about creating these orbiting colonies, to get people off Earth. And it's actually quite it's, as space goes, especially as compared to Musk, it's a very idealistic and I would say kind of benign version, you know, with part of it is animated by the idea of environmental protection of Earth and protecting humanity. But you know, he's not envisioning people living on Mars. He thinks it would be a good idea to get them in these little kind of orbiting terrariums around Earth. And it was sort of quite interesting to disinter that and understand that Bezos has pursued a quite specific vision his whole life. In some ways, I think you could argue he created Amazon to get rich enough so he could spend the money doing this, what was, you know, not gonna be for economic at least for quite a long time. And he was losing. He between the first and the second term, what happened was that SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, got way, way ahead of Blue Origin, Bezos' company. And that whole business is really dependent on government contracts from NASA and the Pentagon. And I think Bezos saw that being on the outs with Trump and Musk being on the ins with Trump meant that Blue Origin was gonna be left by the wayside. And my argument is that's what, caused him to come around. So, again, you know, I don't wanna put too fine a point on the terminology of cowardice. I think it was a kind of surrender of another principle in favor of something else that he certainly thinks is important, but is a kind of is a sort of private pursuit as opposed to defense of, institutions and institutional principle.

00:19:48 Andrew Keen: To what extent, though, is this all a matter of utility? There was that famous interaction, I think, between Zhou Enlai and Kissinger when Kissinger asked him what he thought of the French revolution, and Zhou Enlai said, too early to tell. If Bezos's vision in space is realized, as you say, and it does create enormous wealth, prosperity, happiness on Earth, it represents our next chapter in humanity. And historians write and say, well, it was his ability to pacify Trump and get on his best side that enabled that. Will that, in a sense, Jacob, justify his, what you call his collaboration with Donald Trump?

00:20:35 Jacob Weisberg: I think that's what you'd call it imponderable. I mean, you're, you know, you're the big supposition there, which is that

00:20:41 Andrew Keen: But it does, suggest I mean, the way you're presenting it is that's what, Bezos was trying to do. He doesn't really care one way or the other about Trump. He just cares about his own space vision.

00:20:56 Jacob Weisberg: Well, I'm all for people pursuing their own visions, but there are certain things you can't sacrifice, and I think these are widely recognized. I mean, nobody would respect Bezos if he sacrificed his children in some way to pursue his vision, which, you know, I don't know that much about his personal life. He's still, I think, somewhat private about that kind of thing. But there are things that you can compromise or that you should be open to compromising, and there are things that you shouldn't be open to, compromising. And I think in a liberal democracy like ours, if you're open to compromising on the social contract, and on the fundamentals of how its system works and how a business person like Bezos operates within it, and you say, well, you know, I can justify any kind of corruption, any kind of, undemocratic behavior because I think the end is so important. You know, you're in a classic kind of end justifies the means mentality and also, you know, on the other side of your supposition. You know, who is to say that this vision of space will be realized? I think some people would probably think that Bezos' vision of space is a little bit absurd, but you can't rule out anything that is a project of hundreds of years.

00:22:19 Andrew Keen: In a way, Jacob, I'm not envious of this project because it must have been really hard to know who to leave out. I mean, what Musk comes to mind, of course, and Bezos and Musk are often talked about in the same way. I'm not asking you for your reserve figure in Profiles in Cowardice, because you probably spend the next hour talking about them. But how did you make this decision? Were there people you particularly didn't like or irritated you, or are they all in their own ways? And we'll come to some of the other examples, simply symbolic of the way in which people have morally compromised with this second Trump administration.

00:23:05 Jacob Weisberg: There are a few criteria. One, I was looking for I wasn't interested in people who were sort of flunkies of Trump, you know, with whom I didn't think there'd been any kind of, interior drama of any kind. Secondly, I was looking for people who were representative of these institutions that conceived of it conceived of in a broad way had been weak. So I wanted one person who kind of represented what had happened with the big law firms and someone else who was a way to tell the story of what happened with her education and the universities and someone else who stood in for the tech world, Bezos, and someone else who stood in for kind of finance and big business. Then I went to Stephen Schwarz—

00:23:49 Andrew Keen: Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone is in the book. Yeah.

00:23:53 Jacob Weisberg: Yeah. But I wanted people who I thought had in some way violated their own principles. That is either because they had expressed a very different point of view at an earlier stage or they'd given up on Trump and thought that he was after January 6, said he was dangerous, could never be allowed to hold power again. So I wanted people who you know, with whom there was some kind of moral drama and personal drama at the heart of the story. And I just wanted to try to get inside the thinking partly because, you know, I don't think the world is divided into people who are inherently courageous and people who are natural cowards. I mean, I think, you know, this could be any of us, and any of us could be in some version of the situation faced by these people. And I think it's illusory to think back to the beginning of the conversation that, well, you know, we would make if we were them, we would have made the right choice. Of course, we would. Well, we know, of course, that most people don't most of the time and that, you know, the moral heroes and people really willing to risk everything for fundamental beliefs are very rare. So some of it is, you know, trying to kind of think through the dilemma, from on the inside rather than the outside.

00:25:08 Andrew Keen: Jacob, one of the headlines this week is Donald Trump criticizing the Supreme Court after justices blocked mail-in ballot restrictions. Some people see John Roberts, chief justice, as a moral or literal bulwark against Trumpism, but you've included him in your hall of infamy. Why Roberts? Isn't he a more ambivalent figure than you're presenting him as?

00:25:36 Jacob Weisberg: He is a complicated case, and I think I present him in a complicated way. It's funny you say that. Some people see him just the opposite. They see him as a kind of shill for Trump or someone who's been finding excuses to hand Trump power. I'm somewhere in between. I think Roberts has his own agenda, his own idio— ideology about executive power. I don't think he likes Trump. Personally, I think Trump is probably very unpleasant to him. I mean, Trump has certainly attacked Roberts in the past in a nasty way and doesn't hesitate to do so when Roberts rules against him as he did yesterday on something that's important. But I think Roberts is sort of failing to live up to this larger role of the top, judicial figure in the United States and someone who, for that reason, has a broader responsibility around the rule of law and protecting the justice system from corruption and politicization. And in a moment when the, Justice Department is being used as a weapon to go after political enemies, I just think the chief justice of the United States has a responsibility that I think Roberts hasn't lived up to. I think he's just sort of kept his head down. Trump isn't doing things the way Roberts would like to do them. But in a lot of cases, he's, giving Roberts the opportunity to get to the result he would like to get to.

00:27:11 Andrew Keen: The one Republican on your list is Mitch McConnell, who seems or at least seemed, up until maybe this week, to be on his deathbed, although he seems to have been on his deathbed for many years. Yeah. Why McConnell? Why not JD Vance? Why not Marco Rubio?

00:27:27 Jacob Weisberg: Well, again, you know, you have to choose. And when you say one Republican, I mean, I also have a chapter about George W. Bush and

00:27:33 Andrew Keen: Oh, yeah. I forgot about why. He's, an old-fashioned Republican. Yeah.

00:27:36 Jacob Weisberg: I mean, the only elected Republican who's in office at the moment. And I picked, McConnell partly because I think he is the person who had the greatest power almost single-handedly to prevent Trump coming back into office in a second term. And I think McConnell wanted to do that and shrank from it. And this is around the second impeachment after January 6, after, Trump was impeached by the House. The senate was going to have the vote on conviction, and McConnell was decided that Trump should be removed from office and barred from, holding office in the future. And he could have done it. He could have voted for it himself, which he's told people he was going to do, and he could have delivered the 10 more Republican votes, I think. I make an argument in the book. He could have delivered those votes that would have, rid us of Trump and political life, forever. And he changed his mind. He bailed, with that kind of

00:28:43 Andrew Keen: Was it fair, cowardice? Mhmm.

00:28:45 Jacob Weisberg: I think it was cowardice, and I think it was also fear. I think, it was a combination of things. I mean, I talk about bullying as a dynamic in the lives of several of the people in this book, and I think Trump is a very, successful bully. And if, for someone like McConnell, who was bullied as a child and clearly has an emotional and psychological dynamic around that, I think the fear is a real thing. But I think the fear was, you know, wasn't being beat up by Donald Trump, although there may have been some element of that. I think it was of losing his place in the world, and his place in the world was entirely around the Republican party and the Republican party in the Senate, which he had built into this tremendous machine of fundraising, of judicial appointees, of using the rules in the system to get the results they wanted. And McConnell's whole identity, I mean, is why he's, you know, ending, you know, his life maybe in the Senate in this kind of pathetic way. He can't imagine not being a US senator, and his whole goal in life was to be Senate majority leader. And once he got that, I think he couldn't contemplate giving it up. I think, bringing down Donald Trump, although he could have done it, might well have meant the end of his career being able to lead the Republicans in the Senate. I think the rank and file were not behind him. He called this recess. He went home to Kentucky. He learned that Trump, even after January 6, still commanded this kind of majority support inside the party, and he just thought, you know, I'm not willing to sacrifice.

00:30:32 Andrew Keen: Even though even Trump went after his wife and didn't seem to be too bothered about that.

00:30:37 Jacob Weisberg: You know, in a vicious racist way. I mean, I don't think he wasn't bothered by it. I think he was probably immensely bothered by it. I think, you know, I don't think he likes being called names, by Trump, especially because some of the nicknames are pretty good. I mean, I think Old Crow, which is a brand of, Kentucky bourbon, is one of Trump's better nicknames, which he uses for McConnell. But it's cruel, you know, and I think you see, you know, you see McConnell sort of manifesting the reaction to that cruelty. And he doesn't fight back, I think, because he's weak in relation to Trump, and he is afraid of Trump. He is intimidated by Trump. But you know, my god, this is someone whose, you know, whole point is about the constitutional and historical role of the Senate, the prerogatives of the Senate, why we need a Senate to be a functioning democracy. Again, you know, you can argue, take issue with some of those views, but they are McConnell's view clear views of a lifetime. And what has he done? He's empowered this president who doesn't give a shit about the Senate, who, you know, wants to do things on his own, not ask the Senate majority leader whether he can have permission. And McConnell has enabled that.

00:31:50 Andrew Keen: Two of them are, I wouldn't say, defensible, but certainly maybe understandable characters in your list of infamy are Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of the Blackstone Group, and Brad Karp, former chairperson of, Paul Weiss, a major law firm. He's been humiliated on lots of fronts in the last year or two. Is that fair, Jacob? Could one make a more moral defense of Karp and, Schwarzman? They're just going about their business, making money, creating clients, and they're in a slightly different category from McConnell or Roberts or, George W. Bush or will come to later?

00:32:33 Jacob Weisberg: You know, Andrew, I'd say they're in exactly the same category. And what I was just talking about as McConnell's principles, I think these people, you have to give them credit for having certain principles too. And at the very least, they have to be the principles of their professions and their institutions. So in Karp's case, the rule of law, and all of that what that means for lawyers. The right that people have a right to a lawyer and that a president or a politician can't, arbitrarily punish someone because they don't like their clients. So they don't like the clients' law lawyers have represented. With Schwarzman, I think there are just some fundamental principles about American business and American capitalism. Again, you know, you may or may not be an advocate of American capitalism, but he is. He's at the core of it, and he's benefited from everything that has made business in America possible and successful. The enforceability of contracts, the rule of law more broadly, free trade, free enterprise. These are the, you know, these are the ideas that Schwarzman will express anytime he's with another group of businessmen. It's what they believe in. But do they really believe in it? Because when the opportunity came to be on the inside with a corrupt government and have the benefit of being on the inside and being connected, it's enough to keep him and them totally silent about Trump's total abrogation and violation of those principles. You know, the to have a president who demands stakes, ownership stakes in some of the largest American businesses, on the basis that he's powerful and he can get them. I mean, there's not much that is more offensive to the idea of the capitalist system than that. It's either socialism or some form of corporatism, where the state directs the actions of companies. And you know, again, it's not whether you believe that's a good idea or it's a bad idea. It's that if you're Steve Schwarzman, you don't and can't believe that's a good or, appropriate idea.

00:34:50 Andrew Keen: One character I think some people will be surprised to be on the list is George W. Bush. You have an interesting piece about him in the New Yorker. How did he get on the list, G. W. Bush? I mean, he's everyone, especially in the context of Trump, I mean, everyone thought, oh, that guy was actually reasonably decent, certainly, compared with what's happening now.

00:35:13 Jacob Weisberg: Well, compared to Trump, I think he is. I think, and I think Bush kind of is a stand in to me for the non MAGA Republican Party, which does still exist and, you know, one day may find some way of reasserting itself. But Bush obviously abhors Trump, and he makes that very clear to the people around him. And it's no surprise. I mean, Trump's been absolutely vicious about Bush and his family. You know, we just have the 25th anniversary of September 11th. Trump said when he first ran that Bush was personally responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers. I mean, just because he happened to be president at the time that, you know, you should blame him for it happening. I thought that was, you know, just a horrendous thing to say. And Bush stands depending on, how you think about it for the idea that America stands for democracy, for an infusion of moral values into politics, for a kinder, gentler conservatism. And then more specifically, for, you know, one program in particular, PEPFAR, which was his, HIV/AIDS program, a program that supplied antiretroviral drugs to HIV-positive people in Africa and other places in the world. And it's sort of one of the it's universally agreed to be one of the most successful government programs of all time. I think it saved, 25 million lives probably over the since Bush's presidency. And Trump, of course, destroyed it. Musk, when DOGE came in, he, you know, he took a chainsaw to USAID. Everyone there was fired. The whole enterprise of US foreign aid was end ended, and PEPFAR with most of that went most of PEPFAR. And you know, you just think, well, you know, why was Bush when the his fundamental values, including as some kind of more humane minded Republican? I mean, put aside the question of what Bush actually did in office, but what he professes to believe. Why won't he speak out as other ex presidents have often spoken out when they think some fundamental value or principle is under threat in this country? And well, I have an explanation. I have an argument about why he won't. But I think I do think it's cowardly and self-interested to say I'm gonna lie low and not put my, sort of, fragilely improving popularity in danger by criticizing the president who's popular with the people I see every day in Dallas and the other places I go.

00:38:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe he's too busy. As you know— New York, a piece— [unclear] lovingly painting immigrants. So we got eight people, six white men so far. Surprise. Surprise. But you do find space for a couple of women. Megyn Kelly, and, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing her first name right. Is it Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth College? Probably, the least well known figure on the list. So tell me about these two women. How did they get on the list?

00:38:36 Jacob Weisberg: Yeah. She says Sian. And Dartmouth, you know, they're sins of commission and sins of omission. Bush's, I think, is very much a sin of omission. It's what he didn't say as opposed to what he did say or did do. And in a similar way, I think, with Sian Beilock, Dartmouth was sort of a, kind of conscientious objector, sort of opted out of the whole fight between the Trump administration and the universities. It's the only Ivy League university that didn't really support Harvard in its lawsuit against the Trump administration, which Harvard has won all of its cases so far in the court saying that the Trump administration can't punish it by taking away government funding that's already been awarded or by, preventing foreign students who are enrolled in Harvard from attending. And I think Beilock, because Dartmouth's got a pass, and Dartmouth got a pass for bad reasons, which we can go into. But Dartmouth sort of got a free pass, kind of a get out of jail free card, while coming, while investigating pretty much every other certainly every other Ivy League school. The Justice Department didn't investigate Dartmouth. They said Dartmouth is great. And Beilock, I think, said, well, let's just this is, you know, you gotta dance with the people who are in power. Well, let's, you know, let's make friends out of them. And that's what she's done. But I think, again, it's this difference between your institution being, the narrowly conceived institution, i.e., Dartmouth, and the broader conception of what an institutional responsibility that is, your larger responsibility around freedom, academic freedom and academic independence from government. And I think there's a special irony for this to be Dartmouth because the idea of academic independence was really born at Dartmouth in the early nineteenth century. There's a famous early Supreme Court case called Dartmouth versus New Hampshire [ed.: Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819], which was argued by Daniel Webster in front of the five member Supreme Court. And the reason for the case was the state of New Hampshire decided that Dartmouth, which was a private college with a royal charter from before from colonial times before the revolution, they decided, wouldn't it be nice to make Dartmouth the state university? And they went ahead and did it, and Dartmouth sued and said, no. We have right to be independent of government. And it was that case that really established the whole principle that it's valuable to have academic institutions that aren't subject to government. So, you know, that's what that's why I think her position is so disappointing.

00:41:22 Andrew Keen: I'm guessing you didn't go to Dartmouth. You've certainly got a thing against them. You also put on X, I'm quoting you. What a lame depressing take from Sian Beilock on, an Atlantic piece, why I want more AI at Dartmouth. I mean, doesn't I mean, you give a I mean, on your X page, you give people special awards for, winners for profiles in cowardice. I mean, can she do nothing right, this woman? Your kids or grandkids, Jacob, I think they're gonna struggle to get into Dartmouth. Yeah.

00:41:56 Jacob Weisberg: I'm not too worried about that. If, you know, if her piece had been good, I think I would have acknowledged it. I mean, I think, you know, I'm fully capable of kind of seeing multiple sides. Did you read that Atlantic piece, Andrew? I mean, it was just sort of lame, I thought.

00:42:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Although, I'm not sure it's a profile in cowardice. And what about Megyn Kelly, of course, who Trump insulted enormously with his, what was it, flood, blood, floods of— reference [ed.: Trump's 2015 "blood coming out of her wherever" remark] a few years ago? Why did she get in?

00:42:27 Jacob Weisberg: She was terribly abused and threatened by him when she asked him hard questions in a early presidential debate, almost lost the mists of time now back in 2015. It was, one of the first maybe the first Fox News debate, and she was a Fox News journalist. And she asked him about his hostility to women, about terrible things he'd said and about some of his actions as before he ran for office. And he came after her hammer and tongs, and Steve Bannon, kind of acting as an agent for him, kind of unleashed the dogs on her. She was physically threatened. She had to have bodyguards. Her children were threatened. It was terrible. And she stood up to him, I think, in a really meaningful way, especially for a conservative journalist, someone from Fox. I thought it was really admirable and brave. And lo and behold, she's now— Megyn Kelly is now more MAGA than MAGA. And Steve Bannon, you know, she had on her program, and said, you know, I really learned a lot from you. It wasn't pleasant, but I realized that the left is so dangerous that this is how we have to this is how we have to fight. And I think again, back to the theme of bullying, you know, a lot of these people have written memoirs. A lot of them aren't very well read, but they're well read by me. And they explain I think even a bad book can explain a lot about who somebody is and how they think. And a big theme of her book is overcoming the bullying she suffered as a young girl. And she talks in that book about how she can sort of forgive anything except bullying and resolving not only that she would never become a bully herself, but that she would stand up to bullies. And what I think is kind of, tragic, if you will, is that she did stand up to Trump as a bully, but she couldn't keep standing up to him and has become really, I would say, a tremendous bully herself, in the way if you listen to her daily podcast video show, whatever it is, it has just an incredible bitterness and nastiness, in the way she talks about, particularly about trans people, but really about people she disagrees with politically. She treats them as kind of disgusting and subhuman and talks about them the way a bully talks about people.

00:44:55 Andrew Keen: We had recently Skye Perryman on the show. She's got a New York Times bestselling book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times, which charts the way in which ordinary Americans have resisted Trump. If you were to write a Profiles in Courage, Jacob, about the people who actually stood up to Trump, who would get on the list?

00:45:17 Jacob Weisberg: I haven't read her book. Did you do you recommend it?

00:45:22 Andrew Keen: It's yeah. I think so. I think that she writes quite, certainly very passionately about how to resist Trump and about civic responsibility. She writes about, the streets of Minneapolis that I know you've also been following.

00:45:38 Jacob Weisberg: Yeah. I was gonna say, I mean, I would start there, and I think that the focus on ordinary people, is really admirable. It's not that there haven't been any elites who have stood up to Trump. You know, I could name quite a few. I mean, maybe starting at the Federal Reserve with Jay Powell and Lisa Cook. And you know, there are, I mean, last night after the Supreme Court decision, I saw judge former judge Michael Luttig on TV. He was a very conservative Republican court of appeals judge who's was a close friend and peer of John Roberts, And he's been, you know, absolutely out there in challenging Trump from a kind of conservative constitutional perspective. But to me, the real heroes are local people like the people in Minneapolis who came out in the dead of winter, to just defend and try to defend and protect their neighbors. And they won an amazing victory by driving ICE out of Minneapolis, through peaceful means and peaceful protest. And I think, yes, to me, that was absolute courage. And it's interesting when I make some appearances for the book, I'm gonna be doing like a little bit of a tour later this year in several cities. And I wanna try to talk to people who represent different aspects of that kind of civic courage. You know, lawyers who resigned law firms because they made unconscionable deals with Trump, people who stood up for independent media under threat, people who've been part of these very effective ICE protests in Minneapolis and elsewhere. You know, they're I live in a little town upstate, and every weekend, all through the winter too, there are people on this one corner on the main intersection with these signs saying, you know, honk for democracy, stand up to Trump. I think it's really admirable. You never know what's gonna be effective. But the sense that you create a kind of public opposition and a sense that opposition is possible, to me, is at the center of the other story, which is not the focus of this book, but I hope is present in it a little bit about civic courage.

00:48:00 Andrew Keen: Do you see the writing of this book as, if not a profile in courage, certainly, as your response? I mean, you're the co-founder and, I think, the executive chairman of Pushkin. But is this your way of pushing back at this second Trump regime?

00:48:21 Jacob Weisberg: Well, I think so. I mean, I've yeah. I think like a journalist. My identity is a journalist, and this is, you know, at a basic level, just me trying to describe and explain the political situation as I see it and I find it. But I do think that an important corrective to the behavior I talk about and one that's been largely missing is a sense of shame. I mean, shame, plays a constructive can play a constructive social function. It's a way of a community asserting its values, and to castigate someone who has deviated from them. And I think these people who are in leadership positions, who I talk about in the book, have deviated from their responsibility, their public responsibility, their civic responsibility. And I think that's shameful, and I think they should be made to feel shame for that. And also the example of shame, communal shame, community shame being directed at people like that, I think, may have a salutary effect on the behavior of others. So I think that's what's part of what's going on here. But you know, I don't think about myself in terms of the courage, cowardice dichotomy. I think, you know I don't know. I just think about, saying something that hasn't been said and needs to be said.

00:49:48 Andrew Keen: You've been very, very courageous in terms of the time you've given me. Two more very brief questions, Jacob. Yeah. And your point on shame has been kind of is important because, of course, so many people, particularly, I think, Maggie Haberman's new book suggests that the defining quality, if that's the right word, or the defining characteristic of Trump himself is his utter absence of shame, which is what, in some ways, explains things. Very briefly, the one character I would have loved to have seen on the list is RFK Jr... I'm very critical of Trump over the years and, again, maybe giving into his own power last, especially given the Kennedy narrative, given that, your book is in some ways a remix of JFK's Profiles in Courage. Could, RFK Jr.. be potentially a candidate, maybe the ninth or tenth choice on this list?

00:50:50 Jacob Weisberg: I think absolutely. I think I thought about it a little bit. And you know, as you say, members of his own family, including his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, JFK's surviving daughter who's sort of, you know, upholds the family tradition, you know, denounced him. I think RFK Jr.. is, it's hard for me to make sense of him. I mean, he's such he's so weird at some level. You know, I think part of what you do, I mean, when writing these chapters, you develop a theory of the case. You try to explain why someone's done what they've done and who they really are. And I haven't studied RFK Jr.. enough to kind of give you a version of that, but I worry a little bit, that at the end of a deep inquiry, you might just say, this guy's nuts. Yeah.

00:51:39 Andrew Keen: I think that is,

00:51:40 Jacob Weisberg: It's not coherent. You can't say he went from one thing to another from courage to cowardice. He's done good things. He's now doing tremendously bad things. But why he's done either, I'm not sure I have a very good read.

00:51:53 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I think he's, there's known weirds and unknown weirds. And our RFK Jr.. is certainly an unknown. Finally, Jacob, and we've talked about this a number of times in the show. Is there gonna be a need at the end of all this for some sort of hopefully, it's gonna come in 2028. Some sort of truth and reconciliation moment where all this comes out in the wash in public?

00:52:19 Jacob Weisberg: Yes. Although it's gonna be a very interesting question because I think so many positing the optimistic scenario, which is, to me anyway, Democrats elected in '28 and, you know, MAGA's sort of in the decline or in some sense in retreat. Republicans are gonna all say, we were always against it. We always hated him. Yeah. Glad, glad, glad to be rid of him. And they'll try to lie the reality of the way they colluded to make Trump's worst abuse as possible. And I would, you know, again, go back to January 6 and the 100-plus House members who voted against certifying the election after their own House was attacked by the mob. I don't think you can just kind of go back to normal with those people. I think they owe the country an apology and an explanation at the very least.

00:53:16 Andrew Keen: Well, more than an apology. I mean, anyone can apologize.

00:53:19 Jacob Weisberg: Well, let's start there. You know? But I mean, I think in terms of it's some sense being readmitted. I mean, the country faced, you know, the most profound version of this problem after the Civil War when you have the question of, you know, how do you readmit the former secessionist states, the slave states to the union. And there's always that tension between wanting to sort of continuity for the democratic system and the democratic process on the one hand and justice and accountability and on the other. And in the United States, you know, we had about, twelve good years of Reconstruction when I think it was going in the right direction, and then a period of approximately a hundred years after that when it went in the wrong direction. And I think there has to be some sense of accountability and justice, certainly for the real abuses, for the law breaking, for the corruption, and for the people who betrayed democracy. But you know, they're gonna be the system is gonna exert tremendous pressures to just let's get back to normal.

00:54:26 Andrew Keen: Well, I think that's absolutely true. And I and I'm guessing, Jacob, that your Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era won't be your last word on the subject. One thing's for sure, you're not gonna get a job at Dartmouth, but I'm sure you're not too bothered with that. Congratulations on the book. It's out. It's an important contribution to this debate on how to make sense of Trump and his collaborators. Congratulations, Jacob, on the book, and love to get you back on the show. Thank you so much.

00:54:56 Jacob Weisberg: Thank you, Andrew. I enjoyed talking to you.