“Since Trump’s second election we’ve been in a wave of cowardice, where people have decided — partly by observing what others like them are doing — that there’s no viability to standing up on principle.” — Jacob Weisberg
Michelle Goldberg devoted her Monday New York Times column to two new books shaming the elites who caved to Trump. Both of them have appeared on the show this week: Susan Neiman’s Call It Evil on Monday, and now Jacob Weisberg’s Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.
Reversing JFK’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, Weisberg inducts eight powerful Americans who didn’t stand up to Trump into his hall of shame. It’s quite a list. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Wall Street’s Stephen Schwarzman, big law’s Brad Karp, Senator Mitch McConnell, Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock, Chief Justice John Roberts, media influencer Megyn Kelly, and — perhaps most controversially — former President George W. Bush.
Rather than MAGA flunkeys, Weisberg wanted figures who had stood up to Trump in the first term and then folded in the second. People with, as he puts it, interior drama. Bezos gave up a $10 billion Pentagon contract rather than soften the Post, then he threw in the moral towel by going to Mar-a-Lago and paying Melania $40 million to make an Amazon documentary. What changed? According to Weisberg, Bezos was fearful that his space startup, Blue Origin, would lose out to SpaceX on government contracts. No, not exactly Eichmann. But nonetheless sad if true. Especially since Bezos has the billions to do whatever he wants.
His eight and their ilk aren’t monsters, Weisberg suggests. It’s just that their fear, ambition and self-preservation are contagious, and such pathetic behaviour is herd-like. That’s their soap operatic interior drama. The banality of cowardice. More grist for Susan Neiman’s thesis about the nature of evil in the Trump epoch.
Five Takeaways
• Not Kennedy’s Book. JFK wrote Profiles in Courage while ducking McCarthy. Weisberg keeps the structure, inverts the subject — and quotes Twain: why is physical courage so common and moral courage so rare?
• Cowardice Is Contagious. Behaviour is herd-like. The tech bosses who deplatformed Trump after January 6 now all think the opposite — and all at the same time.
• Bezos and the Rocket. He gave up a $10 billion contract in the first term; in the second he paid Melania $40 million. What changed: SpaceX pulled ahead of Blue Origin.
• McConnell Went Home. He had decided Trump should be barred from office forever, and Weisberg argues he had the votes. Then he went back to Kentucky and changed his mind.
• The Case for Shame. His remedy is a community asserting its values — and his Profiles in Courage would be local: Minneapolis neighbours, lawyers who resigned, honk-for-democracy signs.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
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Buy Profiles in Cowardice: penguinrandomhouse.com
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: Michelle Goldberg and the shame books
00:01:29 Why not JFK’s Profiles in Courage
00:03:06 Adams, Houston, Taft — and Kennedy’s own record
00:04:21 Is this politics as the Sermon on the Mount?
00:07:10 What exactly is cowardice?
00:08:38 Twain: why moral courage is so rare
00:09:09 Fear, Hobbes and herd behaviour
00:10:44 A contagion — and the tech bosses who moved as one
00:12:10 Does Andreessen get credit for jumping first?
00:15:14 Bezos and the $10 billion contract
00:16:10 What changed in the second term
00:19:48 If the space vision pays off, is he forgiven?
00:22:19 How the eight were chosen
00:25:08 John Roberts and the rule of law
00:27:11 Why McConnell and not Vance or Rubio
00:28:43 The votes he could have delivered
00:30:32 Old Crow: bullying and the McConnell psychology
00:31:50 Schwarzman and Karp — just doing business?
00:34:50 George W. Bush and the sin of omission
00:38:03 Sian Beilock, Dartmouth and academic independence
00:42:11 Megyn Kelly: from standing up to bullies to becoming one
00:44:55 Who would make a Profiles in Courage?
00:48:00 Is the book his own act of resistance?
00:49:48 Shame, and Trump’s absence of it
00:50:50 What about RFK Jr.?
00:51:53 Truth and reconciliation in 2028?