PROFILES IN COWARDICE: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, by Jacob Weisberg
Say what you like about President Trump, he has ushered in a golden age of cravenness. A nation long perceived, not least by its own nationals, as resilient and courageous — a people of gallant pioneers, fearless entrepreneurs, irresistible war heroes, nerveless astronauts, brave civil rights activists — is now forced to contemplate an entirely new set of data. It seems that, when placed under mild authoritarian pressure, an extraordinary number of powerful Americans, ostensibly honorable and right-thinking, quickly revealed themselves to be cowardly and unprincipled and made of the wrong stuff.
The journalist Jacob Weisberg is one of the first to attempt to chronicle this new landscape. In a dismal inversion of the John F. Kennedy classic “Profiles in Courage,” Weisberg’s “Profiles in Cowardice” offers case studies of eight representative men and women “who recognized the danger Trump posed to American values, who had the ability to say no to him and who at earlier moments showed flickers of integrity — but who, when a more serious test came, failed to act courageously, in ways that reveal both their moral weakness and the fragility of the institutions they represented.”
His focus is 2025, the first year of the second Trump administration, when we witnessed what Weisberg terms “the Great Capitulation.” The author’s specimens of moral failure are drawn, as they should be, from the country’s supposed crème de la crème: Brad Karp, the former chair of the law firm Paul, Weiss; the private equity mogul Steve Schwarzman; the Amazon founder and Washington Post proprietor Jeff Bezos; the media personality Megyn Kelly; the former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell; the former President George W. Bush; the Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock; and last but certainly not least, John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States.
Weisberg’s intention isn’t simply to lambaste these individuals, even as he hopes that shaming them will serve a useful purpose. Because cowardice “wears disguises: pragmatism, realism, caution, institutional loyalty,” he investigates the specific situational and psychological forces at play in the moral downfall of each of his subjects, taking care, it must be said, to acknowledge that it isn’t straightforward to resist lawless state power.
Standing your ground can be frightening; it can negatively affect one’s career and net worth; it can leave one socially isolated; and, when you’re trying to discharge institutional responsibilities, it can feel ethically complicated. But in the final analysis, Weisberg suggests, the rights and wrongs were pretty clear. His subjects are voluntary members of the American elite who were at no risk of imprisonment or impoverishment.
Nobody made Karp transform Paul, Weiss into a quisling law firm. It was not force majeure that made Beilock respond to the Republican attack on academic freedom with a uniquely deferential strategy. Bezos and Kelly always had the option of not selling their souls. Schwarzman, a billionaire many times over and a onetime Jeb Bush Republican, had no need to recast himself as a Trump loyalist. No rule of political life compelled George W. Bush to remain largely silent about his party’s assault on the American experiment. As for Mitch McConnell — well, let’s not speak ill of the undead.
And then there’s the case of John Roberts, whom Weisberg views as part doormat, part flawed Shakespearean hero: “The triumph of Roberts’s jurisprudence,” he suggests, “came at the worst possible moment. Just as a lawless president was returning to power, the immunity ruling in Trump v. the United States granted him legal cover for tyranny.” Poor Justice Roberts! There’s a divinity that shapes his ends, rough-hew them how he will.
I assess the chief justice differently. I think that he falls into the same category as Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk. Like them, Roberts is an ideologue rather than a moral weakling: He ruled in favor of Trump not out of a misplaced juristic conscientiousness but precisely because he wanted to protect and empower a Republican president brazenly attacking the constitutional order.
Political invertebrates will always be with us, of course: See the recent ignominy of Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado (freeing a would-be election tamperer at the insistence of Trump), one of many powerful Democratic officials whose fecklessness and timidity will soon receive separate examination.
It must be pointed out, as Weisberg does in this valuable and dauntless book, that for every poltroon in high places, thousands of ordinary citizens have raised their heads above the parapet, none more bravely and persistently than the people of Minnesota as they protected their neighbors from rampaging federal officers. Their example upholds what’s left of this country’s reputation for courage.
PROFILES IN COWARDICE: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era | By Jacob Weisberg | Penguin Press | 255 pp. | $31
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