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

“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. The title is a departure point, not a homage — and Weisberg is quick to note the irony beneath it. JFK’s Profiles in Courage was written at the height of the McCarthy era by a senator who was conspicuously uncourageous about McCarthy, ducking even the censure vote, and no better on civil rights; Weisberg’s reading is that Kennedy wrote the book to give himself courage by studying senators who had sacrificed their careers for principle. (It won the only Pulitzer ever awarded to a president, with the help of a ghostwriter.) What he kept was the structure: eight representative figures, each standing in for a part of the problem. What he added was the inversion, and a working definition — not physical cowardice but moral cowardice, the rarer failure. His epigraph is Twain: why is physical courage so common, and moral courage so rare? •       Cowardice Is Contagious. The book’s explanatory heart, and the reason it isn’t a gallery of villains. Fear, greed and ambition motivate most people most of the time, Weisberg argues, and political behaviour is herd-like: people copy their peer groups. Courage is contagious — and so is cowardice. His cleanest illustration is the tech elite, who acted almost as one after January 6 to throw Trump off every platform and swear off donations to Republicans who voted against certification, and who now, again almost as one, think the opposite. Their defence is competitive necessity: standing up would hand an advantage to rivals. Andrew’s challenge — the wildebeest crossing the river, where the first ones in are the brave ones, so shouldn’t Andreessen get credit for jumping early? — got a firm no: a departure from your peer group that is entirely self-interested isn’t courage. Since the second election, Weisberg says, we have been living through a wave of cowardice. Andrew’s name for it: the banality of cowardice. •       Bezos and the Rocket. The book’s most carefully argued chapter, and the one that explains the method. First-term Bezos meets Kennedy’s definition of courage exactly: Trump pulled a $10 billion Pentagon contract because he didn’t like the Washington Post’s coverage, and Bezos didn’t flinch. Second-term Bezos went to Mar-a-Lago and paid Melania $40 million for a documentary. What changed isn’t character but priority. Weisberg traces the through line back to a high-school graduation speech about orbiting colonies: the thing closest to Bezos’s heart is getting humans into space, a vision he calls more benign than Musk’s — terrariums around Earth rather than cities on Mars — and one he may have built Amazon to fund. Between the terms, SpaceX pulled far ahead of Blue Origin, in a business almost wholly dependent on NASA and Pentagon contracts. To Andrew’s Zhou Enlai objection — if the space vision pays off, won’t history forgive the collaboration? — Weisberg’s answer: nobody would respect him for sacrificing his children to his vision either. Some things you compromise; the social contract isn’t one of them. Andrew’s verdict: not exactly Eichmann, but sad if true — especially since Bezos has the billions to do whatever he wants. •       McConnell Went Home. The counterfactual at the centre of the book. After January 6, with the Senate about to vote on conviction, Mitch McConnell had decided Trump should be removed and barred from ever holding office again — he told people so — and Weisberg argues he could have delivered the ten additional Republican votes needed. Then he called a recess, went home to Kentucky, discovered Trump still commanded majority support inside the party, and changed his mind. Cowardice, Weisberg says, and fear — not of being beaten up but of losing his place in the world, which was the Republican Senate he had built into a machine. Bullying recurs across these lives: McConnell was bullied as a child, and so was Megyn Kelly, whose own memoir turns on a vow never to become a bully and always to stand up to them — which she did, magnificently, when Trump and Bannon set the dogs on her in 2015, before becoming, in Weisberg’s account, more MAGA than MAGA and a considerable bully herself. •       The Case for Shame. Weisberg is careful about the charge he’s making — he gives space to each subject’s reasoning, on the grounds that none of us can be confident we’d choose better — but he is not neutral about the remedy. Shame, he argues, plays a constructive social function: a community asserting its values against someone who has deviated from them, with a salutary effect on everyone watching. Hence the inclusion of the sins of omission alongside the commissions: George W. Bush, who loathes Trump privately, watched PEPFAR dismantled and said nothing; Sian Beilock, whose Dartmouth took the Justice Department’s free pass and declined to back Harvard — at the one college whose 1819 Supreme Court case established academic independence in the first place. And who would make a Profiles in Courage? Local people, he says: the Minneapolis neighbours who drove ICE out by peaceful protest, the lawyers who resigned rather than sign the deals, the people on his own small-town corner with honk-for-democracy signs. On RFK Jr., a candid pass — the theory of the case runs out. On 2028: not a return to normal, but something owed to the country, an apo...