The Daily Beast Podcast - I've Got the Names of the Very Worst Trump Cowards

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Jacob Weisberg, author of the new book Profiles in Cowardice, speaks with Joanna Coles about the powerful Americans and institutions that once stood up to Donald Trump and what changed when he returned to office. Weisberg explains why Jeff Bezos went from resisting Trump to accommodating him, how Chief Justice John Roberts helped expand presidential power, and why Mitch McConnell may have had the clearest opportunity to prevent Trump’s second term. They also discuss Megyn Kelly’s transformation from a journalist who confronted Trump into a major MAGA voice, the pressures driving business leaders, universities and law firms to capitulate, and the dangerous short-term thinking behind those choices. But Weisberg argues that the story is bigger than eight individuals: courage and cowardice are contagious, and the willingness of institutions to stand together may determine whether they can withstand an increasingly coercive presidency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on espresso.com. With Trump coming back into office, it's not the fair awarding of government contracts. It's favoritism. It's corruption of all kinds. You have to be in with the president.

And I think Bezos thinks that space is his contribution to humanity. Bezos thinks he's going to build these colonies in space or help us get there. And when that was jeopardized, I think he knuckled under. Is it worth sacrificing democracy? Is it worth letting America become a kind of autocracy that's corrupt? No, it absolutely isn't. In terms of Trump and Bezos having the kind of relationship where Bezos keeps the president happy, I think that does endanger democracy.

He's exercising power that doesn't belong to the presidency, and people are letting him get away with it, and that's what the danger is. I'm John Nicole. Daily Beast podcast and we have a terrific conversation which I know Daily Beast viewers, listeners are really going to enjoy. It's with the political journalist and author Jacob Weisberg and it's based on his book profiles in cowardice. Obviously a take on John F. Kennedy's book, profiles and courage, but it singles out the eight people he thinks are the biggest cowards in America and why, because they suck up to Donald Trump.

It's a really intriguing psychological take on these people, why they do it. Many of them were bullied. Megan Kelly was bullied. She's one of the eight. Mitch McConnell was bullied. Jeff Bezos is desperate in his fight with Elon Musk to have space ascendancy. And Jacob goes into the causes of why they decide. to, his word, collaborate with Donald Trump.

And what they give up in the process. Remember that moment with Mitch McConnell when he's just completely frozen. Jacob's interpretation of that moment is that Mitch McConnell was just scared stiff. There was no physical reason for him to freeze like that, it turned out. He may just have been terrified of Donald Trump. Anyway, don't forget to press the subscription button. Please subscribe to The Daily Beast. our followers, you get extra video, there's all sorts of advantages to becoming a

B-Beast member or joining our Friend of the Beast tier. But no time to waste. America's on fire. Let's get into it. Jacob Weisberg. Very nice to have you in the studio. Welcome. John, it's very nice to be here.

Good. So many people to choose from. You boiled it down to eight cowards. Why did you choose these eight? I wasn't interested in the flax and flunkies. I didn't want to write about Pete Hegseth or Pam Bondi or people who are just shills for Trump. I was interested in the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2 and why the guardrails held so much better in Trump 1 and why they've fallen apart in Trump 2. So I looked for people who both stood in for some larger institution, higher education or American law or tech or finance, but people who at some point had stood up to Trump, at least to some extent. And often very substantially in Trump 1, who in Trump 2 were capitulating. I wanted to understand that. I wanted to explain it both in individual terms, but also around the macro story of what had changed.

Okay, so who's your favorite coward? Who is the cowardiest of cowards here? I mean, you've got, I'm going to read the list. We've got Brad Karp, who was running Paul Weiss, the law company. Stephen Schwartzman, co-founder of Blackstone, Jeff Bezos, who, you know, now delivers groceries to everybody, I guess. Megan Kelly, Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, Sean Bylock, who is the head of Dartmouth. And John Roberts, obviously, Chief Justice, if you had to pick just one, who is the most egregious of these cowards? Look, I think they all deserve shame, and they're all different stories and interesting stories. But Bezos, in a way, is the paradigmatic example because he was so good in Trump won as owner of the Washington Post. Trump threatened him, bullied him, pressured him to have the Washington Post be less critical and less aggressive.

and Bezos didn't yield an inch. Marty Barron, who was editor of the Washington Post in those years, really paid tribute to him and said, we couldn't have had a better owner. And it wasn't just that Trump tried to push him around. He actually punished him. There was a $10 billion Pentagon contract for cloud computing that I think was the biggest government contract ever been awarded. Trump made sure it got taken away from Amazon and given to, you know, other companies.

Bezos went to court. He didn't get the whole contract back. He got some of it back. He stood up in a really admirable way. And I thought, thank God the Washington Post is in good hands. Trump, too, it's a different person. He's unbended knee at Mar-a-Lago paying $40 million for the Melania Trump documentary from Amazon Prime. You know, Amazon Prime is like known for being stingy.

This is an absolutely ridiculous price. It's effectively a kind of bribe, personal bribe to the president and his wife. And he says, well, I think Trump's changed. He canceled the endorsement of Kamala Harris that the editorial board was going to make. He's now reduced the staffing of the paper by something like a third. And there are people in the Washington Post Newsroom who are still valiantly doing a good job trying to hold Trump accountable. And they do break stories. But it's nothing like the accountability institution we had in Trump One when the Post was right there with the New York Times in breaking stories every day.

At A&W. You got to try breakfast at A&W. And what better way than with a delicious Pratt organic coffee? Starting with just $1 all day, every day now until December 31st. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. At participating A&W locations in Ontario. Okay, so it's because of his ownership of the Washington Post that you, you hone in on him.

Yes. Take us back to the inauguration when you have essentially the big tech founders all there, clearly paying homage to Trump. Not all of them were there, but the majority of them were there, the founders of Google, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, Jeff Bezos. Why do you think they went? Was it the intoxification of, you. power. Did they not think that Project 2025 was going to be a real thing? Why do you think they

lend their brand to Donald Trump and then got mocked, you know, their staff found it difficult to deal with? What was it about appearing at the inauguration? Tim Cook, too, from Apple, that they felt they had to, why did they have to go? Jonah, there's so much conformity and peer pressure in American business and American industry, and they're looking to each other for cues. And they're saying, what do we all do now, even though they never present it that way? But think about what happened after January 6th when all of those tech platforms cut off Trump's account because they said he violated our terms of service in one way or another.

We can't lend ourselves to a president trying to overthrow American democracy. And they said, we're not going to make any more campaign contributions to Republicans who supported January 6th. Well, that was one direction. I think that was courageous. But there was a kind of collective thinking. Was it courageous or was it just expedient? Well, I guess the point is a little bit. There's less independent ethical judgment and less independent thinking than there is what are the other guys doing.

But they're individual explanations for a lot of these people too. And it was so interesting to get into the Bezos history and psychology because I think there's a story that's been missed. I don't think it's just about or mainly about Amazon and antitrust, although he cares about that. That was going on even at the time of Trump's first term. What Bezos cares about, if you look at the long arc of his biography and his career, is colonizing space. Right. He's a kid who loved science fiction, who was obsessed with Star Trek, who gave a high school graduation speech at Palmetto High School of Miami about how humans have to build colonies

in space for kind of attractive reasons, you know, to save the environment, to preserve the planet, the kind of utopian vision. He's had that vision his whole life. I think you could argue that he started Amazon to get rich enough to pursue his dream of space. And what happened between Trump 1 and Trump 2 is that, came into severe jeopardy, partly because Musk got so far ahead of him, SpaceX got so far ahead of Bezos's company, Blue Origin. But so much of that business is dependent on government contracts. And with Trump coming back into office, it's not the fair awarding of government contracts.

It's favoritism. It's corruption of all kinds. You have to be in with the president. And I think Bezos thinks that space is his contribution to humanity. It's what he does instead of philanthropy. You know, Bill Gates has the Gates Foundation and, you know, wants, wants to fight disease in the third world. Bezos thinks he's going to build these colonies in space or help us get there. And when that was jeopardized, I think he knuckled under. So this is about lunar economics. Looney, maybe. But clearly lunar economics is going to be a thing, data centers in space, you know, trying to extract minerals, et cetera, from the moon. Could you argue then that actually Bezos isn't a coward at all?

He's a visionary and this is expedient to get to the next level of space exploration. I mean, in a way, that's a very American story, isn't it? Well, I think giving up our constitutional principles here on Earth and here in this country on a speculative basis for, you know, what a vision that may or may not be realized. I mean, look, someone once said that there's nothing that dates people more than their visions of the future. Oh, that's a great line. That's a great line. Yeah.

And you could look back on what people thought the future was going to be like in the early 20th century or in the 1930s. And it's always kind of hilarious because we can't get it right. The future will be like something, but it won't be however Bezos thinks it is. You know, already you talked about the moon. I mean, part of the competition between Musk and Bezos is, Musk is Mr. Mar. Mr. Mars and Bezos is Mr. Moon. I think Bezos's vision, it's a lot more humane. It makes a lot more sense. Bezos doesn't believe in colonizing planets. He doesn't think humans can live on the surface of another planet. He thinks they should live in these sort of orbiting spaceships around the Earth. I like it better than Musk's vision, for sure. But is it worth sacrificing democracy? Is it willing to, is it worth letting America become a kind of autocracy that's correct? Rob, no, it absolutely isn't. But does Jeff Bezos think that his, I would, I think I'm more inclined

to call it expediency than cowardice, which is its own kind of cowardice, especially if it's sort of business related. But does he think that by seriously supporting Trump, by maybe withdrawing the endorsement of Carmelah Harris in the Washington Post, that that actually has any real impact on Donald Trump? I mean, I take your point about democracy, but is Jeff Bezos the guy that's going to stop democracy? Well, it has had an impact. Certainly, Trump, first of all, Blue Origin was back in business getting government contracts. And then when Trump inevitably had his falling out with Musk, Blue Origin was right there to pick up the slack. You know, remember at one point, Trump was like, we're going to deport him back to Sullivan.

Africa and fired his head of NASA, you know, cut them off. And they've, you know, they've made peace in certain ways now. But I think it's not just, it's not just theoretical. Trump, Bezos is now in favor. There was another little episode when at the time of the tariffs, it was reported that Amazon was going to, on prices when you went to the page for a product, they were going to show you how much more it was going to cost because of tariffs. Kind of a good idea. The White House went crazy when it saw this report. Right. Trump calls Bezos. Bezos says, oh, no, don't worry, we won't do that. That's off. Now, that is not, I mean, Amazon's free to do that or not do that. I don't think that by itself is an attack on democracy. But in terms of Trump and Bezos

having the kind of relationship where Bezos keeps the president happy, I think that does endanger democracy. When you have a president who's not a normal Republican president, he's a would-be king, he's a would-be autocrat, he's exercising power that doesn't belong to the presidency, and people are letting him get away with it, and that's what the danger is. Okay, so one of the other characters who's very much involved in that decision to allow the president to behave like this is John Roberts Chief Justice. He's one of the cowards in the book. What made you home in on John Roberts? Well, there have been a few decisions that have empowered Trump in a really dangerous way. And near the top of the list is the immunity case from 2024, Trump for the United States,

where Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said that it is essentially impossible, going to be impossible, to prosecute a president for any crime after he leaves office. it cast this zone of immunity around the presidency so widely that it not only destroyed the cases like the documents case and the special prosecutor, Jack Smith case, that were underway. You don't hear the term self-pardon anymore because Trump won't need to pardon himself in the second term. He can't be prosecuted. And that's because of that decision.

And I thought it was not only a bad decision, but the timing of it seems so reckless and so dangerous. I think what the way people misunderstand Roberts sometimes is that he's a shell for Trump. I don't think he is. I think probably if I had to guess, I'd say in his heart of hearts, he really dislikes Trump. He thinks Trump has, you know, terrible taste. Trump said terrible things about him at various times. I don't think they have any kind of relationship where Roberts is like, how can I help the president? I think that might describe Lido or Tom, Thomas a little better. But Roberts is an idiologue, and he's a funny kind of idiologue because he doesn't present himself that way. He presents himself as a mild-mannered institutionalist who's an incrementalist and follows the law and do things step by step according to the rules.

But really, he's also someone who going back to when he first worked in the Reagan administration in the 80s, has had this federalist society vision of executive power. People sometimes use this term, the unitary executive, which essentially says we don't want the executive branch to be tramled and encumbered by Congress making all these rules and trying to run regulatory agencies. They've now, the Roberts Court has now thrown out all of the independent agencies that go back to the New Deal except for the Federal Reserve on the logic that, well, it's the Federal Reserve. That would be crazy. But there's no more effective independence to the FCC, the FTC, the FEC, medical research. All of this is now explicitly under presidential power. And that is a kind of Roberts' vision of the world.

And I think he's taken the opportunity of Trump being president and having a conservative majority to achieve it. I think he kind of goes through life saying, la, la, la, la, let's pretend we have a normal president. and forget about Donald Trump, he'll be gone sometime. This is the moment to readjust the balance of powers. But I think Roberts also has a responsibility as the top justice figure in the United States at a time when justice is being politicized, when Trump is bringing explicitly, bringing political prosecutions against his enemies, when federal judges are being threatened with violence and attack and have to go into hiding

when they make certain kinds of decision, Roberts, I think, has a bigger responsibility to protect the rule of law in America. That's what I think he's not done. You gotta try breakfast at A&W. You gotta try bread. And what better way than with a delicious Pratt organic coffee,

starting with just $1 all day, every day now until December 31st? You gotta try breakfast at A&W. at participating A&W locations in Ontario. Right. So we've got Jeff Bezos business, John Roberts legal. Megan Kelly, how did you decide on Megan Kelly, who I think, you know, probably her most famous moment

was when Trump attacked her during the debate and said afterwards, you know, she has blood coming out of wherever. That was a moment where Megan Kelly and the president looked in more, Mortal combat and somehow she's done a 180 twisted herself in a pretzel to be one of his biggest supporters. She's more MAGA than MAGA now. But when you think back to that debate, that first Fox News debate in 2015, I thought she was a real hero. And she was a hero because she decided my responsibility in this situation is to be a journalist and ask this candidate hard questions in a direct way about his misogyny, about his abusive women.

And Trump went nuts and launched one of his first, you know, social media. Then on Twitter, attacks on her and menaced her with this digital mob. And she had to have security guards when she took her family to Disneyland. I mean, people showed up in the lobby of her apartment building. It's hard to appreciate the kind of menace and threat that can be brought down on someone where the, when the president says, right, go after them. That one. It's a kind of, it's a kind of moral. permissioning. And I thought she was really brave and she held out for, you know, held out for a long

time, but eventually she couldn't take it anymore. She kind of made peace with him a little bit, but she still wasn't a Trump supporter in 2016. Just she was like, let's, you know, let's have a truce for now. She ended up, she brought down Roger Ailes, another kind of, I think, really brave and heroic moment. But she ended up leaving for NBC News. And there she felt the left or the mainstream media treated her even worse than people on the right hat. And I think it was a huge mistake on their part. I think they should have welcomed her as someone who had said some things that they found appalling, but she was a real journalist and she was, you know, why not have a conservative on NBC who could represent that point of view? Ultimately, they drummed

her out because of stupid stuff she said about blackface and Halloween. And Father Christmas being white. That was back in Fox News. Yeah, was it right? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, she'd said ridiculous things, but, you know, it's so have, so have most of us and so have most of them. And to have this kind of, there's an old phrase, which I like, which is that Republicans look for converts and Democrats, Democrats look for heretics. And I think there's really something to that. And why was Reagan so successful as a president? Because he said, if you agree with me on these things, I'll work with you on these things. And you don't have to agree with the whole. You don't have to agree with me on everything. You don't have to agree with the whole platform. And Democrats have a tendency to do the opposite,

to say, here's a litmus test on abortion. Here's a litmus test on trans rights. And I just think they need a bigger tent. And I think that was an example of that. But anyways, the result of that whole experience, she ended up going back to MAGA. When you go back, she wrote a very interesting memoir back in 2016, 2017, when all this was happening. And she sees her life in terms of the experience of being bullied as an adolescent girl by these mean girls who, for no reason that she could see, excluded her and treated her in this horrible way. And that that affected her whole life. She was unable to have healthy relationships and normal friendships because of this protectiveness that was a result of this really bad bullying experience. And she said, you know, the one thing in life I can't tolerate is a bully.

So you saw all of that, yeah, you saw all of that being activated when Trump tried to bully her and Steve Bannon tried to bully her in this really brutal way. She stood up to a point, but eventually she succumbed to it. And if you listen to her show, the podcast, vidcast, or whatever it is, what is it? It's the daily bully. She's going after trans people, gay people, liberals, whoever it is. But in this bullying Trump-like way. And I think it's really sad. I think the psychology around that is if you are, do you come out of this deep experience

of bullying? I think there's a version of it with Mitch McConnell as well. But you either really do become an enemy of bullying and stand up to it or you become a bully yourself. Right. So it's that sort of adage hurt people, hurt people. That's how I see her. And if you watch that show now, I think it's almost transparent that she's this cartoonish version. Well, I wondered to what extent it was also that she was incentivised by money.

I mean, she got a large payout. I think it was $69 million. Or she went on a huge contract to NBC, which ended early. But she left with a lot of money. But I wondered to what extent she was just cynically looking for a lane on YouTube and found it. And it was unexpected that she would go so pro-maga. As one of the 180s of the list of eight, she to me seemed the most, I mean, you explain it sort of from a psychological point of view, but it still seems very surprising to me because you feel like she could have been independent and had it both ways, but she chose not to. Yeah, but you're right, Jenna.

The psychological explanation doesn't exclude the materialist explanation, which is absolutely there. She's very ambitious. She wants to make a lot of money. And in right-wing media, you do need a lane, and there aren't really any. lanes that aren't MAGA. I mean, there's, you know, there's the bulwark. There's the, you know, there's the people I admire who are, you know, not really even Republicans anymore. But you can't have a anti-Trump media channel and be successful. And I think at some level, too, she's just reading the room and, you know, how do you like that? Right. Where do you show up, right?

What can she bring? But do you think she's cynical about it or do you think she really believes the stuff she says? Well, it's funny. I don't think anybody is. long-term cynical because I think people who are successful, particularly in politics, are very good at making themselves believe the things that are useful for them to believe. And they might make a decision that contradicts what they thought before, but if you come back in six months, they've figured out how to believe it. So do you think J.D. Vance, who obviously called Trump the new Hitler, has now is a true believer in Trumpism? Or do you think he's just seeing Trumpism as the step up the ladder to where he wants to go. I mean, Vance is so Faustian that he sort of

tests the limits of my theory. And, you know, and when someone is, is intelligent the way Vance is, you think they've got to know exactly what they're doing. And I think in a sense, he does. I think with Rubio too, I think it's driven by ambition and the lust for power. And they, they at some level, they must know things that they're doing or wrong, but the, the, the, the lust for power is so strong that it sort of overrides that. And I think it just kind of becomes meaningless at one point, at some point. What do you really believe? You believe what's, what's useful for you to believe politically. And Trump, I think Vance believes in Maga and, and wants to take over from Trump. Would he believe in it a few years from now if the party had taken

in a different direction and turn dramatically against Trump. No, I think he'd figure out how to believe something different and figure out some way to distance himself from it. So I want to come on to Mitch McConnell in a minute. But before we do, one of the things that strikes me about this, particularly for someone like Jeff Bezos, is the short-termism of it. Because we're, you know, 50 days now to the midterms.

It looks like, although never say never in politics, but it looks like there will be some form of blue wave that the Democrats will win the House. Certainly there are enough seats in play. Possibly they'll win the Senate. At which point Trump is a lame duck, his crew are going to start maneuvering against him, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hexeth. They're all kind of, you know, figuring out their next steps. So at what point does the slavish adherence to Trump become a ball and chain around the ankle? I think you've got this exactly right. I think the essence of the problem with so many of these people and so many of these institutions is putting the short term or the immediate prospect ahead of the long term interests, values, principles. And you can look back at other examples in American history. I mean, McCarthyism is a really relevant one. The pressure then, too, was tremendous on universities to fire faculty members who were named and to name names. But longer term, what it did to their reputations, what it did to their independence, what it did to their own sense

itself, I think makes the argument that those were bad decisions, not just bad moral decisions, but often bad practical decisions. And it is part of, we were talking about the kind of group think in the tech world. I think it afflicts American business and finance so badly. And it's kind of, you know, you're talking about people who are making investments and picking stocks on a daily basis. and there's something about short-termism that's almost built in to the mentality. But the long-term interests that they are denigrating or downplaying are there too. Your interest in operating in a non-corrupt environment. Your interest in the enforceability of contracts in the rule of law.

That's why someone like Steve Schwartzman or Jeff Bezos has been able to be successful. It's because they've done it. It's a reason why it happened in America and didn't happen in Western Europe. Well, Western Europe's not very corrupt either, but you know, why it didn't happen in China. It didn't happen in Russia. If you're a businessman in Russia, you get thrown out of a window at a certain point, even if you've shown enormous loyalty to Putin. Exactly. And that's what they've been, that's what they've sacrificed.

And, you know, America, if you look at these indexes of corruption, America has gone in Trump's two terms so quickly from being one of the least corrupt environments for business in the world to not one of the very most. corrupt, but to being in league with countries in South American Asia that we think of, you know, where people pay bribes to do business. And I think it's a kind of tragic loss. And it's also a betrayal of the principles around American business, that is, the free market, the free trade. Remember that idea. But the idea that you have a president who is going to demand ownership stakes in private companies in exchange for the permission to do deals or just, you know, because in the case of AI or Intel, he thinks they can get it. They're in a position to get it. I mean, some people will call that socialism. If the government actually owns some of the means

of production, it's, I think, probably more properly classed as a kind of corporatism, you know, the sort of Mussolini philosophy of government, which combines elements of socialism and capitalism. But whatever it is, if you're a titan of finance or business in tech, you should recoil, that idea. But no, they've been willing to pay. Schwarzmann who are sitting together around the various, you know, state dinners in the UK that the King held for them or when they come together at conferences and things. What are the private conversations do you think they're having about Trump? So it's a really good question and I, and I love to hear more of them. I think they don't trust each other. And part of the dynamic

is I could betray you to Trump if I have his ear. And Elon Musk, I think part of what brought Jeff Bezos to heal was Elon Musk having Trump's year and saying both publicly and privately, he's a bad guy. He's not, he's not on your side. He's telling everybody you're going to lose. That was part of what's really threatened Bezos. So there's no honor among thieves, not that they're that they're thieves exactly. But I think part of this auto brainwashing is that they think, I'm doing what I have to do. We'll get through this. But when it's over, they're going to rewrite the history and say,

I was always against this, but I was just in a terrible position. And we had to make certain compromises and concessions. And thank God that's over. Okay. So you say there's no honor among thieves. Donald Trump demands loyalty. But the astonishing thing about him is he doesn't repay the loyalty. I mean, he may do a case.

occasionally in deals, but you can't trust him. He's unpredictable. I mean, he's an 80-year-old man. He's in his ninth decade. He seems his father had dementia. He is really unpredictable. And, you know, one is struck by the number of people who've come in under the Trump umbrella only to be completely cast out. Actually, I was thinking about at least Stephanie, the congresswoman from New York who attacked her old alma mater, Harvard, who obviously has come under, the institution has come under enormous pressure from Donald Trump, but has sort of pushed back. But you look at someone like Elise Stefnik, who was promised all sorts of things by Donald Trump, fell for his promises, and now is completely abandoned. Do the people in your book not think that, why am I even doing

this? Because it's not going to have any, he's not going to be loyal to me back. Well, he's not ultimately loyal back, but he is transactional. Right. You can make a deal with him. And the other thing with Trump that's kind of unusual is he always forgives. You can always go crawling back to him and flatter him. And, you know, you can be the ex-president of Honduras in jail. And you write him a letter saying, you know, your excellency.

Right. You know, I love you so much. And there's your pardon. I mean, you can be Michael Cohen and have testified against him and tried to put him in jail. Right. And he doesn't hold the grudge if you knuckle under. And that's kind of unusual. It's not a normal system of loyalty.

It's not you're dead to me forever. It's just this constant, it's more like a bullying dynamic where there has to be the constant threat hanging over your head. And if at any point you indicate to him in whatever way that the threat's not going to be effective, that he's not going to be able to control and police your behavior, then he will lash out in a way that makes that evidence. but as long as you make clear that you're not going to challenge him, you're probably going to be okay. That's an interesting perspective. I haven't thought of that, that as long as you apologize,

I mean, his making up with Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, who went to jail because of the things that he did for Donald Trump. And yet they've made up, and Trump is now a guest on his podcast. It's crazy. I mean, Michael Cohen, you know, he testified against him in a criminal case. Well, and spent three years in jail, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so some of the, you know, some of the sort of psychology in these relationships are kind of wacky. And some of these people, at least Stefanic, you kind of think it's carmic justice. I don't know. I feel both things at once. I mean, you kind of, you know, why is he turned on her? He doesn't think she looks very good on Fox News. I suspect that's it. She's not his type of. Right. She's not attractive enough. Yeah. She's not the kind of, you know, she's not Natalie Harp. I mean, you know, he likes, you know, he and Roger Ales had similar idea of what, you know, Republican.

The bombshell. Yeah. The bombshell. What they should look like. So that's offensive and pathetic. But it's also, you know, I think Elise Stefonic having conducted this kind of show trial and started this attack on the independence of American higher education, which, by the way, I think needs to be reformed in all sorts of ways.

But I think it needs to reform itself not give in to extra legal bullying from just Department and Education Department that says, we want to pick the professors, we want to decide how you pick your student body, we want to decide what courses can and can't be taught. It can't give into that. I mean, the essence of a university or a college is academic freedom and independence from the government. It's gotten compromised in part because of so much dependency on research funding around the sciences and medicine. That's the thing that's different now. That's what's given the government so much leverage. Right. All right. So Mitch McConnell, Mitch McConnell, who there may also be comic justice going on there because we haven't heard from him, literally heard from him. He seemed speechless, silenced for, I think, a full three months at this point. Why Mitch, because he could have impeached him and didn't?

That's the other moment, in addition to the immunity decision and even more than the immunity decision that could have produced a different history. I think McConnell is maybe the one person who single-handedly could have prevented Trump's second term. It was a very specific decision. After January 6th, Mitch McConnell is a creature of the Senate. His whole life has been in the Senate. It's the only ambition in life was to be Senate majority leader. He loves the Senate, its traditions, its processes. And when the Senate and the House were attacked on January 6th, he said, this is Trump is,

This is an if there is such a thing as an impeachable offense, this is it. He was ready to vote to convict Trump. He declared a recess when the Senate came back in February 2021. He said, I've done some research. And it turns out that according to my reading of the Constitution, you can't convict a president or an official who's already left office. It's a ridiculous reading. I mean, there was almost no serious constitutional scholar who thinks that, but he got scared. And I think he was bullied.

And I think he was afraid. I think McConnell was afraid of losing his position inside the party, losing his stature. But if he had held firm to what he had said just after January 6th, he could have had Trump convicted. Trump was already out of office or would soon be out of office. And it would have been an easy matter to pass this subsequent vote that would have banned Trump from ever holding public office again. And we would have no second term. And that is on Mitch McConnell.

I think Mitch McConnell knows that. I think he's someone else who writes in a little red memoir, but read closely by me about being bullied as a child and how his identity is about his figuring out how to stand up as a younger kid to this bully. And what happens again when you're in your 70s or 80s, and someone is bullying you again in both physically, that there's a physical thread and their names being called.

And Trump is posting this vicious, racist stuff about McConnell's wife, Elaine Chow, making fun of her. His own former transport, I guess. Yeah. But who quit after January 6th? Right. Who did take a kind of principled stand. I mean, late but better late than never. But you realize that Trump, you thought you were using Trump to get conservative judges,

approved and onto the Supreme Court. It turns out the whole time Trump was using you because he doesn't care about the Senate and even if the Senate would vote for legislation to let him do something, he'd rather do it by emergency decree or executive order because he doesn't want to ask the Senate. He wants to be a king. He wants to be a dictator. He wants to do things on his own authority and own power. So the whole Trump, second term especially, has been such an insult to the Senate and to McConnell's idea of how government works under the Constitution, that, yeah, I mean, to speculate psychologically, I mean, obviously, yes, a physical condition, but I talk about these two instances between the two terms when he froze.

You remember that? Yes, of course. Stock still, couldn't say a word, had to be let off, and perhaps that's what's wrong with him. Nothing obviously wrong with him. I think there's possibly a psychological explanation for that. It's fear. You know, you freeze. People freeze when they're afraid.

And he had very good reason to be afraid of Donald Trump and also ashamed of his own role in empowering him. So how, given that Donald Trump is such a bully, I mean, he's just, I mean, we had a story this morning. We're recording this on Friday morning. We have a story today about him trying to bully a reporter at a. ABC and you can physically see him leaning in and just, I mean, he in particular picks on reporters because they're trying to hold him to account. In this particular instance with Rachel Scott from

ABC, you can physically see him and then his former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, says, oh, I know that face. And he looks scary. He is scary. So how do you encourage people to think about how they handle their fear of him. How do you face down a bully like Donald Trump? Yeah. And it's also important to point out, Joanna, that this behavior trickles down. And everyone in the administration and a lot of people around Trump, they see this behavior. It's normalized. And so I think there's a kind of upsurge of bullying in American life as a way of dealing with things. I think. Well, and they've seen it be rewarded too, right?

he won. I mean, that's the most remarkable thing of all, I think, that people knew he was a bully from Trump one, and he still won in Trump two. That's exactly right. I think we have to get past the myth that this is just about individual courage and cowardice. I think this behavior is social and contextual, and that both courage and cowardice are kind of contagious phenomenon. And When people see other people standing up, they stand up to bullies, and when they feel like they can act together, they have a way to stand up to bullies. And a really good example of this happening, I think, in a very spontaneous way, is what happened in Minneapolis with the ICE protest.

I found that so moving because that wasn't directed by the Democratic Party or any political entity. That was people living in this community, standing up for their neighbors, going out in the dead of winter when it's, you know, 20 below zero in the, you know, might be the coldest city in the country. And pushing ice, ice was an occupying army in Minneapolis. And the, and the citizens pushed them out. That was a kind of collective action. And I think you need that sense of solidarity and commitment to the larger institution. So if universities think we're on our own against the administration, they're under tremendous pressure to make deals. and so many of them made these terrible deals.

Colombia, Cornell, Brown. Dartmouth, I mean, you have the chancellor of Dartmouth in the book because we're the big cowards. And Dartmouth didn't have to, didn't make a deal. Trump left them alone for bad reasons. But they're exactly an example of what I'm talking about is all the other Ivy League school stood up for Harvard because Harvard was the one under attack. And they all signed the petition. And Harvard, of course, won all these lawsuits.

and I think is now standing up quite effectively. And I don't think Harvard is going to knuckle under or make a deal with Trump, especially if they get past the midterms and the Democrats take back one or more houses. But Dartmouth sort of said, oh, we're okay. We're just down by the sidelines. The irony there, which I talk about in the book, is the whole idea of an academic independence from the government started at Dartmouth in the early 19th century.

Daniel Webster, who was a Dartmouth graduate, argued this landmark case before the Supreme Court when the state of New Hampshire wanted to take over Dartmouth, which was a private school and make it a state university. And he won that case. And that's the beginning of the idea of academic independence. And now here we are 200 years later. And Dartmouth is like, oh, not us. We're fine.

You know, like good luck, good luck to you all. I think if you do have the larger institutional solidarity that we didn't see, whether with the universities, with the law firms, the tech leaders, the people in finance, it becomes, it just becomes much safer, it becomes possible to stand up and survive. You gotta try breakfast at A and W. You gotta try breakfast at A and W. And what better way than with a delicious pre-organic coffee, starting with just $1 all day, every day now until December 31st? at participating A&W locations in Ontario.

Right, although the trouble is that often those institutions are in competition with each other, right? So, I mean, what's remarkable about the story of Brad Karp, who I have had represent me in business deals I've done and always loved working with him, was this sense that other heads of law firms sensed he was weak and were all circling him. I mean, there's the head of Sullivan and Cromwell, company I've used, who's on the line when Brad Karp goes into talk to, yeah, to talk to Donald Trump. So arguably, they all have a bigger thing in common, which is the rule of law and wanting America to stay intact. And yet their competitive instincts and their, I mean,

even with the Ivy League too, they don't always want to stand up for each other. Well, I think about this as a journalist. And I think one of the great. great strengths of the American press. And I think this is different even from the press in the UK is that with issues around the First Amendment and access for reporters, the competitors are unified. And the Washington Post and the New York Times were an intense competition around Watergate or on the Pentagon Papers case. They wanted to beat each other. Everything's massively secret. But when they're arguing in court, they're represented by the same lawyer. most of the time, arguing the same position. And I think that's a really good model because there

have to be fundamental principles. And you said in law, it's the rule of law. It's the idea that a president can't arbitrarily say that because I don't like this law firm because of one of its thousand lawyers who was against me in a case, I'm going to ban them from government buildings. That is they can't appear in court. I'm going to take away their security clearances. You can't do that. And the courts have now ruled that you can't do that. And every other law firm should have stood up for Paul Weiss and Paul Weiss should have stood up for every other law firm. And yeah, they didn't do that because it's become such a mercenary culture. And when one of them comes under attack, the jackals circle and they kind of think they're weak, maybe we can pick off their

rainmakers. It is a real vulnerability. But it also speaks to the change in the legal profession, and how it's become much more like Wall Street and much less like it was 30 years ago or when people were more likely to be partners in these firms for their whole careers and they had long-term loyalty. And I think more often stood on principle. Another of the characters in this book,

Steve Schwarzenman, co-founder of Blackstone, huge financial company, a massive presence he and his wife, Christine, on the social scene in New York. I remember once going to their apartment And as I was going in the drawing room, there was literally a butler at the door who said, who murmured to me, this is the largest private drawing room in New York. Does he care, does he care that he's in your book? Is any amount of shame going to be brought to Steve Schwartzman for his collaboration?

Well, this is someone who I think suffers from tremendous insecurity. And if you read his memoir, again, I think I'm in the list. You know, you wouldn't have to take off your shoes to count the number of people who read it. But there's pretty interesting stuff. People reveal themselves in all sorts of ways when they publish these memoirs. Was he also bullied? He wasn't bullied, but he had this tremendous complex about being a nobody versus being a somebody. Something he's got in common with Donald Trump.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's just that deep insecurity. And he talks about going to Yale and he didn't know anybody. buddy and his roommates were weird and didn't have any friends and how was he going to how was he going to get recognized how are people going to appreciate you know how brilliant he was and he's a goes through life with this kind of feeling that he's not being appreciated and not being recognized i mean it's a kind of exaggerated version of what you get from a lot of sort of wall street egotomaniacs and his way of dealing with that is first of all to put his name on everything so

he doesn't do what you would call conventional charity or philanthropy. He negotiates a deal where he'll give you $100 million to put his name on the New York Public Library main building on Fifth Avenue. And it's an intense negotiation whether the letters carved in stone are going to be eight inches or 12 inches high. And if they're eight inches, you're not getting the money. And, you know, his name's a short from scholarship after himself. I think it's a kind of pointless, ridiculous scholarship he has in China. But also very Trumpian. Yes, absolutely. Who else puts his name on everything, on the currency, on, you know, on the map,

and every, you know, my daughter had to fly into Donald J. Trump International Airport in Palm Beach. Right. I mean, ugh. And then she has to drive along the Donald J. Trump highway, right? Yeah, it's like you feel like you're living in a, you know, Eastern European post-Soviet, you know, dictatorship run by a by a charismatic maniac. But anyway, back back to back to Schwartzman. Part of that insecurity is I've got the ear of the president. I've got the president on speed dial. He calls me when he wants to know what Wall Street thinks. Right. And he got Trump to do that and Trump,

you know, gave Trump a lot of money in his first campaign and Trump put him in charge of this business council. Everybody on the business council quit because of what Trump said. about Charlottesville that there were good people on both sides. Shorts said, I'm not really offended by that, but he warned Trump, we better cancel, get rid of this council first before everyone quits, just disband it so you don't have this mass resignation. And he's desperately doing anything, even though he's someone he says cares about anti-Semitism. He didn't care about it in Charlottesville.

He doesn't care about it when it comes to the right. He only cares about it. And the way the Trump administration cares about it as a political cudgel to use. against universities or people on the left. But anyway, he's someone who his identity is so tied up with that kind of recognition that I think it made him crawl back to Trump. I mean, after January 6th, I think even Steve Schwartzman said, we got to be done with this guy.

We need a different Republican support Chris Christie or Nikki Haley or someone who seemed like they could beat him in the 20-24 primaries. Nope, that's not going to happen. All right. I'm back with Trump. What about January 6th? What about the way he's undermined American capitalism?

And Steve Schwartzman, I mean, Jeff Bezos is, I think, well, Musk is again the richest person in the world based on SpaceX stock. But Bezos is the second richest person in the world. Schwartzman might be in the top 20s, you know, its wealth is something like $50 billion plus. That's the size of the Harvard endowment. He has houses all over the world. You know, it's sort of like a, it's sort of a parody of what a super rich person does with that kind of wealth, a kind of extravagance. But inside this is insecurity. I got to matter.

I got to be in the middle of the deal. I got to have the president calling me. I have to have my name on everything. And can that person be shamed? Maybe not. But they certainly care about what other people think about them. And that's where I think there's some. vulnerability. So how do you, how do you draw attention to that then? I mean, obviously,

you've written your book, but let's assume he's not going to read a book called Profiles in Cowardis. How else can pressure be brought to bear? I think of these institutions where he's plastered his name on everything. So there have been protests at Yale. I mean, at Yale, they have the dining hall where the freshmen have always eaten for, you know, 100 plus years, it was called Commons. Great old looks like, you know, the dining hall in Hogwarts and, you know, Harry Potter. Yeah. And there was, I'd say, as a Yale alum, nothing wrong with it. I mean, maybe the roof needed to be fixed.

Schwartzman negotiated this deal to give $100 plus million to turn it into the Stephen A. Schwartzman Center with his name carved all over it. It's a multimedia complex, blah, blah, blah. It's ridiculous. It's a donation. Yale shouldn't have accepted. But the main thing it shouldn't have accepted is putting this guy's name on the building in exchange for it. And I'm sure there's a contract in terms governing when they can take it down.

But, you know, when it's the sacklers, I mean, when someone has really done something egregious, the name comes off because it becomes an embarrassment to the institution. Right. So arguably, should. Should the New York Public Library take the Schwartzman name off it? If they can, if they can, I wince every time I go in there. The same way I wince when I go into a Sackler Gallery. I think what about, was it worth it for a big donation to give it over to him in that way?

And there's a kind of, I think there's a kind of moral harm you suffer every time you use a public institution and that instead of experiencing the democratic nature of it, it's a public library. Anybody could walk in. It doesn't cost anything. You meet every kind of person there. A scholar from Harvard can ask for a book and a homeless person can ask for a book. And when instead it's a tribute to that kind of wealth and power and abusive power. And now I think fealty to an autocratic president.

I think it's embarrassing. I think it's scandalous, and I think it hurts the library as a typical institution. What do you think the karmic cost is to these people? I mean, Brad Karp goes in to talk to Donald Trump. He's had a terrible year. He's had a terrible heart attack. This can't have made his heart issues any better. I mean, he lost, you know, 30 of their top lawyers left, set up alternative companies

because they were just so appalled by it. I'm sure Dartmouth has had a reduction in people applying to go there. Boycotts of Amazon never seemed to work because he's built such a convenient service. But do you think there is a karmic cost? I don't know. I mean, I think Brad Karp and Paul Weiss are an interesting example. Obviously, he lost his job as head of the firm, but he lost it because it turned out he'd been giving pro bono advice to Jeffrey Epstein. and, you know, the stuff in the Epstein files about him was just sort of unacceptable and

embarrassing. And his partner said, enough, would he have survived that without the Trump history? I don't know. What I think you can say at this point is it was a mistake. I don't know if it was a mistake because of karma. I don't know if I believe in karma. But it was a mistake, not just in ethical terms, but in practical terms because they've suffered these harms.

I don't know if that's true of Dartmouth or not. If that's true of Dartmouth or not, or if it will be, I'd like to think that the places that made bad decisions will suffer reputational harm. I think they have. Part of what I'm trying to do in this book is really apply shame as a kind of useful corrective. I think these people should be ashamed. And I think their reputations and how they're seen by posterity, it's got to matter. It's got a matter to them.

And I think that is part of how you maybe ultimately change the incentives so that things start to swing back the other way. And I think you do see it with the universities because he can't get a deal from Harvard. Trump's going after Yale right now. And there was a story several weeks ago that Yale was on the verge of making a deal. There was huge immediate pushback from the faculty, from the alumni, from the students, from Connecticut politicians. And I think there's a lot of pressure on the president of Yale not to make a deal. There's pressure to make it and there's real pressure not to make it. I will see what we'll see what happens.

It's a hard choice. But I think the kind of forces of resistance such as they are are getting it together a little bit and figuring out, figure out how to be more effective in these high pressure situations. Also, it obviously matters. Trump is just weaker. I mean, his approval is under 40%. the thing I'm watching so closely, and I'm sort of amazed it hasn't happened yet, but when will elected Republicans start to get off the train? Maybe it's, I'd say it's 34%. But at some point,

their self-interest, their survival interest turns around, and Trump becomes more of a liability to them than he is a threat to them. But right now, all you can say is there is not a single Republican in the House and Senate. Thomas Massey, the Kentucky Congress, who lost his primary to a Trump-sponsored challenger was the last one. It's not a single Republican standing up to Trump in a systematic way. It's extraordinary, isn't it? And you think of the people that tried to in small ways who got primaried. I mean, John Cornyn in Texas being probably the primary example with, you know, replaced by

Ken Paxton, Ken Paxton, who was impeached as Attorney General and was loathed by both Democrats and Republicans in Texas and may yet end up losing the seat to James Tolariko. Yeah. And even after being pushed out, someone like Cornyn still won't really go into opposition. You know, they still voted the retiring republicans who still voted for Todd Blanche to confirm him as attorney general. And so I think there's still a real fear of Donald Trump and there's also the incentives of what you do after. You know, if you leave the Senate, you probably want to be on corporate boards. And corporate boards, big companies don't want you

if you're persona non-grata with Donald Trump. And a lot of them stay in Washington and become lobbyists. Not that that's admirable, but that's how a lot of them make a lot of money after they leave office. Well, corporate clients aren't going to hire you if you're on the outs with the White House.

So the incentives are there even after you're leaving or when you're gone. Your book is available when? Tuesday, September 15th. Tuesday, September 15th. So we're out two days before publication date. Many congratulations. It's an excellent read.

And I hope that the people you've chosen to focus on read it too. Do you have any sense that they might? Have you been in touch with any of them? If they are going to, I doubt that they will tell me, although I'm sure I'll hear from their publicists about any facts they dispute. I will say Brad Karp is the only one of the aid who was willing to talk to me. And I give him credit for that. And I think as a journalist, you know, story's always better when you hear the person's side of it. And I wish the others had, even though they weren't going to like it.

I did make the best effort I could to understand things from their point of view. Okay. Jacob, thank you for coming in. Joanna, it's great talking to you. Well, there were so many parts of that conversation I wanted to linger on. And we didn't quite get to the full eight, which means you do have to buy the book. But I was particularly interested in the analysis of Megan Kelly, whose one 80 journey I still don't really understand.

Also Mitch McConnell and the Karmic Price, is that why we haven't heard from him for three months? Because he literally cannot say anything anymore. Brad Karp, who'd already had a heart attack that year. Imagine being summoned to meet Donald Trump. and then berated as roundly as he was. And then having Trump leave the meeting, which is what he did too, and leave it to his minions to sort out the deal for Paul Weiss.

And then of course the subsequent collapsing, essentially of Paul Weiss as Brad Karp is driven out of the business. Comment in the boxes for your favourite part of the conversation. And I'll be back tomorrow with David Rothkopf, dissecting whatever Trump has been up to over the weekend. And then I'll be back on Tuesday. with Michael Wolfe inside you know where Donald Trump said big thanks to our production team Ryan Murray John Romero Rachel Passer Heather Pissaro and Neil Rosenhaus so the good news is we have

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