What A Day - Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era with Jacob Weisberg

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Let's talk about cowards. The people who surrendered to President Donald J. Trump's Administration – and why. Jane talks to Jacob Weisberg, author of the new book, “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, ” about five principal factors playing into the dynamics of “cowardice and capitulation."Show Notes: Check out Jacob's book – https://tinyurl.com/yyvnupbd Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

How did Megan Kelly go from someone I actually admired in 2016, the way she stood up to Donald Trump in that famous debate? And also the way she brought down Roger Ailes, as head of Fox News. She was acting like a real journalist. How did that person then become the Megan Kelly of 10 years later more MAGA than MAGA? It's Tuesday, September 29th. I'm Jane Kostin. This is why today. President Donald Trump invited representatives from across the tech world for a big AI launch at the White House today to talk about the future of artificial intelligence or superintelligence.

And what do you know? They all came to a consensus on one thing. The belief of everybody that you're meeting with today that no guardrails, no regulation of AI superintelligence, as you call it, is necessary. Well, there's a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation. And we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that. But the self-regulation is very important. Self-regulation of AI. What could go wrong?

Trump also announced America.gov, the administration's new government chatbot. And good news, the administration's new chatbot knows who won the 2020 presidential presidential election. And it wasn't Donald Trump. Hey, speaking of 2020, former Justice Department. Special Counsel, Jack Smith, who brought two federal indictments against President Trump, was on the Hill on Tuesday. During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he told lawmakers that he believes the rule of law is being threatened like never before.

Smith also told the committee he stands behind the criminal cases he brought against Trump. He said, quote, our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation. If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so, regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat. And when I think about horrifying failures by both Republican and Democratic presidents, I of course think about the war in Iraq. On Wednesday, U.S. forces will pull out of their last bases in the country,

a withdrawal begun by the Biden administration and now orchestrated under Trump. For comparison's sake, American troops invaded Iraq in 2003, the year I turned 16. I am now 39 years old. But I want to talk about cowards, a different set of cowards this time, the people who surrendered to the Trump administration. And why? Joining me is Jacob Weisberg, author of the new book Profiles and Cowardists, a study of collaboration in the Trump era. Jacob Weisberg, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to what a day. Thank you, Jane. Nice to be on.

So you start your book of profiles of people who, subsume themselves to Donald Trump by talking about dissidents in the Soviet Union. And you call 2025-1989, the end of the Soviet Union, in reverse. What did you mean by that? I talk about a trip I made to Eastern Europe in 1988. I spent six weeks traveling around Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, then was Romania. And it was one of those terrible trips that was a great trip, because I got to see a different political system before it fell. And I met so many dissidents. I sought these people out and had this experience of getting to know people who were willing

to sacrifice everything to stand up to lies and to a false system. And what did they sacrifice? They lost their jobs. They could be beaten up. They could be thrown in prison. Their children weren't allowed to attend. university, I mean, the sacrifices, and these were not people who lived terribly well to begin with in that time and place. And, you know, prompted thoughts about what if we lived under that

kind of system? Would the people who pride themselves on being such good Democrats and such good liberals? I don't mean people on the left, but I mean people who believe in constitutional democracy in both parties, would they sacrifice for the things they believe in? And then, you know, a couple decades later, I think we started to get that test. And what I'm talking about when I talk about that process in reverse is as the system began to take on these authoritarian elements, and as Trump, particularly in the second Trump administration, began to exercise extra legal, extra constitutional powers fundamentally behaving like a dictator or an authoritarian, we got to see how those people reacted. And they became, I think, for the,

the most part, people not only elected Republicans, but people who represented the important institutions of civil society, law firms, universities, big business, the tech world, the media on the ownership side in particular, so many of them just fell readily into line and didn't seem to have any instinct to represent the basic principles that should govern their institutions. You list five principal factors that play into the dynamics of what you call cowardice and capitulation. Can you talk me through those five factors? Sure. Well, one that I think doesn't get talked about enough is the fear of violence.

And I think I know why people don't talk about it. It's kind of embarrassing to be threatened. And you also feel you'll encourage it by talking about it because these things have a kind of contagion or epidemic aspect to it. But a comment that really struck me was Mitt Romney saying after the impeachment vote failed, conviction failed in the Senate in February 2021. He said he thought that if all the senators had been able to afford the kind of private security he had, Trump would have been convicted and barred from holding office in the future. It's there as a kind of background thrum of politics, this fear of violence,

and particularly with the way that Donald Trump cultivates what you can only call them digital mob. There's always the danger that that digital mob will turn into real violence. That's some crazy person, you know, in a country, a wash with guns, will come after somebody. And obviously, we've seen manifold examples of that, not limited to people on the right, attacking people on the left. But it's a real fear. It's a fear of federal judges have. It's a fear of members of Congress have. It's a fear a lot of people have when they speak out in a way that may provoke Trump.

I also talk about a lot just to combine a lot of them so it doesn't, this isn't a lecture. You know, the kind of connected factors of peer pressure and the fear of ostracism. I think so much of this is kind of about the social context and people looking to see what their friends are doing and what their peer group is doing. And you see these sort of waves of capitulation. and also sometimes waves of resistance. After January 6th, again, the tech platforms, they all threw Donald Trump off because they didn't want to be complicit in an attempt to overthrow an election.

And they all said they weren't going to give money to Republican candidates that voted against certifying the election after January 6th. Well, come Trump's re-election, 2024, they all as a group with very few exceptions swung back in the other direction. They let Trump back on the platform. They resumed their contributions. They all went down to Mar-a-Lago on bend-in-knee. And I think there's both this sort of looking at what your peers and competitors are doing to determine your own behavior.

But also a kind of fear, and I think you particularly see this with Republicans in Congress, of being cast out of the tribe. You know, what happened to Liz Cheney? It's not just that the party turns against you and you lose your job and your career. It's that you're not welcome at the country. club. You're not your people in your social circle actually start to shun you. And also it affects your potential career. You know, if you leave Congress, unfortunately, so many of them want to become lobbyists and stay in Washington or join corporate boards. Well, if you turn against the

group and become a public opponent of Donald Trump, Fortune 500 companies don't want you on your board. Companies don't want to hire you as a lobbyist. You can become a kind of excommunication. person, which is what has happened to Liz Janie. So two of the others you mentioned are money, which I think is a giant one, and institutional responsibility. And I'd like to hear a little bit more about the institutional responsibility idea. Can you talk about that? Yes, and I think it's institutional responsibility understood wrongly and too narrowly.

So if someone leads an institution, say a university, say a Columbia university, or Northwestern or Cornell or a Brown just to single out some of the schools that made deals with Trump. I think there is a kind of thinking that, well, as head of the institution, my job is to get the institution out of trouble, to protect it that way, to solve the immediate problem. But there's a failure to think about the responsibility to the larger institution, that is, in this case, higher education, the principles of academic freedom, the principles of academic freedom, of academic independence from the government. And you are part of both your individual institution,

but the broader institution. And if you sacrifice the fundamental principles that protect the broader institution, where are you when the bully comes back for more and in a longer-term perspective in terms of your institution, stature, reputation, ability to really function independently? We've seen the same thing,

with the big law firms. You know, you make a deal, the way Brad Karp, who I talk about in the book, made a deal with Trump with the idea that he was protecting his institution, that law firm from attack, but in a way that's so undermined the rule of law and the principles that govern how the law operates

in this country, i.e., that everybody has a right to a lawyer and that the government can't punish a law firm because it has represented people that someone in political power doesn't like. If you sacrifice that principle, I think you're actually not exercising real institutional responsibility. We'll get back to my conversation with Jacob Weisberg in a moment. What a Day is brought to you by Zbiotics Pre-Alcohol. I have to tell you about this game-changing product I drink before a night out with drinks.

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Get your free guide at netsuite.com slash wad. NetSuite.com slash wad. Let's get back to my conversation with Jacob Weisberg. It's interesting to me how some of these incentives lead to other incentives. You have the example of Megan Kelly, who lost institutional backing when first she left Fox News for NBC and then left NBC. And she has to build a career as an independent broadcaster of sorts. But that means that she has to make money and she's more vulnerable to the fear of ostracism and to peer pressure. She has an audience that wants, as you point out, to hear her scream about trans people

and basically perform something for an audience. So how do these incentives keep driving other incentives? You have the peer pressure that drives the money, and then the money drives the peer pressure. Yeah. I mean, how did Megan Kelly go from someone I actually admired in 2016, the way she stood up to Donald Trump in that famous debate? And also the way she brought down Roger Ailes, his head of Fox News. She was acting like a real journalist.

How did that person then become the Megan Kelly of 10 years later more MAGA than MAGA? I think part of it is this personal, in her case, this personal psychological dynamic around bullying. She was badly bullied as an adolescent or teenager, which she writes about in her book, committed to standing up to bullies and then becomes a bully herself. So there's that version of it.

But there's also the kind of incentive you're talking about if you want to be successful in conservative media, there's no root to being the top right-wing population. by being anti-Trump. I mean, thank God we have the bulwark and I think a number of conservative journalists have actually been kind of the opposite of what I talk about in the book. They've really been heroic. But if you want to top the charts, you're competing with Tucker Carlson, you do that by taking a kind of extreme position. I mean, the thing about incentives is they work without you having to pay attention to them or know what you're doing. Here's where the money is. Here's

where the audience is, here's where success is. It's a gravitational pull in that direction. So something I think about a lot, which you don't bring up in the book, but I just kept thinking about this with regard to the media and with regard to actually almost all of the people you're talking about in your book is the idea of audience capture, which is that once you have an audience as a member of the media, or I think for many politicians now where you have an audience that wants something from you and you give it to them. And then the audience keeps demanding something from you and you keep giving it to them. And you can't turn away your audience. You don't want to lose your audience. Your audience is your paycheck. Or they're your voters. Or they're the people

who got you your very fancy job. Or they're the people who now are here to support you. And I'm curious as to how you think about the role that we play in helping to foment this kind of cowardice. And I don't mean myself. I did not make any of these people do any of this. But I do think that there's a role in which, you know, Megan Kelly isn't doing what she's doing if there isn't an audience that's saying, come on, you have to do this. Mitch McConnell doesn't, you know, do what he does with regard to impeachment if he doesn't, isn't firmly aware that that's what the people who voted for him want. I mean, I think that for any number of these figures, there's obviously a business incentive, but also I think that there's kind of

this roiling audience question of people being pushed or feeling as if they're being pushed to make cowardly decisions. Well, I think the larger set of incentives affects all of us. I mean, think about a substack media world versus a magazine media world in which I started. Now, in the magazine world, there was always concerned that the advertisers were going to have too much influence and that the publication was going to bend to do something that the advertisers wanted. In my experience, it seldom happened in any explicit way, but they were paying ultimately for newspapers and magazines more that as much or more than readers were, and that kind of shaped what coverage was like.

But in a, say, in a substack world or a world in which publications like the New York Times and magazines are most of the revenue comes, from the audience, your incentives are to serve that audience. And the audience can be a poll factor in terms of giving people what you want. Those are, you know, again, that's a, that's a financial incentive. On the right, that's true with left-wing media as well as right-wing media. And it's not that that's bad and what we had before was good. I think there just needs to be a recognition that these incentives shape things in certain ways and there are places where you can see it very clearly. And there are also cases where it goes beyond a subtle influence to a kind of pandering.

I think you see that with Megan Kelly. I certainly think you see that when you get away from the media and talk about politicians, you know, and I mean, what's happening in Congress right now when you see congressional committee try to put Jack Smith on the, you know, in the firing line and subject him to a kind of ritual performance of humiliation, it happened to totally backfire and fail. But that's a performance for an audience. In that case, an audience of voters and campaign contributors rather than an audience of readers, listeners, and viewers.

Something I think about a lot. I mean, partly because it gives me hope, but also because it's a real question for me. Outside of Mitch McConnell, for understandable reasons, John Roberts and George W. Bush, who you also mentioned in this book, there's a good reason to think that many of the people in your book will return and say, 2029, and say, I am totally different now. I always go back to, do you remember when the New York Times did a interview with Glenn Beck in 2016,

and it was entitled, Glenn Beck is sorry about all that, where he basically was like, yeah, you know, everything I was saying about Obama with like a weird whiteboard and all of my accusations, wow, you know, things got a little out of hand. So let's say we get to 2029 and you have all these figures who are like, oh, you know, that was different. I'm different now. I'm actually, you know, I'm a changed, reformed person and I see what happened that was wrong. And actually Trump was a, you know, he was not a good president. And I don't know what happened. What do we do with them then? Yeah, I think that's a big question. I think that's quite likely. And it's different for people who are, say, elected. Republicans who I think are going to sort of say, let's just move on, never mind, probably for the most part without trying to acknowledge any wrongdoing, as opposed to people who say lead liberal institutions who are going to be more like the leaders of those institutions post the

McCarthy era and say that was a terrible moment. We can never let that happen again. Of course, they did just let it happen again. And I think there has to be a kind of accountability and justice in certain cases before there's any willingness to sort of readmit these people, as it were, and go back to normal. I think, you know, I particularly think at one extreme about the 137 members of the House and Senate Republicans who voted against certifying the election after the Capitol was attacked on January 6th. That night, after the Capitol was attacked, attack, this huge group of mostly House members, and I think nine senators, said, you know what, we still want to help Donald Trump reverse the results of this election. I don't think in a different

world that those people should be kind of readmitted, as it were, to polite society without an acknowledgement and apology. And it has to be a real apology. And, you know, what do I mean? would I appear on a panel with one of those members of Congress or senators, I would only do so if they were willing to acknowledge what they did and say that it was wrong and maybe give some explanation of why. When it comes to people who lead liberal institutions, I think there's going to be a lot of shading and a lot of spinning and a lot of coloring. And it's going to be up to those of us who care about this to remember, not that they should be banned from public life, or forbidden, but we saw what happened when the chips were down. We saw how they behaved under

pressure. They didn't behave in a principled way. I think we need more principled leaders of our leading institutions. And I would disqualify them on that ground. It doesn't mean I think they should go to prison or be punished in any way beyond that. You actually just referenced former Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy and his infamous red baiting. You based this book, on a book originally written by the late president, John F. Kennedy, called Profiles and Courage, which he wrote or had written, arguable. But you make an important note in the introduction to your book that when Kennedy was an actual senator, he did not display courage. He could have spoken out against McCarthy, but because of family ties and a bunch of other things, he didn't. He didn't say

anything about him and he didn't say he was in the hospital when he could have voted against him to stop him and we don't know how he would have voted on that. But you write that Kennedy gained courage by learning about people with courage and that during the Cuban Missile crisis, he showed a lot of courage in preventing what could have ended in a nuclear war. So you've just written a book about people who didn't show courage, about people who were deeply cowardly. What can we learn about how to be courageous from people who weren't? Yeah. It's a great question, Jane.

And I do think looking at these negative examples in a way can help prepare people for moments they may face or moments they are facing. And some of it, I think, involves the need to think through these issues in advance, everyone for themselves in whatever world they're in. And obviously this takes on one set of, like, risks and sense of urgency if you are a prosecutor in the Justice Department or in a local police department that may be asked to cooperate with ICE in detaining people and deporting people. And another set if you, I don't know, work for a private company. And I don't think the point is that everybody has to operate on some kind of ground of pure principle all the time. time. That would be ridiculous if everybody was always resigning because some, you know, principle was potentially violated. But you do have to think about where the lines and limits are before it happens, because otherwise I think you can get sucked down this slippery slope. And I

think a lot of the people in my book are very good examples of this, where it's just another concession. It's another step. It's, well, we've got to solve this problem. We're in it this far. And if you don't know what you don't do, you're much more likely to end up doing things that you'll ultimately be ashamed of and should be ashamed of. So I think some of it is just a matter of kind of re-grounding yourself, both in a community that shares the same set of democratic and liberal values, but also in terms of what the principles of your institution are and what the limits have to be. You know, if you're a lawyer, you have to stand up for the rule of law. You don't stand up for the rule of law as lawyer. You've abandoned the whole premise of your career, of your professional identity. Jacob, thank you so much for joining me.

Jane, it's great talking to you. That was my conversation with Jacob Wiseberg, author of the new book, Profiles and Cowardists, a study of collaboration in the Trump era. Before we go, Democrats only need to win a few seats to take back Congress this November. Votes of America has launched brand new ways to get involved based in the latest tactics and tools that will help Dems win. It doesn't matter where you live or how much experience you have in politics. There is a place for you. In Club Vote Pro, you'll get trained on your rights and how to keep other voters safe and informed as they cast their ballots.

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The Atlanta Hawks are not the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and tell your friends to listen. And if you earned a reading, and not just about how during Smith's testimony today that I mentioned earlier, Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmidt thought he, he discovered a diabolical scheme in which Smith was coordinating with Fawney Willis, district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia at an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024 to do super crimes, I guess, I don't know. But Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar discovered a tiny problem with the whole scheme. Jack Smith was watching an Iowa Hawkeyes game in Maryland that day.

Could it then be that University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? could that be it? And maybe before we show this kind of thing. I know. But if he was at an Iowa game, is that correct? It was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play. I know, but that might be the confusion over the names of the team, but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully. Like me, what a day is a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at kirkut.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and please watch us.

on YouTube, if only to see Amy Klobuchar looking the happiest Amy Klobuchar has ever been. Why Today is a production of Cricket Media. Our show is produced by Emily 4, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Adam Lippertrude, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.