The thing I’ve found most shocking about Donald Trump’s second presidency is not the epic grift, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement paramilitary violence or the assaults on free speech. These abuses, while horrifying, are predictable. What has stunned me has been the capitulation of so many American elites to Trump’s vulgar authoritarianism.
I didn’t expect major law firms, some that have long boasted about their progressive pro bono work, to fold with barely a fight. I didn’t expect TV networks to settle bogus lawsuits by paying the president millions, or for Ivy League schools such as Columbia University to relinquish autonomy over curriculum, admissions and student discipline. In Hungary, it took years for Viktor Orban’s government to bring most of academia, the news media and other pillars of civil society to heel. Why were so many powerful people in America, a country whose civic culture is steeped in resistance to tyranny, so willing to abase themselves and their institutions?
That’s the question at the heart of Jacob Weisberg’s important new book, “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.” It’s an inverted version of President John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” offering character studies of eight people who gave in to Trump despite surely knowing better. Reading it made me wonder if there’s something about America today that selects for spinelessness at the highest levels.
Some of Weisberg’s choices perplexed me; a few of the figures he focuses on are less morally compromised than simply rotten. There’s nothing that mysterious, at least to me, in the failure of people like Sen. Mitch McConnell, Megyn Kelly or vulture capitalist Stephen Schwarzman to display much democratic integrity. What’s harder to fathom is why people who presented themselves as bulwarks against Trumpism during his first term made such degrading compromises during his second.
Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos adopted the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” for his newspaper during the first Trump presidency, then gutted it during the second. As president of Barnard College during the first Trump administration, Sian Beilock championed sweeping anti-racism initiatives. In Trump’s second term, as president of Dartmouth College, she has kept mostly mum about Trump’s attacks on higher education. These are people who once knew how dangerous Trump was, but now that he’s worse than ever, they’re pretending not to see. Why?
The answers are a little different in each case, but they usually involve intra-elite competition. From the outside, these people look as if they can easily afford to risk acts of bravery. But they’re consumed in different ways with making sure their peers don’t get ahead of them. Courage is contagious, but so, it turns out, is cravenness.
An emblematic example in Weisberg’s book is Brad Karp, former chair of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which owed its reputation to its work for civil rights. As Weisberg writes, Paul Weiss was the first major New York law firm to hire a Black associate, William Coleman, who would help write some of the legal briefs in Brown v. the Board of Education. It represented Edith Windsor in her landmark 2013 same-sex marriage case. During the first Trump administration, Karp assigned 75 lawyers to fight Trump’s family separation policy. “Each of us needs to do what we believe is right, whatever the consequences,” Karp said in a 2024 interview.
So it’s astonishing that less than a year later, after Trump issued an executive order targeting the firm, Karp made a deal with the administration that included providing $40 million in pro bono work, which has included services for the Commerce Department. As Weisberg points out, Paul Weiss’ surrender helped set off “a bidding war for submission.” Today, the firm’s culture has changed; gone from its website are pages that once described its work on voting rights, reproductive rights and immigrant rights.
Why would anyone sell out his own ostensible values the way Karp did? Weisberg, who interviewed Karp for the book, attributes his decision-making to Paul Weiss’ changing financial underpinnings. In the 2010s, the firm became a leader in the spectacularly lucrative field of private equity law. Competition for star lawyers who demanded salaries in the eight figures was fierce, since clients tended to be more loyal to their attorneys than to their firms. Threatened by Trump, Karp feared an exodus of partners and the loss of one of the firm’s biggest clients, Apollo Global Management, whose CEO is a powerful Republican donor. Karp repeatedly described Paul Weiss’ peril as “existential.”
But as Weisberg points out, the stakes were hardly as grand as that word implies. Karp and his colleagues weren’t facing prison or penury. “An average of $7.5 million per partner might have fallen to, who knows, $4 or $5 million for a couple of years,” writes Weisberg. That’s a real hit, but it’s not exactly martyrdom.
Ultimately, Trump’s return to office brought Karp down, though not in the way he feared. This year, he was forced to resign after the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which revealed that Karp had socialized with the sex trafficker and offered him free legal advice. Karp met Epstein through one of his prized clients, Leon Black, Apollo’s billionaire co-founder. Given the waters Karp swam in, the idea of choosing decency over riches might have seemed foolish. Paul Weiss is now one of the most profitable law firms in the world; revenue is up almost 24%.
Philosopher Susan Neiman’s new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” is a useful companion to “Profiles in Cowardice.” Like Weisberg, Neiman wanted to explain why so many institutions caved to Trump. She believes it begins with an ethos that disdains virtue as hypocritical or naive. “When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself,” she writes. “It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”
Neiman cites research showing that “the longer people study economics, the more selfish they become.” The reason, as she interprets it, is that they grow convinced that maximizing self-interest is normal, and that to do otherwise makes you a sucker. The more the logic of capitalism pervades the rest of life, the less room there is for compassion, honor or heroism. Maybe that’s why some of the people most financially able to defend liberal democracy have decided it’s one of the few luxuries they can live without.
