Hey Everyone,
Delighted to chat this week with my friend Jacob Weisberg, whose new book, Profiles in Cowardice (a riff on JFK’s Profiles in Courage) asks: why did so many powerful Americans fold under pressure during Trump’s second administration?
In his book, Jacob profiles eight institutional leaders who, he argues, failed to stand up to Trump’s unconstitutional power-grabs. They are:
Brad Karp, former chair of Paul, Weiss (the law)
Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone (Wall Street)
Jeff Bezos, Amazon (Big Tech)
Sian Beilock, Dartmouth (universities)
Mitch McConnell (the Senate)
John Roberts (the Supreme Court)
Megyn Kelly (the media)
George W. Bush (the Republican establishment)
In our thirty-minute conversation, we honed in on three: Karp (the only one who spoke to Jacob for the book); Schwarzman and Bezos.
What was it about each of these three men’s characters that led them to bend the knee to Trump in a way that may have been self-serving in the short term, but Jacob believes damaged the democratic principles that guides each of the bodies they lead in the long term? For Karp, Jacob argues, it’s people-pleasing. For Schwarzman, ego. And for Bezos, his space ambitions.
I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Buy Profiles in Cowardice here, or from an independent bookstore via Bookshop.org.
Thank you Heather Le, 🇨🇦 Julie Harvey 🇨🇦, Kerry Shaw, Shannon Edrie, mary kostanski, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jacob Weisberg! Join me for my next live video in the app.
