I've Got the Names of the Very Worst Trump Cowards

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And I think Bezos thinks that space is his contribution to humanity. Bezos thinks he's gonna 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's absolutely isn't. In terms of Trump and Bezos having a kind of relationship where Bezos keeps the president happy I think that doesn't danger 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 Charlie Coles. This is the 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 Cowardist. Obviously a take on John F Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage. But it's singled 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. We love our followers. You get extra video. There's all sorts of advantages to becoming a bee beast member or joining our friend of the beast tier. But no time to waste. America's on fire. Let's get into it. Good. So many people to choose from you. You 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 the hexath or pambondi or people who are just shills for Trump. I was interested in the difference between Trump one and Trump two. And why the guardrails held so much better in Trump one. And why they've fallen apart in Trump too. 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 one who in Trump two were capitulating. I wanted to understand that I wanted to explain it both in individual terms, but also around the macro story of what it changed. OK, 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 Carr, who was running pull wise the 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 Darmus 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 one 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 pay 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 or Pentagon contract for cloud computing that I think was the biggest government contract ever been awarded. Trump made sure 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, think of the Washington Post as 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 something like a third. And there are people in the Washington Post newsroom who are still valuately 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 won when the post was right there with the New York Times in breaking stories every day. Okay, so it's because of his ownership of the Washington Post that 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 power? Did they not think that project 2025 was going to be a real thing? Why do you think they lent 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? Joanna, 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 presented that way. But think about what happened after January 6th when all of those same tech platforms cut off Trump's account because they said he's 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? The point is a little bit there's less independent ethical judgment and less independent thinking than there is what are what are the other guys doing, but their 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 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 loves 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. It was a 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. What happened between Trump won a Trump too, is that came into severe jeopardy, partly because Musk got so far away. head of him, SpaceX got so far ahead of Bezos' 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. Bill Gates has the Gates Foundation and 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, 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 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 great. 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. Moore, Mars and Bezos is Mr. Moon. I think Bezos' vision is 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 learn to 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? But does Jeff Bezos think that he is, 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, or by maybe withdrawing the endorsement of Kamala 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. Remember, at one point, Trump was like, we're going to deport him back to South Africa and fire his head of NASA and cut them off. And they've made peace in certain ways now. But I think 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 our product. They were going to show you how much more it was going to cost because of tariffs. Kind of a good idea. White House went crazy when it saw this report. Trump calls Bezos, "Oh, no, don't worry. We won't do that. That's all." 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 doesn't danger 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. OK. 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-gen 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 and the United States were 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 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 Alito or Thomas Little better. But Roberts is an ideologue, and he's a funny kind of ideologue 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 ranch to be trampled 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, the 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, well, let's pretend we have a normal president. 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 politically, 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 decisions, Roberts, I think, has a bigger responsibility to protect the rule of law in America. That's what I think he's not done. 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 her wherever. That was a moment where Megan Kelly and the president looked in 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 if you think back to that debate, that first Fox News debate in 2015, I thought she was a real hero. 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 menace 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 off to 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 laugh After the mainstream media treated her even worse than people on the right hand. And I think it was a huge mistake on their part. I think they should have welcomed her as someone who 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 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 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 me on everything. You don't have to agree with all platform. And Democrats have a tendency to do the opposite to say, here's a litmus test on abortion, here's 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 you can see excluded her and created her in this horrible way. And 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. Steve Bannon tried to bully her in this really brutal way. She stood up to up to a point, but eventually she succumbed to it. And if you listen to her show, the podcast, vidcaster, whatever it is, what is it? It's the daily bully. She's going after trans people, gay people, liberals, whatever 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 incentivized by money. I mean, she got a large payout, and 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-mega. 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. So you write you on 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. Right. I mean, there's the bulwark. There's the people I admire who are not really even Republicans anymore. But you can't have an anti-Trump media channel and be successful. And I think at some level too, she's just reading the room and how do you show up, 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, the contradicts what they thought before. But if you come back in six months, they've figured out how to believe it. So you think JD 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 falsely and that he sort of tests the limits of my theory. And when someone 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 Ruby O2, I think it's driven by ambition and the lust for power, and they, at some level, they must know things that they're doing wrong. But the lust for power is so strong that it sort of overrides that. And I think it just kind of becomes meaningless at some point. What do you really believe? You believe what's useful for you to believe politically. And Trump, I think Vance believes in MAGA and wants to take over from Trump. Would he believe in it a few years from now, if the party had taken a different direction and turned 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. A.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Paxet, they're all kind of, you know, figuring out their next steps. So 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 an essence of the problem in 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 to 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 of self, 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. You're interested in operating in a non-corrupt environment. You're interested 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 because they've done it. It's the reason why it happened in America and didn't happen in Western Europe. Western Europe is 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 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 be in league with countries in South American Asia that we think of, you know, where people pay prohibits 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 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 call that socialism, 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 intact, you should recoil against that idea, but no, they've been willing to pay. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Maybelline, New York. Jelly mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day-gum v-grip. No tightness. No stickiness. No residue. [BLANK_AUDIO] Do we hydrate it skin? That still feels like your skin. Try new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. Maybe it's Mavily! So do you think that you know Jeff Bezos and Steve Schwarzman 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 they're 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 ear 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 gonna lose that was part of what's really threatened Bezos so there's no honor among thieves not that they're that their thieves exactly but I think part of this uh 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 gonna 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 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 Elise 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 Stephanie 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 and he you can 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 and jail and you you write him a letter saying you know you're 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 knock knock a lunder so and that's kind of unusual it's not a normal system of loyalty it's not your dead to me forever it's just as constant it's more like a bullying dynamic right 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 evident 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 hadn't thought of that but as long as you apologize I mean his he's 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 it's like going testify against him I mean Michael Cohen you know he testified against him in a criminal case so well I'm spent three years in jail right 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 think my god what you know why has 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 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 Ailes had a similar idea of what you know Republicans both yeah what they should look like so that's that's offensive and pathetic but it's also you know I think at least Stefanic 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 justice department and education departments that says we want to pick the professors we want to decide how you picked 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 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 seems 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 don't you an 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 was a very specific decision after January 6 Mitch McConnell is a creature of the Senate his whole life has been in the Senate it's the only ambition in life is to be Senate majority leader he loves the Senate it's traditions it's processes and when this Senate and the House were attacked on January 6th he said this is Trump is this is and if there is such a thing as an impeachable offense this is it he was ready to vote to convict Trump he took 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 that's ridiculous reading I mean there's almost no serious constitutional scholar 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 we would have no second term and that is on Mitch McConnell I think Mitch McConnell knows that I think he's 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 you know you're in your 70s or 80s and someone is bullying you again in both physically and that's there's a physical threat and their names being called and he's and Trump is posting this vicious racist stuff about McConnell's wife Elaine Chao making fun of for his own former transpose yeah but who quit after January 6th right who did take a you know 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 judge 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 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 so the whole Trump second term especially has been such an insult to to Senate and to McConnell's idea of how government works under the Constitution that yeah I mean to speculate psychologically I'm an obviously yes a physical condition but I talk about these two instances between the two terms when he froze yes stock still couldn't say word had to be let off and process what's wrong with him nothing obviously wrong with him he he I think there's a possibly 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 ABC and you can physically see him leaning in and just I mean he 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, 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 won, and he still won in Trump too. 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. 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 to Minneapolis with the ICE protests. 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 or when it's 20 below zero might be the coldest city in the country. And pushing ICE was an occupying army in Minneapolis, 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 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, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, Dartmouth, Dartmouth. I mean, you have the chance of Dartmouth in the book, because you have the big cowards. And Dartmouth didn't have to, didn't make a deal, they didn't, Trump left them alone for bad reasons. But there are exactly an example of what I'm talking about is all the other Ivy League schools 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 it's 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 stand by the sidelines. The already 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. Like, 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. Right, although the trouble is that often those institutions are in competition with each other, right? I mean, what's remarkable about the story of Brad Carp, 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, another company I've used, who's on the line when Brad Carp goes into 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 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 to, 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 paper's case. They wanted to beat each other, you know, everything's massively secret. But when they're arguing 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 if 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 jackal circle, and they kind of think they're weak, maybe we can pick off their rain makers. It is a real vulnerability, but it also speaks to the change in the legal profession, how it's become much more like Wall Street, and much less like it was 30 years ago, when people were more likely to be partners in these firms for their whole careers, and they have long term loyalty. And I think more often stood on principle. Another of the characters in this book, Steve Schwarzman, co-founder of Blackstone, huge financial company, a massive presence here in his wife, Christine, on the social scene in New York. Number once, going to their apartment, and as I was going in the drawing room, there was literally a buckler at the door who said, "Who murmured to me? This is the largest private drawing room in New York." Does he care that he's in your book? Is any amount of shame going to be brought to Steve Schwarzman 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 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 this just that deep insecurity, and he talks about going to Yale, and he didn't know anybody and his roommates were weird and didn't have any friends. And how was he going to get recognized? How are people going to appreciate how brilliant he was? And he 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 Ego Maniacs, 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, he names this short from scholarship after himself. I think it's a kind of pointless, ridiculous scholarship, he hasn't signed up. But also very Trumpian. Yes, absolutely. Who else puts his name on everything, on the currency, on the map, on every daughter had to fly in to Donald J. Trump International Airport in Palm Beach. Right. And then he has to drive along the Donald J. Trump highway, right? Yeah, it's like you feel like you're living in a Eastern European post-Soviet dictatorship run by a charismatic maniac. But anyway, back to shortsman, 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. There were good people on both sides. Sure, it's that I'm not really offended by that. But he, you know, he warned Trump, we better cancel, get rid of this council first before everyone quits just disband it so you don't have this mess resignation. And he's desperately doing anything even though he's someone he's just cares about antisemitism. 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 in the way that 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, you know, Chris Christie or Nikki Haley or you know someone who seemed like they could beat him in the 2024 primaries. No, 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, it's 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 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 kind of extravagance, but inside this insecurity, I got a 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 it, everything. And can that person be shamed? Maybe not, but they certainly care about how 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 Cowardist. How else can pressure be brought to bear? I think of these institutions where he's plastered his name on everything. So there, 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 called, was called Commons. Great old looks like, you know, the dining hall in Hogwarts and, you know, Harry Potter. 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 dollars to turn it into the Stephen A Schwartzman Center with his name carved all over it. It's a multimedia complex. Well, it's ridiculous. It's a, it's, 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 of covering when governing when they can take it down. But, you know, when it's succaculars, I mean, when someone, it's really done something egregious, the name comes off because it becomes an embarrassment to the institution. Right. So arguably should the New York Public Library take the Schwartzman name off it. If they can, if they can, I winse every time I go in there the same way I winse when I go into a sackler gallery. I think what, what about, was it worth it for a big donation to give, 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. It's a typical institution. What do you think the comic cost is to these people? I mean, Brad Carp goes into 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 pulled 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 comic cost? I don't know. I mean, I think Brad Carp and Paul Weiss are an interesting example. Obviously, he lost his job. It's out 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 had stuff in the Epstein files about him was just sort of unacceptable and embarrassing. And his partner said, enough, would they have 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's 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 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. Right. These people should be ashamed. And I think their reputations and how they're seen by posterity. It's got a 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. 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 the Yale not to make a deal with pressure to make it. And it'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 a 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 Congressman 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 try to in small ways who got primaried. I mean John Corning in Texas being probably the primary example with you know replaced by Ken Paxton. Ken Paxton who is impeached as Attorney General and was loathed by both Democrats and Republicans in Texas and may yet end up losing the seat to James Tallerika. Yeah and even after being pushed out someone like Corning 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 a persona non-grotted 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 gonna hire you if you're 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. Okay so we're out two days before publication date. Many congratulations 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 fact they dispute. I will say Brad Carp 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 stories always better when you hear the person's side of it and I wish the others had even though they weren't gonna 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. Wow 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, who's 180 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 Carp, 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 Carp is driven out of the business. Comment in the boxes for your favorite part of the conversation. And I'll be back tomorrow with David Rothkoff, dissecting whatever Trump has been up to over the weekend. And then I'll be back on Tuesday with Michael Wolff, inside you know where Donald Trump said. Big thanks to our production team, Ryan Murray, John Romero, Rachel Passo, Heather Passoro, and Neil Rosenhaus. So the good news is we have so many bee-beast tier members now. There are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support.