He serves as Chair of The Committee to Protect Journalists and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
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He → serve → Books
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jacob Weisberg discuss why American institutions proved far less resistant to Trump in his second term than his first, what figures like Jeff Bezos and Brad Karp reveal about the social nature of courage and cowardice, and whether Harvard’s response to the Trump administration could become a turning point for institutional resistance.
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response → discuss → resistance
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
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transcript → condense → clarity
There’s a famous book by John F. Kennedy, which I must admit I’ve never read, called Profiles in Courage, in which he profiles all of the various people that he admires and who he thinks have bettered America and perhaps the world with their courage.
You have inverted the premise of this for a book that speaks more naturally to our own historical moment, Profiles in Cowardice.
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that → ’ → Cowardice
Well, I think so, and just to spend a minute on Kennedy because it is a really interesting book—it’s a book about the Senate.
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it → think → Senate
And John F. Kennedy as a young senator, I think, was really troubled by his own failure of courage.
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I → think → courage
He’d been a war hero, and everyone knows the story of PT-109, how he rescued his fellow sailors, and his physical courage was unquestionable.
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courage → know → sailors
But when Joe McCarthy was running rampant, JFK took a dive in the Senate on the vote to censure him.
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JFK → run → him
He got out of voting.
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He → get → voting
He never said how he would have voted.
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he → say → ?
He never stood up to Joe McCarthy.
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He → stand → McCarthy
My read on it is that he wanted to write this book to give himself more courage, to try to understand what courage in politics was.
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courage → want → politics
He wrote about eight senators going back to the early days of the Republic, not all of whom he would have agreed with on substantive issues, but who took important decisions against their own interests, who were willing to risk or sacrifice their political careers for principles, often constitutional principles, that they believed in deeply.
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they → write → that
I think it worked for JFK.
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it → think → JFK
So the book is sort of a trope in Washington—people talk about “profiles in courage” when someone is willing to do something, which they very seldom are, against their political interest.
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they → talk → interest
Often even the ironic use of the phrase has become a bit of a trope, right?
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use → become → trope
The Trump era is a series of “profiles in courage” because look at how cowardly everybody is being.
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everybody → look → courage
This idea that courage today is in such short supply that you look at the United States Senate and say it’s a series of “profiles in courage,” as an ironic, knowing wink, contrasting this moment with that of Kennedy.
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it → look → Kennedy
It’s kind of a received idea today.
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It → ’ → ?
I look at a series of American institutions—institutions of civil society, law, academia, business and finance, tech, and then Congress, the Supreme Court, media, and so on.
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I → look → society
What really prompted me was that at the beginning of Trump’s second term, the first part of 2025, the contrast to Trump’s first term was so marked.
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contrast → prompt → term
I focused on people in this book who were different in Trump Two than they were in Trump One.
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they → focus → Trump
Trump threatened him, tried to blackmail him, and actually caused tremendous financial harm to Amazon by taking away a Pentagon cloud computing contract.
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Trump → threaten → contract
It was a $20 billion contract—I think it was the largest contract in the history of the US military—and Trump took it away from Amazon to punish Bezos for the coverage he got in the Washington Post.
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he → think → Post
Bezos didn’t waver.
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Bezos → waver → ?
He said the right thing, he did the right thing.
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he → say → thing
In Trump Two, he was in Mar-a-Lago on bended knee, ready to capitulate.
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he → capitulate → knee
Even before Trump was elected, you knew it was going to be different.
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it → elect → ?
That paradigm, I think, applies to so many people in institutions—certainly to Brad Karp, who I write about, the managing partner at Paul Weiss, in my illustration of what happened at the big commercial law firms.
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what → think → firms
Same thing: in Trump One, he sent Paul Weiss lawyers to the airports in New York to try to help Muslim immigrants who might be denied entry.
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who → send → entry
In Trump Two, he made a deal in five days to essentially give in to Trump’s unlawful demands, demanding a range of favors from them in response to things that were entirely within their rights to do as a law firm.
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that → make → firm
I want to dig back into some of those particular people over the course of this conversation, but let’s think about what produces a moment of courage, and what produces an atmosphere in which people who are capable of courage in different moments end up not being courageous.
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who → want → moments
One story you could tell is one of moral decline—that in the past people were courageous, they had principles, there was a kind of public spirit with which they grew up, and unfortunately we’ve lost that over time, and now everything is worse.
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everything → tell → time
It’s often tempting to think that, given how awful so much of our politics is.
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much → ’ → politics
But it’s interesting that at the beginning of the conversation you mentioned JFK being haunted by his failure of courage during the McCarthy era.
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JFK → ’ → era
And when you look at American history in those decades, you might say that there was quite a lot of courage in how to confront the Great Depression at a certain point.
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you → look → point
Then there was this moment of complete dereliction of duty when people let McCarthy run wild, and then things got better.
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things → be → duty
So clearly it’s not a secular story of fifty years ago, seventy years ago, things were much better and everybody was virtuous, and then over time it declined, because we see that kind of oscillation.
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we → ’ → oscillation
We see the difference between the McCarthy era and ten or fifteen years later.
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We → see → era
We see the difference between Trump One and Trump Two.
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We → see → Trump
…and 259 more, not listed.
The Aporia
