- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy; Claire and Carl Stuart; Christine and Philip Dial; Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication, ellergroup.com; Diane Land and Steve Adler; and Karey and Chris Oddo.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's a veteran journalist and newsroom leader whose latest book, "Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era," is a New York Times bestseller.

He's Jacob Weisberg.

This is "Overheard."

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- Two.

- This is "Overheard."

(bright engaging music) (audience clapping) (audience clapping) Jacob Weisberg, welcome.

- Thank you, Evan.

It's great to be here.

- Old friend, glad to see you.

Congratulations on your success with this book.

- I appreciate it.

I love coming to Austin, because you do everything here.

- Well, that's very nice.

Thank you.

I wanna understand the origin story of this book.

So you've written books about Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

This is not really a book about Trump, as you've said, it's a book about kind of other people's reactions to Trump.

But nonetheless, this is a book about the time we're living in.

You could've written any book.

Why did you write this book?

- There was a mystery I wanted to solve, Evan, which was why was Trump 2 so different from Trump 1?

And different in this sense, in Trump 1, there was a lot of resistance to what Trump tried to do that went beyond the powers of the presidency.

Call it his extra-constitutional actions.

And that's really the essence of this book.

You know, this isn't a left book attacking Trump for being on the right.

This is a book that is an argument to liberals, conservatives, to everyone saying that what Trump has tried to do is extraordinary because he is acting as a dictator rather than as a president.

And what I mean by that is he's trying to use powers that don't belong to the presidency under the Constitution.

- Yeah.

- There's so many cases where Trump, with control of Congress, could get laws passed to do what he wants.

He prefers to issue an order and not go to Congress, or he prefers to demand an ownership stake in an American company, or he prefers to give an order to a law firm or a university saying, "You're gonna be punished for this."

- "You must do X."

And it only works, of course, if the people on the receiving end don't stand up to him.

- That's exactly the problem.

And, in the first term, there was significant resistance.

I mean, not enough.

But when Trump tried to do things that were really outrageous, there was resistance.

Even inside his own administration, people stood up, and there were Republicans in Congress who stood up, and institutions.

You know, people talk about the guardrails.

The guardrails were a little shaky in the first term, but I think they held around democracy.

- Right.

- In the second term, much less so.

- You buy the argument that there are no guardrails now.

- Well, people use terms like norms and talk about traditions, but the laws in the Constitution are only as effective as the people entrusted with taking care of them.

And when there's deference to an executive, you can go down a path towards authoritarianism if the people who are responsible for institutions, both government institutions and what we call civil society institutions, like academia, you know, museums, foundations, all that, if those people say, "All right, this president is so powerful that we'll just do what he wants," I think you can lose those guardrails that protect democratic process.

- I mean, I think about norms and institutions and kind of history and all that sort of stuff, traditions, and I think people like us talk about that, right?

- Yeah.

- And so aren't you adorable talking about norms, right?

I don't know if the rest of the country looks at this conversation and thinks, "Yeah, I get that or I understand the importance of this."

Like, I think this may be, dare I say it, a coastal elite conversation.

- Yeah, well, what I would say is it's an American conversation, and it's an American conversation that very much dates from the founding.

You know, we've just had the 250th anniversary of the founding.

And when you go back to those original debates and original documents, what you see is a group of political thinkers creating a country.

- Yeah.

- And what they were worried about is precisely what's happening right now.

- Right now.

Right.

- It's a demagogue.

It's someone who didn't respect the written laws.

And the basic problem was how do you constrain someone like that?

And it's never amazingly, I think, happened.

I mean, we've had bad presidents and we've had presidents who in places abused power.

But I don't think we've ever had a president who so challenged the premises of the system until now.

- This is really the thing I wanna talk about, because the level of capitulation is kind of off the charts, right?

If you read this book, and you know there are plenty of other examples of it that are not in this book, the level of capitulation is off the charts because the level of assertion of authority by this president is itself off the charts.

There is no comparison point previous to this one that is even close.

Right?

- I think that's right.

I mean, the closest relevant comparisons, in some ways, are McCarthyism in the '50s and Watergate, and some of the abuses of power in the Nixon administration.

But I don't think either of those was actually remotely comparable to what's going on right now.

- Well, Nixon's problem was mere criminality.

Like, if it were only criminal behavior, that might be one thing.

But we're talking about essentially a complete undoing and an unmaking of the way government operates, right?

- Yeah, that's right.

And, you know, Nixon broke laws, but he knew he was breaking laws and he knew what the laws were.

And his defense would've been that, "I'm not the first, and that I'm just doing what Kennedy and Johnson did before me."

This is different.

Donald Trump is trying to make himself into the law, and the way he has... There's so many examples you can talk about, but just talk about the use of the Justice Department for political prosecutions.

- Right.

- Now, I think it's not that that's never happened before.

- We're sitting here 24 hours after James Comey was indicted, I believe, for the third time?

- Yep.

- Right?

Where the Justice Department is being used to exact vengeance on one of the president's perceived political enemies, acting like the president's law firm as opposed to America's Justice Department.

- Quite openly.

And so many prosecutors around the country who were career officials have resigned or been fired because they wouldn't pursue these cases for the Justice Department.

I mean, the entire Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which I think was something like 75 lawyers, they've all resigned or been fired because the Civil Rights Division is no longer a civil rights division.

It's a political persecution division.

- So back to the Nixon analogy, then we'll come to the book, 'cause I do think there's a connection here.

There was a Barry Goldwater in the era of Watergate who would go to the White House and say to the president, "This is too much, it's time."

There is no Barry Goldwater today.

The only people in the president's party who will speak up against him are people who've been defeated in primaries in which he endorsed their opponent or they've retired to get away from government, right?

The bravery that a Barry Goldwater might've had or the sort of statesman-like behavior is also absent from the scene today, and that's really what this book is about.

- Yeah, and again, in the first term even, there was John McCain, there was Mitt Romney.

- Correct.

- There were more than a dozen Republican members of the House and Senate who, I think, stood, I mean, sometimes they voted with Trump, but they generally stood against what he was trying to do that was unconstitutional.

And, this time, we're down to none.

I mean, the last one was Thomas Massie.

- Thomas Massie from Kentucky who got beat in the primary.

- Yeah, and again, this is not someone whose politics I would agree with very much, but I really admired that he had principles and stood on it.

And Trump came after every one of those people.

And, as you say, they either got defeated in a primary against the MAGA candidate who he supported and funded, or they resigned to get out of town.

- Drove them out of Congress.

- But the pressure that's brought to bear on them, it's part of what I was interested in the book, because each one of these people is an individual story with their individual motivations that I try to explain.

But there are also some factors that cut across everyone, and particularly Republicans in office, and there is a kind of peer pressure and I think a fear of being ostracized.

And it includes a kind of social ostracism.

When you think about what happened to someone like Liz Cheney, someone I greatly admire, who really stood up to Trump.

After January 6th, she said, "This is an impeachable offense."

She, against the orders of the leadership of her party, she said, "I'm gonna join the investigating committee," along with Adam Kinzinger.

They were the only two Republicans who did it.

The Republicans otherwise boycotted it, boycotted the investigation.

And, as a result, she was deprived of her leadership position in the Republican Party, she was censured, she was censured by the Wyoming Republican Party and has become a kind of non-person.

- She didn't even get 40% in her primary, I think, against Harriet Hageman, who is now, you know, soon to be the United States Senator from Wyoming, but actually took that seat from Liz Cheney.

And Liz Cheney was an outcast and a pariah in her party then and now, right?

- And think about what that's like.

Harriet Hageman I think was someone who'd been a friend and a disciple of hers.

And all of these people who'd been her social circle, as well as her political supporters, turned against her because she broke with Trump on a matter of principle.

- So this book has its profiles and characters, obviously, the analogy or the reference point is to the famous book, "Profiles in Courage," but it is literally profiles.

It is literally eight stories of people who have demonstrated kind of deplorable behavior in the face of what you're describing.

It's Megyn Kelly of Fox News.

It's Brad Karp of the law firm Paul, Weiss.

It's Sian Beilock who was the president of Dartmouth.

It's Jeff Bezos from Amazon, but now really more, for this book's purposes, the owner of "The Washington Post."

It's former President George W. Bush.

It's Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone.

It's Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

And it's John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

- Eight out of eight.

- You like that?

- That was pretty good.

- I did great!

No notes!

Eight out of eight, no notes.

But, in each case, they represent a vertical for which there are other examples of individuals, but these are kind of the best examples that you could give to be illustrative of the point.

- Yes, and the book really is mostly confined to the year 2025, when this started to happen.

And the thing that kind of got me motivated to do it was these sort of waves of capitulation, particularly of the big law firms, at the universities, but also in business and finance.

- Big media.

- And media as well, where you were just seeing people behave in such an unprincipled way.

And I sort of thought, "How could it be happening?"

I mean, at the law firms, Trump started issuing these executive orders saying that the law firms he didn't like, because they'd represented a client who he objected to or had some role in investigating January 6th, or prosecuting January 6th, bringing lawsuits against January 6th defendants, he essentially banned those law firms.

He said the lawyers couldn't enter government buildings.

They'd have their security clearances taken away.

And he then demanded a kind of negotiation.

And I write about Paul, Weiss, which was the outstanding liberal law firm with this tradition going back 150 years, being the first this and that, and this record around civil rights, firm that people really admired.

Now, a commercially very successful firm as well.

It was a kind of top destination for a lot of graduates from the top law schools, because it was a place where you could do pro-bono work representing civil rights clients, but also work on the kind of most interesting and lucrative Wall Street work.

Trump came after them because one lawyer who actually wasn't even at the firm anymore, out of more than a thousand lawyers at this firm, had been part of the Alvin Bragg investigation, someone in- - In New York.

- In New York, Mark Pomerantz, the one case where Trump was convicted, but the case then became moot when he was reelected.

And he said, "Because this lawyer was at the firm, I'm banning this firm."

- The whole firm.

- The whole firm, thousand plus lawyers, can't enter government buildings.

So think about that pressure.

And part of what I try to do in the book is really identify with these people.

This is not an exercise in condemnation.

This is an exercise in trying to understand what happens when you're targeted in that way and how hard it is to make a principled decision under that kind of pressure.

- And the motivation for them to capitulate is some mixture of fear, playing defense, "What happens if we do X?

He'll come after us and any number of things will happen."

But also the flip side of that is ambition.

"If I do X, maybe I'll get ahead."

The Jeff Bezos case is interesting, because as much as we associate Jeff Bezos with Amazon and, as I said, "The Washington Post," really what this may be as much about as anything is space flight and the degree to which he was in competition with Elon Musk, concerned that Blue Origin, his private space company, was not getting ahead sufficiently.

Musk was in favor, he was not in favor.

So we assume that Bezos' decision to capitulate was partly with an eye on that.

- I think it's the only way you can explain Bezos, because Bezos is such an interesting example.

Because, in the first term, he was really admirable.

He owned "The Washington Post."

Trump came after "The Washington Post-" - Supported the paper, supported the editor.

- Completely.

- Yeah.

- And their slogan was "Democracy Dies in Darkness."

That was his slogan.

- Right.

- Trump had him into the White House for dinner, put all this pressure on him, ultimately took a huge contract away from Amazon.

It was meant to be the largest government contract of all time, a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract.

And to punish Bezos for "The Washington Post" criticizing him, Trump killed it, and Bezos stood up to all of that.

- I mean, I think even, remind me if this is right, I think he even threatened to change the postal rules to penalize Amazon delivery packages.

- Oh yeah, that too.

I mean, Trump had smoke coming out of his ears about Jeff Bezos.

He said he was, like, top of his enemies list.

- Right, right.

- And Bezos was great.

And I thought, "This is the kind of person we need owning 'The Washington Post.'"

Really admired him.

And then, in the second term, in 2024, Bezos was just the opposite.

He canceled "The Post's" planned endorsement of Kamala Harris after it was kind of already set to run, subsequently made huge cutbacks to the newsroom, which damaged the journalism.

But, most importantly, he went to Trump on bended knee and offered him the kind of deal Trump likes, which, in this case, was a huge payment for the Melania Trump documentary.

Melania Trump herself got at least $28 million from Amazon Prime, and this was discussed over dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

And call that what you want.

A lot of people called that a bribe, but I would say, at the very least, it was an uneconomic price for a documentary.

- Well, there's not a world in which any documentary, I mean, maybe Nathan Fielder is now getting that kind of money, right?

We need some Nathan Fielder money.

But, you know, the reality is that documentary filmmaking is so upside down right now that there is no justification economically for a payment approaching that, and especially, let's be honest, for this movie.

- Exactly.

- Right.

- They didn't have to pay that to outbid anybody else.

- No, let' say that.

- Let's say that.

- It was not a competitive process, right.

- Yeah.

- But the point you're making is there are ways to capitulate.

- Yeah.

- And one of the ways is you basically write a check and you call it what you say it is, but we also can see it.

- Right, and there's also, you know, helping to pay for the inauguration.

Helping to pay for the- - Well, all the ballroom- - The ballroom.

- Contributions, which "The Washington Post," to its credit, despite Bezos' cutbacks, "The Post" has told us a lot of good, important things over the last couple years.

- The newsroom is hanging in there.

- Their reporting on the ballroom donations was one of their great journalism victories over the last- - And this is $330 million in private donations that were kept secret, if you can believe this.

And, again, you wanna think about what Trump is doing that is unprecedented and unconstitutional.

You can have whatever opinion you want about the ballroom.

I don't like it very much.

But if they're gonna do it, there's a way to do it, which is Congress appropriates the money.

- Right.

- That's the way it works under our system.

Under the Trump system, he raises private donations in secret from people who have business before the government.

- Before the government, which in, you know, the old Molly Ivins line, I don't know that it's actually Molly's line, but I heard Molly say it for many years, was that, "The crime is not what's illegal, it's what's legal."

- Yeah.

- Right?

And the visibility into all of this that we have now, that they're just doing this out in the open.

- Yeah.

- Right?

- Except I'm not sure it is legal.

It's just there's no one to challenge it, because Congress is laying down for it.

- But it may not be in a technical sense legal, but it has been legitimized by the lack of either pushback by the people who have checks and balances in their job description or by, at the very highest level, the courts who have essentially given this guy a blank check.

And writing about Mitch McConnell is kind of door number one, Congress has totally been laying down.

And writing about John Roberts is door number two, the Supreme Court has basically said, "Do what you want."

- I mean, it's sort of the two of them, McConnell and Roberts, have created a perfect catch-22... And a lot of this book does come back to January 6th and the failure to hold Trump accountable for it.

And, after January 6th, Mitch McConnell, who like a lot of Republicans, despises Donald Trump and has let people around him know and has been doing a oral history project that people have gotten access to where he says what he really thinks about Trump, he wanted to convict Trump in the Senate and remove him from office.

He was so outraged, appropriately so, by what had happened.

- As an institutionalist.

- Yes.

- To see how Congress had been defiled in a literal sense.

- Yeah, this is someone whose life is about the Senate.

Again, whatever you think about his politics.

And he told everyone he was ready to vote for a conviction, and that would've prevented a Trump second term, because after you convict someone after impeachment- - Can't run again.

- Well, there's a subsequent vote where you ban them from holding office in the future, and that actually is just a majority vote after the two-thirds you need.

- And there surely would've been, if there had been a vote for impeachment, there surely would've been enough people to vote for that.

- Indeed.

Anyway, McConnell was set to do this.

Then he changed his mind.

He deferred the vote.

He came back and he said, "It turned out I was wrong, I've read the law, and you can't convict someone who's already left office," which Trump had by that time after January 21st.

Not a creditable legal argument.

Legal scholars do not agree with it.

But he said, "But I think because we're not convicting him, the appropriate remedy is criminal prosecution."

Queue the criminal cases, the January 6th case- - All the indictments.

- Under Jack Smith, all those cases proceed.

They get to the Supreme Court.

John Roberts writes the majority 6-3 opinion, and says, "Uh, turns out impeachment is the only remedy for this.

There's a zone of immunity around the presidency that is so wide that you essentially cannot prosecute a president or a former president for almost any conceivable crime committed in office."

- And, of course, the danger here, Jacob, as you know, as others have said, is not only letting Trump off the hook, but giving a permission slip to future presidents to do basically whatever the heck they want.

- Yeah, I mean, we don't hear much about the Trump self-pardon anymore.

Remember that was a big topic in the first- - Yes.

- It's not necessary anymore.

That Roberts decision in the immunity case- - It is a pardon, effectively.

- It essentially makes it impossible to prosecute any president, not just Trump.

But the timing is unfortunate, because you have a president who, you know, first of all, massively abuses the pardon power.

I mean, there's a kind of pardon-for-sale business in Washington.

He pardons people, and then says he doesn't know who they are, "Someone told me to pardon them."

There's a pardon lobby now.

But we're dealing with a level of corruption that's unprecedented and it's impossible to hold the presidency accountable.

And I'm worried about that, as you say, not just because of Trump, but because it gives this authority to the next president.

Imagine if the next president is a Democrat, they're gonna inherit all of this power.

Are they gonna give it back?

It's possible, but they tend not to.

- And the people who have enabled this president to do what they did will be the first ones to object.

- Yeah.

- If the next president does this, then it's like, "Okay, turnabout is fair play."

- Well, for example, the Democrats will inherit stakes in something like, as of current count, 40 private companies.

- Right.

- Like, 10% of Intel.

- Yeah.

- 15% of NVIDIA's processing- - How's that complaint about socialism working out for us?

- Well, I think we're gonna hear it again when it's Democrats saying, "Actually, we want some say in how these companies are run."

- Are run.

- But they're willing to overlook it when it's Trump.

- It's amazing.

At the end of this book, you talk about courage, not cowardice, and you call out a couple of examples of people or sort of institutions is not really the right word, but, anyway, the kind of the counter to what this book is talking about.

Federal judges who despite, you know, I mean, everything is reviewed or many things are reviewed upstream from them have actually been quite brave.

Some of them, in fact, appointed by this guy.

You talk about the leaders of cultural institutions like Lonnie Bunch at the Smithsonian.

You talk about big philanthropy.

And you talk about journalism, which I think is actually something that we should say.

As much as people complain that journalism is not meeting this moment, everything we know, we know because a journalist told us, right?

There are brave journalists in this moment.

- Absolutely.

I identify as a journalist, and I've been very proud of the profession.

Again, not universally, but, on the whole, they've been, I think, very tough, very brave, and very professional.

Their owners are much more of a mixed picture.

- Mixed bag.

Yeah.

- So many of the media owners have paid to settle these lawsuits, again, which are kind of indefensible payments to Trump.

But even so, I mean, I think a really encouraging example right now is the way the TV networks are standing with CNN, which Trump has banned from covering him.

- Yep.

- And the courts have ruled against Trump.

- Including Fox News.

- Including Fox News.

- Not just the liberals.

- Yeah.

- Right.

Not supposed liberals, Fox News.

- That's the point to me is the American press tends to be very unified around the First Amendment and the rights of journalists, and that cuts across party lines.

And I think if you saw that kind of principle, if you'd seen it among the big law firms, in the universities, if you'd had that kind of solidarity, Trump wouldn't have been able to get away with as much as he has.

- Will, the next two years, assuming that the midterms, which, as we sit here, are a week away, the midterms return control of one or both houses of Congress to the Democrats, will the last two years be similar in the sense that he will have the power to compel, or will he be weakened and less able to impose his will as a consequence of that?

And, therefore, some of these folks, universities, law firms, what have you, will not feel the same pressure to bend the knee?

- I think we're gonna be living in a very different world, assuming that the Democrats do take at least the House, which seems very likely as of this- - Just the math, maths.

- This conversation.

So the narrative is gonna change, because we're gonna have daily stories about the investigations into corruption.

- Right.

- A lot of the abuses.

And if some people- - May have an impeachment against Pete Hegseth.

That seems to be teed up, right?

- And if Republicans start to break with Trump, you may have another impeachment of Trump, and there'll be a debate about whether that's good strategy or a good idea.

It would be sort of futile now, but, you know, if the dam starts to break, things could be very different.

I think what that does is Trump is weakened and the Democrats, if they take the House, it's a symptom and part of his weakness.

But, as that happens, the price of standing up to him goes down, and the countervailing pressure to telling institutions to stand up to him increases.

So I don't think the kinds of deals we saw, the capitulation of the law firms in 2025, I don't think that would happen even now.

And I certainly don't think- - Even now?

- Even now in 2026, and I certainly don't think it's more likely.

I think Trump will have much less power to compel.

But, as a result, it may be the kind of dangerousness of the wounded animal.

- Yeah.

- He may lash out in even more unpredictable ways.

And he won't necessarily have as much power, but he'll have the ability still to command the stage and to command attention.

- I'm gonna take the over on courage for the next two years.

I'm gonna assume, 'cause I've gotta hope for something, right?

You need hopium.

I'm smoking hopium as it relates to courage over the next two years.

All right, Jacob, it's a great book.

I'm so happy for you.

I'm happy for your success.

Thanks so much for being here.

- Thank you, Evan.

Pleasure.

- Jacob Weisberg.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

(audience clapping) Thank you.

(audience clapping) Visit our website at AustinPBS.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- I think the question is gonna come down to who is that person or who are the people who could do that for the Democrats?

- Right.

- I think someone like Jon Ossoff is really promising.

You know, a Democrat who has been elected, probably about to be reelected, in a red state.

- By a big margin.

- A Democrat who can- - Probably by a big margin.

- Get Republican votes, who's good on his feet, you know, who's youthful, who has a lot of energy.

Now he's not the only one.

I think there are other people in the party who can play that role.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy; Claire and Carl Stuart; Christine and Philip Dial; Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication, ellergroup.com; Diane Land and Steve Adler; and Karey and Chris Oddo.

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