Jacob Weisberg with Frank Rich: Profiles in Cowardice

Overview

What happens when the people powerful enough to stand up to the President choose to look away?

In his new book, Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, Jacob Weisberg forces a reckoning with eight figures at the heights of American leadership and asks why they failed to stand up to Donald Trump.

Join Weisberg, former editor of Slate, as he sits down with acclaimed writer and cultural critic Frank Rich for a conversation about fear, power, and the stories people tell themselves when principle becomes costly.

In an inversion of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, Weisberg examines eight of America’s most powerful figures — Jeff Bezos, Stephen Schwarzman, Brad Karp, Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, and Chief Justice John Roberts — and asks why, when confronted with Donald Trump’s return to power, they chose accommodation over resistance. His argument is unsettling: authoritarian power doesn’t always arrive by smashing institutions. It can advance when those inside them decide, one compromise at a time, that resistance is too risky.

An instant New York Times bestseller, Profiles in Cowardice has quickly become one of the most talked-about political books of the moment. The New York Times Book Review calls it “valuable and dauntless,” and as Tina Brown puts it, “we badly need Weisberg’s book.” Few people are better suited to explore his argument than Frank Rich, who has spent decades chronicling the intersection of politics, media, and culture.

How does fear disguise itself as pragmatism? When does compromise become capitulation? And what does courage actually require when there is something real to lose? Hear Weisberg and Rich as they examine the moral mechanics of the American elite.

“Jacob Weisberg delivers history’s judgment with devastating clarity.” — John Ganz