Who Enabled Trump’s Second Act?

It’s become settled wisdom that Donald Trump’s first term as president might have been much more disastrous for democracy had patriotic Americans, many of them either Republicans or non-partisan figures in government, the courts, or the military, restrained his excesses at key moments. The epitome of this defiance was his vice president’s refusal to reject the confirmation of Joe Biden’s election in 2020, despite pressure from Trump and the hooting mob he summoned to intimidate lawmakers engaged in what should have been a routine rubber-stamping of the results. But there were a host of similar if less dramatic refusals to bend laws and the Constitution to the turbulent president’s will, as Jacob Weisberg notes in the introduction to his study of the vastly diminished resistance that met Trump’s intensified excesses when he reentered the White House in 2025.

Certainly, Democrats fought Trump 2.0 tooth and nail from the get-go, with largely futile opposition in Congress and hundreds of lawsuits from state and local elected officials. Almost entirely missing in 2025, however, was internal resistance in the administration and the GOP. There was also much more complicity and capitulation in key business and civic power centers that had shown backbone the first time around. These are the developments that Weisberg examines in his new book: Profiles in Cowardice, which identifies men and women who might have put roadblocks in Trump’s path but didn’t.

Profiles in Cowardice: A
Study of Collaboration in the
Trump Era by Jacob Weisberg.
Penguin Press, 286 pp.

The title, of course, is an allusion to then Senator John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (if largely ghost-written) Profiles in Courage, celebrating eight fellow U.S. senators—from John Quincy Adams to Robert Taft—who took principled yet unpopular and costly stands during their careers. Weisberg, conversely, chooses eight ignoble enablers or bystanders who imperiled democracy in 2025.

His targets are diverse, and I’d bundle all but one of them into three groups. First, the hasty capitulators: Super-lawyer Brad Karp of the firm Paul Weiss and Dartmouth College President Sian Beilock did seem to lack fundamental courage when they immediately caved to White House extortion measures (thus exposing others to horrific pressure to do the same). Second, pure opportunists: Steven Schwartzman, the financier, and Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and chair and owner of Blue Origin and The Washington Post, snuggled up to Trump to secure business advantages and protection from reprisals. And third, ideologues, although they’re not always thought of that way: Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, and John Roberts, whose conservative agendas overlap with Trump’s interests, chose to go along to get along despite their clear disdain for the tyrant. The final subject, right-wing flamethrower Megyn Kelly, feels misplaced in the book: Once the target of gruesome Trump insults, she genuinely seems to have gone pure MAGA after helping to bring down Roger Ailes but then bombing in mainstream media.

Weisberg is fluent and fair in telling the stories of these disappointing would-be resisters. His take on Bezos is particularly helpful to those who don’t know the saga of how Amazon became so incredibly powerful, or the extent to which this history-making business may be a sideshow cash-cow for the lifelong “Trekkie” whose heart belongs to space travel. Trump gained influence over the legendary Post—the newspaper that took down Richard Nixon and published the Pentagon Papers—via the White House’s leverage over Bezos’s space tech company Blue Origin. Its investments and operations are vastly dependent on federal contracts, and its proximity to the Post is one of those accidents of history from which the 47th president seems so often to benefit. The book also offers an efficient introduction to the dynamics of extortion, competitive pressures, and fears of adverse publicity that gave Trump such extraordinary power over national law firms and Ivy League universities, and why some institutions didn’t succumb. At the same time, Paul Weiss and Dartmouth did, mostly because Karp and Beilock raced to get out of harm’s way.

But the book’s intellectual and emotional center is Weisberg’s takes on Mitch McConnell and John Roberts. Unlike the other subjects of Profiles in Cowardice, Weisberg believes these two men could arguably have stopped Trump 2.0 in its tracks. Granted, many of the opportunities McConnell and Roberts had to do so preceded Trump’s return to office, and thus didn’t represent the cowardly acts of 2025 that this book supposedly examines.

In McConnell’s case, the truly pivotal moment Weisberg discusses is Trump’s second impeachment trial following the attempted January 6, 2021, coup that McConnell unambiguously condemned. Had the then Senate Majority Leader scheduled a trial before Trump left office on January 20, a conviction—and with it, a ban on any second Trump term—might have been possible. But the trial didn’t begin until February 9. According to McConnell, orchestrator of the scheduling gambit, Trump couldn’t then be impeached for the simple reason that he was out of office. In the end, McConnell voted for acquittal, saying his hands were tied and that criminal courts could handle any outstanding issues—not anticipating the Supreme Court’s sweeping immunity ruling on Trump’s behalf. Thus, says Weisberg, “the best opportunity to rid the country of Donald Trump once and for all [was] squandered.”

(It’s not at all clear there were ever going to be enough Republican votes to convict Trump, casting doubt on Weisberg’s insistence that the majority leader could have stopped Trump from ever returning to office, but McConnell’s ploy did rule it out entirely.)

McConnell’s cooperation with Trump’s first-term legislative agenda is easy to understand, since it coincided with the default conservative agenda of tax cuts and efforts to pare back the social safety net significantly. Perhaps more important to McConnell, however, was the opportunity to remake the federal judiciary in a conservative direction. By the time Trump’s second term began, McConnell was no longer majority leader, and was enfeebled by poor health. He was very much a bystander during Trump 2.0.

Roberts, meanwhile, gave his gift to Trump’s second-term power trip in July of 2024. Writing in the majority opinion in Trump v. United States, Roberts bestowed upon Trump the presidential immunity doctrine—in one fell swoop closing off the slim chance of a pre-election federal criminal conviction and providing the executive branch serene peace of mind about any future legal consequences.

Roberts’s record on major cases involving Trump before and after this decision has been mixed, but where he’s helped the administration, it’s mostly been to pursue longstanding conservative legal objectives. The Trump v. Casa decision banned the nationwide injunctions by district court judges that had put the brakes on Trump power grabs ranging from the decimation of civil service protections to mass deportation measures. Advocates of presidential prerogatives from both parties have pursued the results of the decision for years, and Roberts has been a steady advocate for expanding presidential power over federal agencies and national security matters since his service in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

Of course, the chief justice’s variable record does show a willingness to displease Trump occasionally. A good example was this year’s decision rejecting the administration’s efforts to revoke birthright citizenship, with Roberts writing the majority opinion. The chain of Roberts decisions most cheered by MAGA Republicans—the gradual unwinding of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—reflects his longstanding pre-Trump grudge with remedial efforts to address past radical discrimination. Trump’s half-hearted efforts to hang onto Congress through his second term could owe quite a bit to the Court’s blessing of partisan gerrymanders, but that this White House benefits is a bit coincidental.

In the end, it’s doubtful that Roberts’s decision in Trump v. United States prevented the prosecution and conviction of the scofflaw president. Most of the chief justice’s other “favors” to Trump involved stands he would have probably taken had some other president been in office. Like McConnell, Roberts was more of a Trump fellow traveler than someone who understood the danger to democracy he posed and refused to get in his way out of fear or White House pressure.

Weisberg is correct, of course, in suggesting that McConnell and Roberts, both lifelong Republicans, found ways to avoid antagonizing Trump even when some harsh truth-telling was in order. He bluntly says of Roberts that he may have viewed Trump as “good news wrapped in a bad taste . . . The Chief Justice was getting the outcomes he wanted—an end to affirmative action, a unitary executive—and so he closed his eyes to everything else.” Unfortunately, that is probably true of most partisans with respect to presidents of their own party.

Perhaps the most controversial “coward” in these profiles of cowardice is Trump’s predecessor and punching bag, George W. Bush. Weisberg is exasperated that Bush, all but uniquely among modern presidents, has refused to criticize his successors (Obama as well as Trump) by name. However, he has signaled his disdain towards this particular successor in countless ways. Weisberg doesn’t assert that W. could have somehow blocked Trump’s ascension to the White House or his 2024 comeback. But he clearly believes that only cowardice, timidity, or fear of controversy can explain Bush’s tight lips. Here’s his most censorious judgment:

What would have happened if George W. Bush had said openly what he thought about Trump? The behavior of the Cheney family, so closely tied to the Bushes for a quarter century, provides a useful contrast. The difference between the Cheney family and the Bush family is that the Cheneys had genuine courage and were willing to pay the large price for standing up to Donald Trump.

That’s all very true. But it’s equally true that Dick and Liz Cheney’s defiance had approximately zero effect on Trump’s reconquest of power in 2024 or his abuse of that power in 2025, other than serving as examples of elite GOP hostility to the “populist” president. Trump’s MAGA warriors would have been thrilled by open enmity from the Bush family. So it’s not easy to condemn W. for just keeping his mouth shut.

In assessing courage and cowardice in the face of Trump’s return to power, Weisberg underestimates the culpability of another key actor in the drama that led to Trump 2.0: the primary and general electorate of 2024. When Trump announced his third presidential campaign, Republicans by no means rolled over, as I noted in New York on the eve of his November victory:

The semi-disgraced 45th president, his reputation freshly bruised by the midterm losses of his handpicked candidates, did not look inevitable: He drew 12 primary opponents, including a senator, two governors, a former vice-president, a former senator, and three former governors. One rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, was coming off a historic landslide reelection that excited Republicans everywhere…

Trump, who didn’t participate in a single debate, crushed his Republican rivals, disposing of DeSantis in Iowa and Nikki Haley—the final symbol of resistance—on Super Tuesday. They both subsequently endorsed him, reflecting the complete makeover of the GOP into Trump’s party and, just as importantly, the abandonment of any party misgivings about the former president’s conduct in office on January 6. 

In contrast to Trump’s win in 2016 and his claimed victory in 2020, he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote in November 2024 (albeit not by the landslide margins he asserts). Many Trump voters knew he represented a threat to democracy and the rule of law, but cared more about gasoline prices or a handful of transgender athletes. Sometimes willful ignorance, selfishness, and pure malice matter more than cowardice in preventing resistance to great evils. Responsibility for the debacle of 2025 is a broadly shared burden.

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