Tuesday, September 15, 2026
A New Book Seeks to Shame the Elites Who Caved to Trump
A New Book Seeks to Shame the Elites Who Caved to Trump
“Jacob Weisberg’s book examines elite capitulation to Trump, citing Brad Karp’s deal at Paul Weiss and shifts by Jeff Bezos and Sian Beilock. Susan Neiman attributes such submission to self-interest overriding virtue.
The thing I’ve found most shocking about Donald Trump’s second presidency is not the epic grift, the ICE paramilitary violence or the assaults on free speech. These abuses, while horrifying, are predictable. What has stunned me has been the capitulation of so many American elites to Trump’s vulgar authoritarianism.
I didn’t expect major law firms, some that have long boasted about their progressive pro bono work, to fold with barely a fight. I didn’t expect TV networks to settle bogus lawsuits by paying the president millions, or for Ivy League schools such as Columbia to relinquish autonomy over curriculum, admissions and student discipline. In Hungary, it took years for Viktor Orban’s government to bring most of academia, the news media and other pillars of civil society to heel. Why were so many powerful people in America, a country whose civic culture is steeped in resistance to tyranny, so willing to abase themselves and their institutions?
That’s the question at the heart of Jacob Weisberg’s important new book, “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.” It’s an inverted version of John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” offering character studies of eight people who gave in to Trump despite surely knowing better. Reading it made me wonder if there’s something about America today that selects for spinelessness at the highest levels.
Some of Weisberg’s choices perplexed me; a few of the figures he focuses on are less morally compromised than simply rotten. There’s nothing that mysterious, at least to me, in the failure of people like Mitch McConnell, Megyn Kelly or the vulture capitalist Stephen Schwarzman to display much democratic integrity. What’s harder to fathom is why people who presented themselves as bulwarks against Trumpism during his first term made such degrading compromises during his second.
The Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos adopted the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” for his newspaper during the first Trump presidency, then gutted it during the second. As president of Barnard during the first Trump administration, Sian Beilock championed sweeping antiracism initiatives. In Trump’s second term, as president of Dartmouth, she has kept mostly mum about Trump’s attacks on higher education. These are people who once knew how dangerous Trump was, but now that he’s worse than ever, they’re pretending not to see. Why?
The answers are a little different in each case, but they usually involve intra-elite competition. From the outside, these people look as if they can easily afford to risk acts of bravery. But they’re consumed in different ways with making sure their peers don’t get ahead of them. Courage is contagious, but so, it turns out, is cravenness.
An emblematic example in Weisberg’s book is Brad Karp, the former chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which owed its reputation to its work for civil rights. As Weisberg writes, Paul Weiss was the first major New York law firm to hire a Black associate, William Coleman, who would help write some of the legal briefs in Brown v. the Board of Education. It represented Edith Windsor in her landmark 2013 gay marriage case. During the first Trump administration, Karp assigned 75 lawyers to fight Trump’s family separation policy. “Each of us needs to do what we believe is right, whatever the consequences,” Karp said in a 2024 interview.
So it’s astonishing that less than a year later, after Trump issued an executive order targeting the firm, Karp made a deal with the administration that included providing $40 million in pro bono work, which has included servicesfor the Commerce Department. As Weisberg points out, Paul Weiss’s surrender helped set off “a bidding war for submission.” Today, the firm’s culture has changed; gone from its website are pages that once described its work on voting rights, reproductive rights and immigrant rights.
Why would anyone sell out his own ostensible values the way Karp did? Weisberg, who interviewed Karp for the book, attributes his decision-making to Paul Weiss’s changing financial underpinnings. In the 2010s, the firm became a leader in the spectacularly lucrative field of private equity law. Competition for star lawyers who demanded salaries in the eight figures was fierce, since clients tended to be more loyal to their attorneys than to their firms. Threatened by Trump, Karp feared an exodus of partners and the loss of one of the firm’s biggest clients, Apollo Global Management, whose chief executive is a powerful Republican donor. Karp repeatedly described Paul Weiss’s peril as “existential.”
But as Weisberg points out, the stakes were hardly as grand as that word implies. Karp and his colleagues weren’t facing prison or penury. “An average of $7.5 million per partner might have fallen to, who knows, $4 or $5 million for a couple of years,” writes Weisberg. That’s a real hit, but it’s not exactly martyrdom.
Ultimately, Trump’s return to office brought Karp down, though not in the way he feared. This year, he was forced to resign after the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which revealed that Karp had socialized with the sex trafficker and offered him free legal advice. Karp met Epstein through one of his prized clients, Leon Black, Apollo’s billionaire co-founder. Given the waters Karp swam in, the idea of choosing decency over riches might have seemed foolish. Paul Weiss is now one of the most profitable law firms in the world; revenue is up almost 24 percent.
The philosopher Susan Neiman’s new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” is a useful companion to “Profiles in Cowardice.” Like Weisberg, Neiman wanted to explain why so many institutions caved to Trump. She believes it begins with an ethos that disdains virtue as hypocritical or naïve. “When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself,” she writes. “It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”
Neiman cites research showing that “the longer people study economics, the more selfish they become.” The reason, as she interprets it, is that they grow convinced that maximizing self-interest is normal, and that to do otherwise makes you a sucker. The more the logic of capitalism pervades the rest of life, the less room there is for compassion, honor or heroism. Maybe that’s why some of the people most financially able to defend liberal democracy have decided it’s one of the few luxuries they can live without.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.“
Monday, September 14, 2026
Supreme court rejects Trump’s mail ballot restrictions for midterm elections
Supreme court rejects Trump’s mail ballot restrictions for midterm elections
“The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s mail ballot restrictions, upholding an injunction that lets states continue existing processes. Kavanaugh concurred on timing; Alito dissented. Civil rights groups and Democrats praised the decision.
Decision allows states to send ballots under process followed for years even as president tried to limit system
The supreme court on Monday rejected Donald Trump’s mail ballot restrictions for now, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting in the midterm elections already underway.
The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they have used for years.
The Trump administration had asked the court, once again at the center of a roiling political controversy, to clear the way for restrictions before the pivotal November contests for control of Congress. The case has major implications because nearly one-third of the country votes by mail.
“The government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the district court’s preliminary injunction,” states the one-paragraph unsigned order. “And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this court do not favor a stay.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a concurrence, ruling that he believed the government had “at least a fair prospect” of success defending the plan, but that implementation so close to election day would be “arbitrary and capricious”.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. In the dissent, Alito blamed the litigating states for creating the conditions of a ruling so close to an election, and wrote that they should not benefit from a protracted process that they created with their suit.
“The plaintiff states cannot claim the timing of the rule tilts the equities in their favor when they, and courts hearing their claims, are responsible for so much of the delay,” he wrote.
Civil rights groups lauded the decision.
“It is alarming what the administration was seeking to do here,” said Kristen Clarke, NAACP general counsel and former head of the justice department’s civil rights division. “This was an 11th-hour effort by the administration to hijack the way that we vote by mail in our country.”
Civil rights groups could not have moved faster, she said. “At the earliest opportunity, civil rights organizations like the NAACP took to the court to stand up for voters. It’s important to remember that the final rule was not issued until about roughly 10 days ago. So, I find Justice Alito’s statements disingenuous … We should focus on the fact that the court is leaving in place an injunction that prevents this administration from turning our electoral system on its head. What the administration was attempting to do here would have unleashed chaos across the country.”
“The supreme court has done the right thing by protecting the American people’s right to vote,” said Robert Garcia, a Democratic representative from Long Beach, California. “Donald Trump tried to illegally interfere with our elections and undermine vote-by-mail for millions of Americans and failed. We will keep fighting to protect the right to vote of every single citizen in this country.”
The case stems from an executive order issued by Trump on 31 March requiring the post office to refrain from delivering ballots for mail-in voting to registered voters deemed ineligible when compared with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal records.
Voting rights groups, joined by 23 states and the District of Columbia, sued the administration to stop the proposed rule, arguing that the US constitution provides no authority for the president to issue orders governing the administration of elections.
Election officials have said there was simply no way to carry out a complete overhaul in the weeks before the midterms. Indeed, Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin began sending mail ballots to voters over the past week while the new system was still not active.
The Trump administration plan would require states to adopt a uniform envelope style and submit lists of eligible voters to an online portal. The postal service could refuse to deliver ballots to states that didn’t comply.
A whistleblower report, though, said the postal system’s requirements could lead to millions of mail ballots never being sent, because the portal wasn’t properly built and a single bar code error could result in an entire batch of ballots being tossed out.
Democratic state officials and voting rights groups challenged the restrictions in court, arguing the president has no constitutional authority to set election rules that would “virtually eliminate mail voting on the eve of a major election”.
Lower courts agreed. But an initial injunction issued by US district judge Indira Talwani was overturned on procedural grounds in July, but was reinstated after the USPS posted a final rule on ballot delivery. Monday’s ruling upholds that injunction.
The Trump administration appealed to the supreme court, arguing that federal control of the postal service allows them to set rules for mail ballot handling and that compliance was possible.
The federal government won an early procedural decision at the supreme court, but the justices pointedly did not decide the legality of the plan.
Trump has long opposed mail voting and falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, even though he often uses that method to cast his own ballot, including as recently as this year.
“The court’s ruling is a massive sigh of relief for local election officials and voters – especially for the thousands of service members abroad whose ballots are legally required to be sent by all 50 states within the next five days,” said Samantha Tarazi, co-founder and CEO of the Voting Rights Lab.
“But this isn’t over. This administration will keep testing every avenue to manipulate our elections and sow doubt in results he doesn’t like. Today is yet another example of President Trump’s extreme elections agenda losing in the courts and with the American people. The bottom line is simple: states run our elections – not the president.”
Sunday, September 13, 2026
What Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Argued in His Call for AI Slowdown - The New York Times
What Anthropic’s C.E.O. Argued in His Call for Slower A.I. Development
"Dario Amodei’s 3,800-word letter laid out a three-step plan to rein in artificial intelligence.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word open letter on Saturday calling for a slowdown in the development of A.I.
The essay prompted other A.I. leaders, including Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, to speak out in agreement.
Here are the key arguments that Mr. Amodei made in his essay:
Why A.I. Needs to Slow Down
Mr. Amodei said two recent developments convinced him that simply investing in A.I. safety was no longer enough.
One, he said, was that A.I. itself had begun helping to build the next generation of A.I., a self-reinforcing loop called “recursive self-improvement” that could soon outrun humans’ ability to understand or control what they were creating.
Mr. Amodei also pointed to a recent incident where OpenAI’s systems went rogue and attacked the A.I. start-up HuggingFace. OpenAI was not aware of the hack until it was informed about it by HuggingFace weeks later.
While the attack did not cause any real harm, Mr. Amodei said he predicted a more capable version of the A.I. could seize large parts of the internet and cause “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.”
Proposed Steps for a Slowdown
Mr. Amodei laid out a three-step plan to “pace” the development of A.I. across the industry, arguing that the world would have to do it together.
First, he said, Anthropic would invite independent reviewers to work inside his company, giving them employee-like access, including desks, badges and laptops. The reviewers, which he called “evaluators,” would verify that his start-up was following its safety practices. These reviewers would then publish what they found, even if it was unflattering. Mr. Amodei urged rivals to do the same.
Second, Mr. Amodei said, A.I. companies in the United States and other democratic countries should agree on shared safety standards and a common limit on how fast A.I. capabilities could advance, aided by their governments. He suggested that A.I. companies coordinate — ideally through regulation, but voluntarily in the meantime — on how quickly their systems could advance.
Third, he said, the United States and other democratic nations should work to get authoritarian governments, chiefly China, to accept similar limits. Mr. Amodei said this step would be the hardest and most unlikely to happen soon.
Any deal with China would be a ladder, Mr. Amodei said, from the most to least achievable steps. They would include banning clearly dangerous A.I. uses; agreeing to test A.I. models for dangers before release; putting a “speed limit” on A.I.’s self-improvement capabilities; and, what China is least likely to agree to, a full pause on development.
Mr. Amodei said in the meantime, democracies must keep their lead over China, backing restrictions on selling powerful A.I. chips to the country and employing tighter security to keep rivals from stealing or copying American models.
“Any cooperation we are able to achieve with China will extend the amount of time we have to spend on pacing the frontier within the democratic nations,” he said.
Emmy Martin is a reporter covering the technology industry from San Francisco and a member of the 2026-27 Times Fellowship class."
Saturday, September 12, 2026
Opinion | Trump Catastrophically Miscalculated in Georgia - The New York Times
Trump Catastrophically Miscalculated in Georgia
"When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise.
For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer. In July, Mr. Trump dubbed the fresh-faced lawmaker “Pee-wee Herman.” The next month, upset over Mr. Ossoff’s criticism of the president, one aide called Mr. Ossoff a “feminine theater kid” and a “lightweight loser,” and another derided him as “a miserable person” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while deploying a sexually explicit moniker unfit for a family-friendly publication.
Mr. Ossoff gives as good as he gets. Maybe better. He has derided Mr. Trump as “a failed president,” “a national disgrace” and a “draft-dodging crook.” This anti-Trump feistiness has boosted the senator’s standing in his party and turbocharged his re-election campaign. Once talked about as the most vulnerable Democratic senator of the cycle, he is now being talked up as a hot presidential possibility for 2028.
If Mr. Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.
Not all of it is Mr. Trump’s fault. Demographics have partly driven Georgia’s political turn from red to purple. The state’s populace is young, and a growing majority belongs to racial or ethnic minority groups. Republicans cannot win statewide contests simply by turning out the MAGA base. And over the past decade-plus, Democratic organizers, including Stacey Abrams and her New Georgia Project, have done yeoman’s labor mobilizing the blue team.
But the president has done much to speed the shift. Most famously, his election fraud lunacy after losing the state in 2020 depressed Republican turnout and cost the party both Senate seats in runoffs held in January 2021. This tipped control of the chamber to the Democrats, a mark of shame that sat poorly with many Georgia Republicans.
Mr. Trump’s ensuing feud with Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who refused to help overturn the state’s 2020 election results, greased the state party’s slide into extremism and obsolescence. The rise of MAGA elevated the far right, most prominently the Georgia Republican Assembly, a grass-roots group that has feuded fiercely with more mainstream Republicans and pushed to impose arbitrary purity testson candidates. In 2023, the group unsuccessfully pressed the state party to pass a rule blocking candidates from running who were insufficiently conservative or traitors to the party. (This of course included Mr. Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the state’s secretary of state, who refused to “find” Mr. Trump 11,780 extra votes.)
As Team MAGA took over the state party apparatus, Mr. Kemp and other elected leaders distanced themselves from it, creating parallel fund-raising and voter turnout machines. The state G.O.P. got bogged down in niche issues, such as a crusade for paper ballots, that are not top-of-mind concerns even for most Republican voters.
Republican elected officials now view the state party not as an organ for helping get them elected so much as one aimed at litigating grievances against G.O.P. officials and candidates deemed insufficiently MAGA, party operatives have told me.
Mr. Trump himself continues meddling, despite having displayed a reverse Midas touch in statewide races. In the 2022 midterms, his preferred candidates lost their primaries for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and insurance commissioner. Herschel Walker, Mr. Trump’s pick to face Senator Raphael Warnock, won the primary but lost the general.
Mr. Trump narrowly carried Georgia in 2024. But less than two years later, his approval numbers are deep underwater there. In this summer’s primary, his pick for governor, Burt Jones, lost to the businessman Rick Jackson.
As for this year’s Senate race, Republicans had aggressively courted Mr. Kemp to take on Mr. Ossoff. He declined. Allies of his told me at the time that he decided it was not worth another brutal statewide campaign — with at best grudging acceptance by a president and a MAGA movement that had long vilified him — to be just another member of the party’s Senate roster. And so the G.O.P. was left to pick from a constellation of lesser lights.
Enter Mike Collins, the Trump-backed horse in the race. The hard-right representative emerged from a nasty G.O.P. primary tarnished by scandal, short on campaign cash, polling well behind Mr. Ossoff and facing grave doubts among many Republicans in the state that he can turn things around. Mr. Collins isn’t really an anti-establishment outsider; his father was a House member. But he rocks the middle-finger swagger and the country-fried good-ol’-boy shtick — complete with a mullet, his critics marvel — that tends to thrill the MAGA base. Many big-money donors are skeptical of him, and he is expected to be a hard sell among the more traditional Republicans, independents and swing voters who determine statewide races.
Mr. Collins’s scandals and missteps have not helped. Several people in his orbit, including his son-in-law, have been chummy with white nationalists, publicly promoted white nationalism or been otherwise accused of antisemitic behavior. Rather than swiftly addressing the dust-up within his family, Mr. Collins refused to answer questions and allowed the mess to drag on for weeks before firmly declaring himself not a racist.
The representative is also under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations that his office misspent taxpayer funds on a no-show paid internship for the girlfriend of his longtime chief of staff, Brandon Phillips. (Mr. Collins has denied impropriety.)
Compounding the awkwardness, Mr. Collins fired Mr. Phillips in May, in response to the aide’s offensive posting on social media. Then the representative had to replace his subsequent chief of staff, Kip Talley, because of his participation in a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, notorious white nationalists. Even the party’s nominee for governor, Mr. Jackson, is keeping a healthy distance from Mr. Collins.
This all serves to fuel the emerging mythos of Mr. Ossoff. The 39-year-old senator — still the youngest in the chamber — stands poised to romp to re-election in a state made more purple by Mr. Trump’s machinations. Better still, Mr. Ossoff’s choirboy looks and often earnest demeanor, coupled with his taste for political combat and his social media savvy, give him an edge in the political mud pits. He can land some pretty rough insults without coming across as nasty or extreme.
In June, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted that Mr. Ossoff seemed to have been cooked up in a lab as the perfect Democratic candidate for 2028. The rich irony is that Mr. Trump has been a — maybe even the — most important cook.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle "
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