A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie by Albert Bierstadt. During the Civil War, Bierstadt traveled the West and began sketching out this view. He finished the painting soon after the war ended: Violent storms all around, but a promising shaft of light. (Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty.)
People may look back on this past week as a milestone in political awareness. It’s not only that public opinion keeps turning against Donald Trump. That’s been evident for months in plummeting approval ratings, for all the obvious reasons: Tariffs, brutal ICE raids, blatant self-dealing, needless and unpopular wars.
The real milestone, it seems to me, comes in signs of dawning awareness, crucially among some GOP forces who have enabled Trump, that he won’t be there forever. They’re already hearing from constituents that they don’t like soaring gas prices and an open-ended war. Eventually there will be questions about why their representatives turned a blind eye to these abuses for so long.
As everyone except Trump himself seems to realize, the primary-election results of this past week only make his impending lame-duck-hood seem more real. He keeps showing tighter and tighter control, over a smaller and smaller pure-MAGA cult base. He can still rally his loyalists to knock off any Republican who has displeased him. But the obvious cost is smoothing the path for Democrats in the fall.
This week’s mini-rebellion by Republicans in the Senate, refusing to rubber-stamp Trump’s stupid ballroom and corrupt slush-fund deal, is an early sign. He might still manage to pacify them and make a “deal.” But this little crack in previously solid GOP support is like the first mocking laugh in The Emperor’s New Clothes, or the peek behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. The magic cloak of invincibility has slipped off, revealing the enfeebled man inside.
If they dare think about life beyond the Trump era, Republicans must be realizing that what is good for Donald Trump—say, a ballroom, or a slush fund, or a war—is less and less good for them. He’s been able to pick off many of them one-by-one in primaries—from Indiana, to Louisiana, to Kentucky, and perhaps to Texas. But the primary season is almost over and that leverage will be gone.
Something will come after Trump. The work of recovery when he is gone will take many decades, and may be impossible in some areas. For instance: How will Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan ever “trust” US “leadership” again? To say nothing of Ukraine.
The point of this post is to present four examples of people who have been thinking about the process of civic reconstruction. These are disparate examples, and I’m aware that they may not seem logically connected. But for me they’re coming into focus and each deserves attention, as the end of Trump’s era begins to come into view.
My first example comes from Chicago, late last summer. That is when ICE/CBP roundups were intensifying, and Donald Trump had announced Chicago as his next target. He threatened to muster the National Guard from other states and deploy the US military if needed. These were the days of active speculation that Trump would invoke the 1807 “Insurrection Act” and send federal troops to occupy US cities. He said his forces could arrest Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, if Pritzker got in their way.
As the threats intensified, in late August Pritzker held a lakefront news conference in Chicago, flanked by city and state officials. To one TV reporter he said, straight to camera and addressing the president: “If you come for my people, you come through me. So come and get me.”
And in his very tough-toned formal speech, after urging peaceful but rock-ribbed resistance from Chicago’s people, he ended with this, addressed to Trump himself. Emphasis added, to reflect the way he spoke:
If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.
As Dr. King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Humbly I would add, it doesn’t bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.
This wasn’t the first trenchant state-level resistance to ICE and Trump. Gavin Newsom had sounded similar defiant notes in California, and through the bitter cold of the following winter, the people of Minnesota and Minneapolis, and their governor and mayor, stood up in a way that inspired the world.
But Pritzker’s statement caught my ear as the first clear moment when a prominent figure dared say: History does not end here. We are watching. We will remember. We are determined to bend that arc back where it needs to go.
Ten years ago, first-term Republican Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, was one of many GOP officials who mocked and condemned Donald Trump as an unacceptable choice for the presidential nomination. But unlike most of the others who lambasted Trump at that stage—Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham—Flake stuck to his position, rather than flip-flopping to become another lackey once MAGA prevailed. Flake refused to endorse Trump even as he kept winning primaries, and he explicitly called for Trump to drop out from the race, and cede to Mike Pence as the nominee, when the “grab ‘em by…” Access Hollywood tapes came out one month before the election.
Trump of course remembered these offenses. Soon after he took office, his team began organizing a MAGA primary challenge to defeat Flake in his 2018 re-election run. By the autumn of Trump’s first year, the fundamentals were clear. Flake made a surprise announcement, in a speech on the Senate floor, that he would not run for a second term, rather than change his policies in hopes of winning MAGA support.
The next summer, in his waning months in office, Flake gave a commencement speech at Harvard Law School that laid out his calculation very bluntly. He told these bright young lawyers that they had bright prospects. But, he said, they should also remember that they had a duty. It was…
to defend these values and these institutions that you will soon inherit. Even if that means sometimes standing alone. Even if it means risking something important to you. Maybe even your career. Because there are times when circumstances may call on you to risk your career, in favor of your principles.
But you — and your country — will be better for it.
You can go elsewhere for a job, but you cannot go elsewhere for a soul.
Flake has kept to that theme, about the ethical aspects of leadership, in the years since then, in a book and public presentations. Just this week I saw him on a CNN panel, with Kaitlin Collins, discussing how today’s Republican office holders should react to Trump’s treatment of those he had targeted for revenge.
Two days before Flake’s interview, GOP Senator Bill Cassidy had been humiliated in the Louisiana primary, for his sin of voting for Trump’s impeachment five years ago, after the January 6 assaults. One day after Flake’s interview, GOP Representative Thomas Massie would be beaten (but not humiliated, as we’ll get to) in Kentucky. On that same day, for no apparent reason, Trump targeted GOP Senator John Cornyn, of Texas, for similar humiliation and possible defeat. Kaitlin Collins played a clip of Lindsey Graham crowing about how all these results showed “this is the party of Donald Trump.” She asked Flake to respond.
“I can’t argue with [Graham’s] assessment,” Flake said. But he warned that this was a false spring for the MAGA forces, since winning a cloistered primary meant appealing strictly to “a subset of a subset of a subset” of voters. “This is very much the party of Donald Trump,” he said. “It won’t always be,” with that change coming as soon as the midterms.
Then he moved from tactical politics to ethics—as he had done in his Harvard Law speech. The problem for GOP enablers was not just that they would have to face a non-MAGA electorate, in the midterms. The deeper problem was “You also have to face your kids. And your grandkids. And your neighbors.”
Power is transitory. Reputations, good and bad, endure.
Flake’s comments over the past decade, and this past week, crystallize one of the mysteries and tragedies of our era. Why have so many people in politics been such cowards? Why have they been willing to sell their reputations, their souls, so cheaply?
This is the question Jacob Weisberg addresses head-on in an important forthcoming book, Profiles in Cowardice. Weisberg is a former editor of Slate and co-founder of Pushkin Industries, and a longtime friend.
I’ve had a chance to see advance galleys of his book, which will go public in September. It’s the best attempt I’ve seen to grapple with the moral questions Flake raises, and the civic ones JB Pritzker raised, of how to understand, and reckon with, people who have knowingly done harm.
Obviously this is a question people have asked before, Doctor Faustus onward. Weisberg’s inspired gimmick is to turn John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage on its head. That book gave eight examples from the Senate’s history of people who had made tough choices, often at a steep political price. Weisberg gives eight examples of people who instead made easy, weak choices, and damaged the country in the process. The publisher has released the list of his eight representative cowards, shown in a footnote below.
Kennedy’s book aimed to make courage contagious, by giving examples of the brave. Weisberg’s aims to make cowardice more costly, by explaining how and why it happens, and giving how-to steps for reconstructing civic courage. I’ll say more about it when it officially comes out this fall.
When I talked with Weisberg by phone this week, we discussed one of his main themes: That you judge courage and cowardice on a continuum, measuring how far people will go before they say No.
We agreed that there are Trump loyalists who are feeling no ethical tension at all: Trump himself, and his family. The likes of Stephen Miller or Kash Patel or the now-departed Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem. They’re presumably immune to Flake-style appeals to the soul, but may be subject to Pritzker-style invocations of justice.
But what about the countless others who once saw Trump clearly, and now have turned against everything they believed? JD Vance, who famously warned that Trump could be “America’s Hitler”? Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, who warned that Trump would be a disaster for the country and the party? Todd Blanche, once a respected federal prosecutor? Bill Cassidy himself, a medical doctor who could have stopped RFK Jr’s confirmation but didn’t, with a horrific toll in medical research and public health?
What made them so weak? Weisberg’s book gives a variety of practical and emotional explanations. But I asked him about what should come next. When this is over, how we should think about people whose weakness or ambition made them forsake their beliefs—or in Flake’s terms sell their souls?
Weisberg said that whenever the current moment had passed, the right approach would be to apply a standard of how much of someone’s principles or soul they had been willing to sacrifice, before they said No.
“I think of it as like people on the American left who were Communists, or fellow travelers, early on,” he told me, about the knowing MAGA enablers. “If they changed their minds by 1932, full credit. By 1936, partial credit. In 1956, not much credit. But better late, than never. It’s never completely too late.”
