Transcript of Courage vs. Capitulation: Lewis and Weisberg on Trump 2.0’s Quiet Heroes and Loud Cowards

I don't think we even know what it feels like to genuinely mistrust our government. There's this surface mistrust, but if you take it to a place which is where it's headed now, where it is actually untrustworthy, where you can't eat the food, you can't fly on the planes, I mean, it's a completely different environment.

It's on. It is on. Hi, everyone.

From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. The midterm elections are tomorrow, and if Democrats perform well, President Donald Trump could face a reckoning. Maybe. His decision to make the election all about him when he's deeply unpopular likely wasn't the best move. But even if Democrats win back the House, the Senate is still an open question. They face a daunting reality. In just 2 years, Trump has managed to do an extraordinary amount of damage to many of our major institutions, especially the government itself. 2 new books put a face to that destruction. In Blockers, author and journalist Michael Lewis profiles a handful of career civil servants who were targeted by the Trump administration. These were the nameless bureaucrats the president loves to demonize as the deep state. But Lewis's book makes clear how gutting the federal workforce hurts all of us. And in Profiles in Cowardice, fellow author and journalist Jacob Weisberg highlights 8 powerful people who failed to stand in the way of the Trump administration's power grab, or worse, enabled it. Their capitulation has deepened the public's mistrust in leadership across almost every major American institution, including tech, finance, and education.

And let's not leave out media. I wanted to have the two of them on together because I do think there's a huge overlap between who is a hero, who stands up, and who is a quisling. It's a really important topic for me because we all wonder what we do at that moment in history when it matters, whether it's civil rights or Nazi Germany or anywhere else. And it's just an important topic as Americans because I always believe in stand-up people and there's a lot of people sitting down. All right, let's get into my conversation with Michael and Jacob. Our expert question comes from MSNOW anchor Nicole Wallace. So don't go anywhere.

Michael and Jacob, thanks for coming on On.

Pleasure, Kara. Thanks for having me.

Very nice to see you.

So you guys have the most bookend of books right now coming out, and I wanted to bring you together. I've known you two for a long time. And they're both really wonderful books and for different reasons. Michael, your book profiles some of the career civil servants who tried to stand up to the Trump administration and got in Doja's way, not for political reasons, but in defense of laws and norms. Give us a broad sense of what kind of person you were talking about and how they got labeled blockers by the administration. And it was, in fact, the Doja boys who did that, because I've heard that from Silicon Valley people many times, that word.

You've heard the word? Yes. You know it? Yeah. No, it's so— so Elon told these little muskrats when they went out into the administration to find the blockers and get rid of them, that they would be there. And I'd heard it, I heard it enough from, uh, the subjects and potential subjects that they've been labeled blockers when all they were really trying to do is stop the law from being broken, that I thought this was a moment to take that word and turn it from insult to compliment. But who were they? Um, they were civil servants, mostly in their 50s. They'd gone through the previous Trump administration without any trouble, most of them very nonpartisan people who were in in kind of roles that I think we would all agree we would like to see perform well. Like, I don't know, Kathleen Walters was the Chief Privacy Officer of the IRS. She's the person between your tax return and an administration that might want to weaponize it. Tim Curry was at the Office of Personnel Management, and he's kind of the fair referee between the civil service and the political class that comes in to run them.

And so, like, nonpartisan that no one knew his politics. To this day, no one knows his politics. Every administration kind of thought he was on their side, but no no one could read him and had no problem functioning in the government until this administration. And then essentially they came in, they wanted him to be the rigged ref, uh, that they didn't want that. They didn't want fair refs.

They want the calls in their side.

They want the calls in their favor, right? Um, Francis Collins, I mean, he didn't really stand up, he just got whacked like a mob hit. But he was the former NIH director who was running a lot, just running a lab at, at the National Institutes for Health. And he was objectionable not to Doge, but to other people because he is such a powerful voice for science and for the scientific research project.

So they're all different.

They're all different. And the way they came afoul of the Trump administration, or how their work was disrupted, or how their careers were ended, it was different. It was different in each case. You glue them all together, you get the full picture.

Right. And that they were blocking people, but they really weren't. They were doing their jobs. They were doing their jobs. And they wanted to use that term to say they're sort of— Don't yuck my yum, as the kids say. Their yum is pretty grotesque. But Jacob, your book does the opposite. You profile 8 people who could have stood up to the administration's worst instincts but didn't. These are people we know, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Chief Justice John Roberts, Brad Karp, the former chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton& Garrison, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, of course, my personal favorite. And each of these people had justification for the actions in the Trump 2.0. Did you see common threads in their stories of capitulation and cooperation?

Yeah. And I just wanted to say, Kara, it is a great counterpoint because from the same vantage point of early 2025, Michael immediately began seeking out and finding the secret good guys. And I, of course, went for the prominent villains. But I didn't want people—

Or quislings. I would say quislings. Quislings is a great term.

Norway, Second World War, the dictator who collaborated with Hitler. It's a way of kind of Referring to Nazism without saying Nazism, which is kind of what you need to do right now. But I didn't want people who were pure villains. I wanted people who, first of all, knew Trump was dangerous and who at some earlier point in most of these cases had stood up to him. So the question was, why, having done that, did in 2025, did they capitulate in these waves? And they were institutional waves because so much of it was about the capitulation not just of one law firm, but so many of the big law firms, the universities, the tech companies, business and finance. And struggling to understand that, I thought, well, maybe let's focus on people who are in some way representative of those different institutions, some inside government, some civil society. And I wanted people who'd changed, and I wanted to try to understand why they changed.

Was there a through line? Is it just money or— Are they retired of being attacked, or was there one through line in any of it?

If you had to do it in one word, it would be money. But I think if you get a few more words, they include ambition, fear, careerism, fear of violence. I think there are a lot of factors that are in play, and it's different with each of these people.

Which each of them.

And each is an individual story. And you mentioned Bezos. I mean, I think he's in a way the perfect example because in Trump Won, Bezos was a hero. I mean, he was a really admirable owner of The Washington Post. The Washington Post was doing what it needed to do to hold a reckless president accountable. And Bezos was doing what he should have done as an owner. I mean, democracy dies in darkness. That was the slogan he wanted on the paper. And Trump took this huge contract away from Amazon, tried to go after Amazon's postal rates. I mean, tried to punish him in every way.

Yeah, he called it the Amazon Washington Post.

Exactly. He didn't draw any distinction between Bezos himself— and he does own it in a personal capacity, Amazon doesn't own the Washington Post. And Bezos did the right thing. And I thought, that's the owner they need. And thank God he's there. And then beginning of the second term, couldn't have been more different. I mean, he's down at Mar-a-Lago on bended knee, paying what's effectively a huge bribe, $28 million to Melania as a minimum payment for this ridiculous documentary, and underwriting the inauguration and defending Trump.

So one of the things both your books makes clear is the difference between Trump's first and second term. Michael, in your 2018 book, The Fifth Risk, It was about the first administration's indifference to learning how government works. Essentially, we don't care. This time around, you write that Trump created, quote, the most energetic and empowered transition team in history. This caught a lot of people you profiled off guard, even though much of what Trump has done was laid out in Project 2025, especially by Russell Vought, who was a character. Why weren't these threats taken seriously by many in the civil service sector? They thought they were going to get Trump 1.0 again, essentially.

I think they probably thought he wasn't capable of this sort of organization. And you make a really good point. These 2 things, I wouldn't have written the book if it was the same thing, right? Because it'd be the same book all over again. And the first Trump administration plays more like comedy almost. I mean, this sort of like firing the transition team right after he's elected and telling Chris Christie that it'll take an hour for him to figure out the whole federal government and just having a complete indifference to the whole apparatus that he's supposed to run. Uh, this time, and it might be, they kind of explain a lot of Jacob's characters. This projected very quickly as a much more successful and energetic power grab. When I was thinking about it, the frame of my story of the book, it was, this is how it starts. It's a power grab and they're grabbing institutions like quasi-government institutions like the Institute of Peace or the Smithsonian or all those, all the Kennedy Center, all these things that were really not meant to be controlled directly by the president. They're grabbing that. They're grabbing the power of the purse and they grabbed the civil service, this 2 million person nonpartisan workforce, these people taking oath to the Constitution and started making 'em take loyalty oaths.

And so once you think of it that way, that it's a massive power grab in an attempt to turn this enterprise into a loyalist sort of partisan thing, then you start thinking about, oh, all right, how's the government different then? Like, how are these things— you're going to change the incentives in this massive workforce. How is it going to behave differently when it, I don't know, it does public safety or when it collects data or when it's, you know, investing in long-term scientific research or all the other things the government does? And it— you could see it. You could see through these people, you know, that the reason they don't belong is that they're doing it the old way and the new way is going to be different.

You know, I— my kids go to public school here and there's a lot of public servants at the public school. And the parents were— they looked shell-shocked. And they knew I knew Elon Musk and they're like, what is this? Should we turn in this essay of 5 things? I go, don't you dare. Don't do it. He'll forget. Which of course he did. They never read them. Exactly. I said, don't worry about it. And I was like, I hope you don't lose your job, but don't worry about it. But they were shell-shocked. And these were very good ones at the Weather Service. One was in agriculture doing what I thought were important jobs for, for, for the government.

Can I ask you a question? Sure. I want to ask you a question. How do you think the stereotype of the bureaucrat has been sold so well? I mean, you know these people. It's ridiculous. How do you— the difference— this is what got me jazzed in the first place. It's like the difference between the reality when you meet these people and what you're told they are, and it's so shocking.

It's such a difference.

Yeah. Why do you think that difference exists?

Well, I mean, there's, you know, there's movies and TV and, you know, stuff like that. But I think from Silicon Valley, and because you had Elon Elon particularly in place there is they have the idea that they're in my way, they're in my jam, my vibe. And so they're useless, they're absolutely useless, and all they are are obstructionists. And they just don't— they've never met any. And they don't think anything works except their ideas and what they do, even though they've ridden on the rails of the government forever, whether it was the internet or Elon getting his loan. They never notice that they're riding on public roads or that they got any manner of help from the government or universities. It's just all themselves. So they have this idea, but they've always been that way, very disdainful of people who work in the public service. I just think they think they're gods ultimately. Yeah. But Jacob, one of the reasons you said you wanted to write your book was to understand why the guardrails that protected our democracy during the first term weren't holding this time around. And here I want to talk about Mitch McConnell specifically when he was speaking.

McConnell has said Trump's actions on January 6th were, quote, about as close to impeachable offense as you can imagine. Still, he voted to acquit him. And if the Senate had voted to convict, we wouldn't have a second Trump administration, presumably. Was his vote that day the decisive failure? Did it reveal that our institutions were already weaker than we ever realized? I think part of this is we don't think they're going to cross the line, and then they just do it. They just continually do it all the time.

Well, McConnell, whatever you think of him, is an institutionalist. He's someone who loved the Senate, believed in the Senate, knew how the Senate worked, and thought the Senate was a crucial component of democracy. And so I think the attack on the Capitol on January 6th was just, you know, rocked his world. And he hated Trump anyway. And he said to his colleagues and, you know, a few people still privately, but that's it. I'm done with him. It's an impeachable offense. And he was going to vote to convict. And he could have— I mean, McConnell, more than any other single person, could have prevented Trump too, because if he'd gotten those 10 votes that were needed for conviction, which he was in a position to get, Trump wouldn't have been— they could have declared Trump ineligible to seek office again. So the mystery there is, why did McConnell flip? And there were 7 Senate Republicans who voted for impeachment. He was not one of them. They were 10 votes short. So the question is, why did he, instead of taking that vote and doing what it seemed like he was ready to do, Or he wanted to do, like McCain did, for example.

Yeah, but why did he recess the Senate and then come back and say, actually, we can't convict him because he's left office, which is a pretext? I mean, constitutional lawyers don't think that that's the right reading of the Constitution. And I think it was fear of losing his position as leader of the Republican Party. It turned out what, what one of the things that shook out after January 6th, I mean, remember that night after the Uh, Capitol Police reclaimed the Capitol. Republicans in the House and the Senate still voted against certifying the election. And then when they all went home to their districts, what they found was it was Trump's party. And I think what people like McConnell, who absolutely hate Trump, but I think what they found out was they had lost control of the party to the extent that they were either going to go along with it or they were going to do what Liz Cheney did. You know, they were going to become rebels get kicked out.

And he didn't want to become a martyr, correct?

Absolutely. He wasn't done. He was ready, although he was, I would say, had had enough career for anybody at that point. He wasn't ready to conclude it. And I think there's this panic in the face of— I mean, it is a kind of bullying, the things that Trump was saying about him and his wife, Elaine Chao, these kind of racist remarks. And there's an environment that has a lot of threat of violence in it. I remember there's a striking comment that Mitt Romney made afterwards to McKay Coppins where he said he thought if every senator had the private security he had, Trump would've been convicted in the Senate. And it was really physical fear of violence that prevented him from being impeached and convicted.

And coming right after the insurrection. So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Yours comes from MSNBC's host of Deadline White House, Nicole Wallace. Let's listen to it.

Hi guys, what a coup to have you together. So here's my question. I want to know, Michael Lewis, what your blockers think of Jacob's capitulators, and vice versa.

I'd like vice versa.

All right, so I actually know the answer to this question, at least for a couple of them, because right after Jacob's book Profiles in Cowardice— let's name the book— uh, came out, Kathleen Walters, the privacy officer at the IRS, called me and said, this is amazing new book by this guy named Jacob Weisberg. You got to get it. I said, Jacob Weisberg is one of my best friends. So I think that the ones I've heard from loved his book and noticed his book without me pointing it out to him. They're also connoisseurs of a slightly different situation, but the capitulation that occurred inside the civil service. You could do what Jacob did. It would be a different, slightly different kind of story. with the people who were faced with choices inside the civil service. Do you go along? Do you get promoted in exchange for breaking the law, in exchange for violating the norms, in exchange for violating the spirit of your institution? And you can go from agency to agency and you can find a person who was plucked from 8 rungs deep in East Jesus, Georgia, doing something administrative and small and made head of the agency because they'd signed— Oh, you saw that.

Yeah.

They'd signed the documents. You know, and there's that character that really gets under their skin, uh, and kind of rhymes with Jacob's characters. Uh, it's like, what did you do during the war, Daddy? And, and these— my characters are all people who, like, made a decision to give up their career rather than violate this. You know, you can get another job, you can't get another soul, is what they like to say.

Right, right. And Jacob?

Well, exactly. And, and sadly, I don't have the ongoing relationship with my subjects that Michael Haslip has. In fact, I have no relationship with them all. You know, only one of them even talked to me for the book, and, and none of them And one of them can't talk anymore, but go ahead.

Allegedly.

Exactly. But so I don't, but I do know what they think. And I, and I think because I know this situation, which is what, how unprincipled people view principled people. And it's the opposite of what they say. What they say is these people are preening Puritans, not realists, you know, are, are kind of like standing up for public applause. What they really feel is a kind of ethical envy, a moral envy.

Right, right, right.

So they insult them because they know they've taken the money, they've taken the easy road. And these people are kind of a living rebuke to them. And it just honestly, that just, you know, this book even exists. All you have to do is kind of like wave this book and people understand exactly, oh shit, there are people who in this situation actually stood up and did the right thing and I wasn't one of them.

And do you think they feel any remorse? And if given a second chance, would any have done things differently for both of you? And let me give you an example. I interviewed Tom Tillis recently. And I called him Too Late Tom, which annoyed him greatly.

And he voted for Todd Blanche when he was already on the way out. So what was the cost? What would have been the cost of doing that?

Right. But talk about what— did they feel remorse for their actions? And in your case, Michael, did they go like, why did I do that? Jacob, you first.

Well, the Washington definition of martyrdom is, you know, you're reduced to living on $1 million a year. Like, it's, you know, it's to talk about debt. I mean, the metaphor is actually a little bit inept. I think the people for whom it has worked out badly regret it. That is, I think they don't regret it for the right reasons. Brad Karp has to regret his capitulation because he lost his job. Now, he lost it over Epstein, but it just worked out badly. The firm has lost it. Paul Weiss has lost its reputation. It's now the same as every other firm. So many of its most prominent lawyers left, and they have a kind of real Paul Weiss firm in in exile. And yeah, they've kept their income. But the thing is, when he looks at the other firms that did stand up, and one of them, Jenner& Block, is a very big firm like Paul, Weiss, it hasn't suffered. It's done great. And you know what? People would rather hire a lawyer who's a fighter than a lawyer who surrenders at the first smell of tear gas. So I think it worked out badly, and I haven't talked to him.

He has to regret it because what he did, failed so badly, but that's not the right reason to regret it. The right reason is not based on hindsight. I did the wrong—

I made the wrong choice.

Jacob, has it worked out really well for any of your characters?

I mean, Bezos in the sense that he's doing what he wants to do and he's back in the space race with Musk. And I think it's fundamentally, I mean, Kara was sort of getting at this, but being this new version of himself who's a kind of astronaut and a hero. And so he's living his best life. I mean, he hasn't won the competition with Musk. I don't know that he has to win it. Musk is richer now, but, you know, Bezos has the biggest yacht. And, you know, it's so telling. I mean, like, if I wanted a yacht, which I don't, I mean, don't give me one, please. But, you know, I'd be— No problem. I'd be fine with the 5th biggest yacht or the 8th biggest yacht. Why does it have to be the biggest yacht? It can't go under bridges. All it's— the only thing is it's the big— it's the biggest penis.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Which means one thing.

So you're asking my characters? Yes.

Are they like, oh God, I can't believe I was ethical?

No. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I think the kind of people who, who I write about generally had sort of figured out how to lead a meaningful life, that they, that they were already pretty clear about why they were doing what they were doing. And the minute that purpose is perverted in any way, they knew exactly what they had to do. Now, they've suffered. I mean, some of them are still unemployed. Most of them are poised to come back in. If there is an effort to repair the government, an effort to repair these institutions, they've set themselves up to come back in. So no, not a one of them regrets what they've Done.

There are thousands like them who either resigned, retired, or were fired by the Trump administration. And Jacob, I see a lot of parallels between your book and the fallout from the Epstein Files, the story of powerful people who looked the other way in the face of wrongdoing or worse, enabled it or participated in it across education, politics, finance, law. They chipped away at the integrity of these major institutions. First, Jacob, how did their actions seed even more mistrust in our society? And what are the knock-on effects, if any, or does it repair itself?

Well, I just think there's this huge tension between accountability and getting back to normal. And I think we're going to be right in this issue, assuming Democrats at least take the House after the midterms, because they're going to have the question of what kind of accountability do we bring And it includes the kinds of people I'm talking about in the book, the heads of media companies who made these legal settlements that were in effect bribes. They want to look into the settlements with law firms to try to find out exactly what the law firms agreed to when they said they'd do pro bono work for Trump and so on. And I think it's really a difficult question. It's a question that societies that go through some kind of democratic rupture have to face. If you put all the emphasis on justice and accountability, you may not be able to do what you want to do. In the Democrats' case— Move forward. Move forward. But I think Biden was sort of the example of, well, let's not go into that right away. We don't want to look like we're seeking revenge. And he soft-pedaled the justice part too much and waited too long, and justice was never done.

So I think it's a really interesting and really hard question, but I think the accountability is essential. I think you can't just let Republicans who voted against certifying the election on January 6th pretend it never happened. I'm not saying they should all be prosecuted. I don't think most of them committed prosecutable offenses. But I think it has to be acknowledged before we can get back to any kind of democratic normality.

There is that worry among— that Democrats will be too soft. And they think that. I know the tech moguls think, well, Democrats won't come after us the way Trump did. So Michael, in your case, can they recover? has touched on it, because you may not want to build it back the same way. You may have an opportunity to do it in a new fresh way, for example.

So listen, we just take the— it's— I think it just depends function to function. So let's take the, the pillaging of the, of tax return data, uh, that DHS steals somewhere between 50,000 tax returns from the, from the IRS to go find undocumented workers. I mean, you can't let the law get broken in that way and not go back and prosecute, right? You've got to hold people accountable for For having violated the, the, the IRS privacy laws. But then you need to reinforce the laws. It feels to me— I mean, Jacob is a— is more of a political historian than I am, but it does seem to me that it feels a lot like right after Watergate, that, that when a lot of these guardrails around the presidency were placed, they were placed in response to a power grab. And things like restoring and reinforcing inspectors general, I mean, That, that the, the fact that that happened, that they have removed the, the chief mechanism for identifying corruption, for identifying waste, fraud, and abuse, and nobody really fought back. Uh, I mean, that, that's—

Or could fight back.

Or could fight back. Right. That's right. I don't mean the inspectors general themselves. I mean the Congress. No, but I don't think there was—

people didn't expect you had— there was no protection to fight back.

Right. So some combination of public education about what happened in these agencies explaining what happened, I think will lead to some natural reform. But I don't know how much you can actually do with Trump still in the White House.

So where does that lead the civil service with an overall ability of the government to function for its citizens?

I mean, it's messy. It depends on which part of the civil service you're talking about. But here's another example. I mean, right now, Russell Vogt, is sitting there strong-arming individual universities. I mean, there's not a medical school in the country that is not getting a call saying you need to fix your— DEI. Yeah, all that stuff, whatever it is he wants. Um, once you accept that as a principle, it's a game is over. Like, once you accept that that's acceptable, so you've got those sort of like specific violations need to be addressed. And I, I What I don't understand is even if you give, even the Democrats take both the Senate and the House, how much you can do when you have a president who's just going to veto.

Now, Michael said in an interview, Jacob, once you start generating mistrust of the government, it's easy to distort what's going on inside for political gain. And look, mistrust in the government isn't a new phenomenon. And Doge was excellent, Elon, about distorting what was happening, making things up. You saw this when they dismantled USAID, casting them as corrupt, or the US Institute of Peace, which Michael wrote about in the book. When you have that mistrust of government, it's very easy for people to be quislings, presumably. And that's where your characters slid into that idea.

I think, Kara, the thing that has to happen is Republicans have to break with Trump. Not all of them, but some of them. And Michael, Watergate is exactly the right reference point. But the crucial difference is you had Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker, and, you know, you have these Republicans who felt some higher responsibility beyond their loyalty to the president. Most didn't, but enough did in the first term. Some, some did. Now there are none. I mean, there's not a single elected Republican who is comprehensively standing up to Trump until that dam breaks. And I think it does break if he gets unpopular enough. It's probably pretty close to breaking right now. Then you can start to have, you know, some kind of return to truth, as you put it, or accountability. But I mean, I just wanna give Michael another example 'cause I think it's so, it is part of his book and it fits so well. It's USAID. So USAID was illegally destroyed by Musk and Doge. And in, when the Democrats come back, there are gonna be 2 things they're gonna want to do about USAID. One is expose what happened. Why did Elon Musk decide to take a sabbatical to kill 3/4 of a million people?

Like, you know, and just— it was— I mean, Congress appropriates money for USAID. The president cannot say, I'm going to close it instead. That's what he did. So there's an investigation that may involve criminality, and it's a proper congressional investigation. But the most urgent thing, in a way, is to get USAID back up and running and dealing with all the global health issues. that can't get dealt with without it. And so it's not that you can't necessarily do both things, but there's a tension between them and an environment where maybe the House can pass a bill and maybe even the Senate, if the Democrats take it and they get rid of the filibuster, can pass it. Trump's just going to veto it, and they're not going to have a 2/3 majority. So it's an argument, actually, for focusing on the investigation and the accountability, because even if the MAGA people won't testify, they can do that.

Yeah. Now, Michael, it begs the question, even though Doge is over, the effects and what's to come, because on its face, it's an abject failure. It cost the government more money than it saved. You flooded the idea that cutting $2 trillion in the federal budget was never— I agree with you. I said that at the start. The real goal was about—

Can we say that again? Because this is interesting. I'm curious what you think of this. It's a funny question what Elon thought he was doing as opposed to what he said he was doing. Because if you are actually going to try to cut $2 trillion out of the budget, you can't do it the way they even— you can't do it if you're going to go over the military and entitlements and all the rest. So So he wasn't trying to do that. He was saying he was trying to do that. And I mean, if they were really interested in waste, fraud, and abuse, they did a really poor job of finding it. That— so it— Or maybe it wasn't there. Maybe it wasn't there. That's exactly right. So then the question is like, what does he think he was doing?

I think he was— I'll tell you exactly. I said at the start, I was like, he wants the data because it's never been compiled the way— it's across the government. That's one. Very interested in the data, especially because he was so interested in AI at the time and Grok. And his stuff was lagging behind others. And the other is he got rid of all the government investigations into him. He fixed it to work for him and others like him.

You don't think that putting his friend in to run NASA was part of his wishlist?

All of it. All of it. Every bit of it was about him. Whatever it was, whether it was getting a sweet, sweet government contract, whether it was pushing out Bezos, whether it was— it was all about self-enrichment, but specifically the existential crisis of those investigations that were happening at— if you noticed, all the agencies that were investigating him got their ass kicked, right? Every single one of them. And so that was one. And the other was that he does have this idea about the deficit in his head. And you saw him pop out about the deficit several times. He couldn't help himself. And he does have this sort of godlike feeling that Western civilization is at risk and he is its savior. He's said that to me many times.

But if he actually cared about it, why didn't he do something about it?

Well, it's just like, why would you give a share of SpaceX stock to every child? for $10 billion rather than just give them the $10 billion. I wonder why. Because he wants to support SpaceX stock. It's all about the money. And let me give full disclosure, he recently challenged me to a sword fight and said I should go to prison when the only thing I pointed out was what Jacob mentioned, was that there are criminal things attached to these things that the government is looking at.

Kara, I would go a little farther than you even if that's— I mean, you go pretty far, which I appreciate. But think about why Putin's interested in US politics. It's to undermine the system. And the sowing distrust that you were talking about is itself the goal. And it's not that he's going to invade America and try to make it a Russian colony. It's that the worse we're doing, the weaker we are, the more room there is for him to do it. That's so important. And I think there's a version of that that applies to Musk, that there's this libertarian mindset. He doesn't want the government to interfere. I mean, he wants it to fund SpaceX through contracts. But he doesn't want AI regulation, even if a few days of the week he says he does. He wants a weak and disempowered federal government. And what he delivered with— I mean, if you try to make any coherent motivation out of Doge, I think it's just damage. I think it's just saying— Yes. I want a government that is in less of a position to challenge and constrain me.

So this is kind of the deep level on which Trump and Musk are aligned. They're both invested in sowing mistrust. that Trump can't function in a trusting environment, that Trump does better if nobody trusts each other because he's so personally untrustworthy. It's strategy for him.

Everybody's a criminal.

Yeah, everybody's a criminal. Everything's rigged. He creates an environment in which he can compete when nobody trusts each other. But back to the trusting of the government, it's such a funny thing. I mean, Americans, if you ask them, I think they all say they don't trust the government, basically. The polls show that. but in their behavior, they do, right? They drink the water, they eat the food, they fly on the airplanes, they hold the treasury bonds. I don't think we even know what it feels like to genuinely mistrust our government. There's this surface mistrust, there's this unease about it or whatever it is.

Which is a good thing.

But if you take it to a place, which is where it's headed now, where it is actually untrustworthy, where you can't eat the food, you can't fly on the planes, I mean, it's a completely different environment.

Right. Then you become, yes, you become countries that have that as a daily occurrence. But then Doge was successful in doing that, right?

Yeah.

And of course everyone sucked up to him because the world's richest man, and we have this idolatry of innovators and wealthy people. So he must be smart because he knows cars, right? He must be able to fix this. How do you assess Doge at this moment, especially because some of, and you actually focused in on someone who noticed that the government does work.

Can I tell that story really briefly? Yes, please. Very quickly. I thought this was kind of funny. So, Sahil Lavingia is his name, and he actually came, unlike most of the Musk rats, he came with an actual purpose. He had this OCD thing about the IRS sending him paper. Like, why does the IRS send me paper? And he thought he could do that. We should all be able to file our tax returns on an app and he could build the app. But he, he didn't have any particular worshipful feelings towards Elon Musk. They didn't let him go do what he wanted to go do. They stuck him in the VA and he, he, and he saw what they were doing in the VA and he said it was madness. And he sort of wandered around in the spirit of curiosity rather than the usual Doge contempt. And in the middle of his reverie, he gets a call from a reporter at Fast Company magazine, and he makes the mistake of saying to this reporter that the government's not quite as inefficient as I thought it was. And a lot of these people in here, they really like their jobs and they do them well, and that kind of stuff.

It was amazing how hard it was to get fired from Doge. Like what you could, the things you could do and stay in Doge. Like you could tweet white nationalist stuff, J.D. Vance would stand up himself and protect your job. But if you said the government's not quite as inefficient as I thought, your head got whacked off. So he got fired from Doge, uh, and for, for saying what was like obvious to anybody who was wandering around the government. But, but after Doge collapses, ends, is a failure, he gets called back and invited to actually figure out his app problem. Yeah. And I thought it was sweet and also telling that everything in Doge wasn't just awful, that there were people and there was a possibility it could have been something so different if Elon Musk was a different character. But given that power— I know, I know, I know. He's a pig's head wing.

Okay, he's not. But 100% less ketamine? Sure, why not? No, they are unqualified to do this job.

They're unqualified to do the job. Yeah, yeah. But, but they had a mandate to do stuff that actually could have been useful to do.

And that's why a lot of Democrats went along initially, like Ro Khanna and others. I texted him, I go, it's not going to work, but go right ahead and support it. Like, it's not— trust me.

But one of the odder strains of the stuff that came into me about Musk— Musk wouldn't talk to me, but I talked to his friends, and, and they were kind of adamant They would say, they would say basically this, you, if you're gonna understand Elon, you have to understand that Elon doesn't lie. And I said, what on earth are you talking about? Like, he's, everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie.

Yeah. Hello, Elon.

I mean, he, he, but they said, no, he doesn't think he's lying.

That's correct.

And that's interesting. I mean, it's, it's different. It's more unsettling.

He's, he lies to himself.

Different from Trump.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Trump thinks— do you think Trump knows he's lying?

Not now.

He used to.

He used to.

So let me, you know, 'cause it goes higher, 'cause people who who are more like, how did you do this? Jacob, you save Chief Justice John Roberts at the end of your book, who of course wrote the majority opinion in the court's 2024 presidential immunity decision. He's also overseen the court's shift to conservative supermajority. Their decisions have undermined his mantra that justices are just calling balls and strikes. What sets Roberts' failures apart from others you write about? And what happens when the American people stop believing the justices are applying the law evenly?

Yeah, I think Roberts is, in his own mind at least, an institutionalist too. Like Mitch McConnell, he cares about the respect for the court and the credibility of the court. And I think a lot of the bad decisions he's made, either not taking cases or not ruling on cases, like waiting a year and a half to rule on birthright citizenship, is actually to avoid confrontation with Trump where the law and the Constitution are totally clear. Although the birthright citizenship case amazingly was a 5-4 decision. But I think he's wanted to protect it by avoiding a conflict that Supreme Court has no army. It can't enforce its decrees. If Trump actually went so far as to defy the court, that would be a real constitutional crisis. But I think he's also had his own agenda, which is he wants a much more powerful executive. He didn't particularly want a more powerful Trump. Again, I don't think he necessarily has any sympathy for Trump at all, but he's had this version of, you know, the unitary executive, get rid of congressional control over the independent agencies, which they've now done, you know, after 150 years. And that immunity decision was sort of a case in point.

I mean, this decision is a catastrophe because it essentially says that there will be no way to hold Trump legally accountable for any crimes he commits in office, even after he leaves office. And I think that would be a catastrophe in our American democracy in any time or place. But to rule that way just before he comes back into office, the self-pardon— nobody talks about Trump pardoning himself anymore. He wouldn't need to. He's unprosecutable under that decision. And even if you, as Justice Roberts, believe that is what the Constitution says, that the only way to ever hold a president accountable is through impeachment, couldn't you wait a little bit on that decision until you had somebody else in office or Trump on the way out? Because you were giving total impunity to the most dangerous person who's ever been president in 250 years of American democracy.

We'll be back in a minute.

Whatever So looking forward, what you're talking about is this idea of reckoning, right? Where the Democrats are in a strong position to take the House and possibly the Senate. We'll see. And when they get back, there's these ideas they're going to investigate law, ethics, they're going to have subpoenas, everything else. I have said I think they'll try to pick off people like Elon Musk or Pete Hegseth. For each of you, what does a reckoning look like? First you, Michael. What is the reckoning here, or is there no reckoning at all?

I mean, it depends on how intelligently it's done. But if you gave me a magic wand and said, you get to orchestrate hearings, you get to orchestrate investigations, where would I point the magic wand? I'd start, I think, with things that are easily understood by the public. And so I'd start with the money. I'd start with pardons, like, like the sale of pardons. And I would do that— what you just said, like the, the financial corruption would be probably the place I start because, because who could object to that kind of thing? What I would privately love to see is actually an investigation of what happened in the, in these individual agencies because I don't think— With Doge? With Doge, but not just Doge though. You know, I'd love to know what Howard Lutnick's been up to. I think that it starts with actually understanding what's happened. Because I don't think— I mean, I got to dive into some of these places, but most of this stuff has not been written about. And so it's— I think there is an— there's a, like, just what happened kind of thing. But that's slower, and that's— it will be harder to sell to the public.

Going after the financial corruption, and particularly the pardons, I think the pardons are easily, like—

Yeah, the pardons, the financial corruption. Is that going to be enough for the public in that regard? Because I personally, I think doing a big Trump impeachment is stupid. Like, it's not going to work. And you go for the lower-hanging capos, I guess. I don't know what else to call them.

I don't know. Jacob, what do you think?

I think they've got to go very big picture. I mean, I think the January 6th hearings were the great example where they told a narrative. They were all on the same page. I mean, the tendency is going to be for 5 different committees to go in 50 directions, and there'll be time to investigate all of that. But the beginning, they have to create a kind of master narrative And I think it is about corruption. I mean, you could frame it as how did the Trump family make $2 billion in 12 months? You know, I think I agree with Michael that the pardon-for-sale industry in Washington is so shocking and encompasses so much, including the story of the crypto corruption. I mean, if you had to take one, the pardon of CZ, you know, the crypto billionaire who, when he was pardoned, Trump said he didn't know who he was, and someone asked him, he couldn't remember who. And this is someone who's at the heart of the family self-enrichment. But I think you need that big picture. And again, the most important thing is to get some Republicans to come aboard. January 6th, they admitted those January— Doesn't that help Trump?

Doesn't that help Trump? He loves confrontation. He loves the circus. That's how we, a lot of ways he got back with the prosecutions in New York where he can cast himself as a victim of government. Evil, essentially.

He'll do that regardless. And he's not gonna— no one's gonna testify. No one in the administration. Democrats aren't gonna get any help from the Republicans on this. But if they can find a few centrist Republicans, the equivalent of the Adam Kitzinger and Liz Cheney, they gave that committee so much credibility, even though the Republicans of the party were boycotting the hearings and wouldn't assign members to it. The leadership said no, but because they peeled off a few brave Republicans, Because it had a credibility that I don't think it would've had if it was purely partisan.

Although none of whom are serving. None of whom are serving.

Carol, if I give you the magic wand, what do you do with it? What do you do with it?

Musk. Musk. Make an example and see what he did. See what he did there. And of course, as you said, the financial corruption. I think the crypto stuff is great. The pardons are great. The self-dealing. Because if you're going to restore people's trust in government, you want to show them you can meaningfully improve their lives. And investigating figures like Hegseth doesn't necessarily do that. But if you could show accountability and then actually pass legislation that helps people, to me, that's where you get the best bang. And unfortunately, you're going to have to leave behind some of these people never getting justice, right? That's just the way you're going to have to accept it. It might tickle your fancy, but I don't think you're going to get it. That's my feeling. I just don't think it's going to work. And Musk is going to slide his way out of it, as he always does.

I mean, I assume Musk will have a pardon.

Pardon. That's right. So finishing up, just a couple of things. You both have talked about the idea of capitulating to Trump and not capitulating to Trump. And many people feel the tide is turning away to capitulating from Trump. I'm not so sure. But then you see regular people, many of whom Michael writes about, like a grand jury declined to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, speaking about the January 6th investigations because she had very strong testimony. Do you see more people, Michael, like yours? Or Jacob, do you see more people continue to behave like yours now that maybe Trump is possibly in the rearview mirror?

I think there are more examples that make me smile. Yes, the Cassidy Hutchinson one was a good one. And the media, the broadcast media standing up for CNN and boycotting the press pool on the days when it's CNN's turn On the roster. You know, that's the kind of— I think to stand up to Trump effectively takes a kind of institutional solidarity. And the media is actually showing a little bit of that right now, much more than it did when the AP was attacked at the beginning of the administration over the Gulf of America. And I think, I think it would be different now. I don't think the law firms would bend in the way they have. At the same time, it's in this interim place where Trump is weaker, There's more resistance at the margins. But where are the Republicans?

Michael, what about you? Because look, Paramount just accepted $1 billion from Elon Musk.

I mean, the economics of it are changing, right? That it's as Trump weakens, people's decisions will become more enlightened, right? But the other thing is collective action kind of— it takes coordination, takes time. The response is slower than you would like. But if you go into the NIH right now, The researchers, the individual researchers have organized themselves to protest their own management. And it started with a trickle and now it's a flood. So I think I'm kind of hopeful actually. And once you name the thing, once you do what Jacob did and you say, this is what you don't do, and once you name the thing in the way I did, this is what you do do, that it is a moral decision and it is made clear, I think it's easier to make the right decision.

Yeah, I think you're— I agree. When I was on the playground the other day, one of the parents who was all worried about the Musk stuff, who I advised them not to do the thing, came up to me. I said, how's it going now? And they go, fuck those guys. And I was like, good.

There we go.

I said, excellent way to approach it. And he goes, I'm doing a good job. I'm fine. I'll be fine. And I was kind of feeling happy for him because they had real fear. So my last question, I want to leave it on a hopeful note actually, which is, this is one, Michael, at one point in the book, you compared the Trump administration to a meteor. You write, it killed off an entire species and made room for new ones. It's good for us, not so good for the dinosaurs. There's an opportunity to rebuild a system in a way that's more functional, more modern. What, what has to happen to take advantage of here's a fresh start through destruction? Jacob, you go first and then Michael.

Well, I think, you know, Trump's not always wrong about what's broken. I mean, take the, the IRS. I mean, think about how how convoluted the tax system is and how hard it is to pay your taxes. He was wrong, obviously, about— I mean, I don't believe there was any sincerity about fixing it. But if you look in many of the same places Trump looked, whether it's government or in the nonprofit sector or the private sector, I mean, the universities had plenty of issues and Trump correctly identified a bunch of them, but they have to reform themselves. And I think in the best-case scenario, the Trump episode is over and cooler heads come back and say, but that doesn't mean everything was great before. We had tremendous inequalities and failures in our worlds, in our systems. And let's think about a more plausible reform scheme. But that even to say that, God, it sounds so idealistic and it's so far from where we are. But that's where I would hope we would get to over a period of time.

Yeah. What about you, Michael?

You know, this sounds kind of woolly-minded, but I think everything starts with public education and starts with public attention and interest. And so the silver lining here is Trump sort of electrified the material. Like, nobody cared about the government, you know, nobody paid it any attention. People— it was a train on a track, and no matter what you threw at it, it just kept going down the track. And now I think there's a sense that, no, actually the train is derailed, and the train's interesting all of a sudden. So I do think this is a moment for public education. It's like one great national civics lesson. And hearings in Congress can be a mechanism for getting stuff across. So I think that's where I think about where you start. You start with that. Let's teach. Let's get people interested in this so that then there is a political marketplace for the kind of reform that needs to happen. Yeah, I think they are.

Young people. I was just at the University of Michigan. My second son is there. And they're talking about policy. All the kids were talking about housing, Medicare for All, all these issues, which before my sons were like, ugh, the government doesn't work. And now they're like, here's what it takes to work, which is a big difference.

Yeah.

Right? But does that mean for all these people, the Quizzlings and the heroes, what is the one thing besides biology that needs to put Trump fully in the rearview mirror? Because biology is undefeated, FYI. Go ahead, Michael.

So he runs on fear and anger. His political movement, the fuel is anger. And the deep answer is, how do you address people's feelings of grievance? But the shallow answer is, I think that the minute the wicked witch is dead, the minute he feels like he's not popular, I think it could turn so spectacularly. When people are no longer afraid, they'll discover their courage. So, I mean, I think it's just like, it's happening. And is it like, public sentiment is turning and you're not as maybe as hopeful as I am about this, but I think we may wake up a year from now and say, how did that happen? Like, why did anybody ever listen to him?

McCarthyism or anything. Yes, that kind of thing.

And we need that Joe McCarthy moment. I mean, that, you know, sir, at long last, have you no sense of shame, no sense of decency? I mean, Obama almost got it with the Cheesecake Factory designed by Saddam Hussein. I mean, you know, there's just going to be some distill— some funny distillation that just reveals that the emperor has no clothes, that parable, you know, it only works if everyone maintains the lie. And I agree with Michael. I'm hopeful that it's going to crumble, but my predictions have been wrong so far. So I almost don't believe myself about my instincts about what is likely to happen in the next year.

Well, there's one sign of that, $500 million Elon Musk is spending. He's scared out of his mind. Yeah. Even though that's just a tiny amount of money. And to me, that says a lot. The flying car and the $500 million, I'm like, oh man, you're fucking scared, aren't you? That to me is the whole, whoa, that kind of thing. More like a little hopping car. It doesn't fly. We're not going into this. I need to stop people from calling it a flying car. Anyway, I really appreciate it. These are wonderful books. You should read them together, everybody, because besides them being best friends, which I didn't realize, you should read them together because they're really great bookends on those who are heroes and those who are not and what that means. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Kurt. It's great talking to you.

Thanks, Carol. Thank you. Today's show was produced by Vicki Vergolina, Michelle Eloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeleine Laplante-Dooby, and Megan Birney. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemarie Ho, Jim Mackel, and Manolo Moreno. Our Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademix. If you're already following this show, you're a civil servant, emphasis on civil. If not, you're a muskrat. Ew. And more spineless than Mitch McConnell's reanimated corpse. Oh, I said it. So what? Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.