Do you remember Julian Assange’s catchphrase, “Courage is contagious”? I think he may have borrowed it from the old Bible basher the Reverend Billy Graham, but no matter: it had a catchy ring about it.
Sadly, there is something even more contagious: cowardice. There is a lot of it about. In the US today, it is spreading very rapidly, and there seems to be no known cure.
An enterprising journalist at Politico has called it the Great Grovel. In a recent piece, John F Harris chronicled how a parade of the wealthiest and most elite institutions in American life have capitulated to a series of unprecedented demands from Donald Trump and his brutish team of retribution-seekers.
Where to begin? Maybe with some of the wealthiest people on the planet. I’m looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who were among the first to “take the knee” before Trump had even cleared his throat. Or maybe the bosses at ABC who, rather than telling the president-elect where to shove his lawsuit, agreed to pay him $15m (£11.5m) to settle an eminently defendable defamation claim.
Or how about the lily-livered drips covering the White House, who – in solidarity with their banned colleagues at Associated Press – are seriously considering wearing badges that say “First Amendment”. For one day only, you understand.
Trump must be trembling at the prospect.
And then there are the crybabies running the great universities. Specifically Columbia, whose interim president hoisted a white flag high above the hallowed halls of learning. Katrina Armstrong promptly stepped down, to be replaced by an acting president, Claire Shipman, who has already been warned that it’s only a matter of weeks before she’s forced out.
But none of this rivals the flabby capitulation of some of the most affluent law firms in America, who have stumbled out of their well-appointed offices with their hands in the air. Trump began by (almost certainly illegally) threatening one law firm – Paul, Weiss – in retaliation for some slight, real or imagined. Within a week, the firm surrendered, promising to devote $40m in legal services to causes close to Trump’s heart. It also vowed to abandon any DEI policies.
As Pete Hegsethmight say: “It’s PATHETIC.”
Paul, Weiss has long prided itself on being at the forefront of the fight for civil rights. It is not a poor company. Last year was something of a boom year, with revenues growing 32 per cent to $2.63bn. The average pay for its partners in 2024 was $7.5m.
And still, it folded.
Well, what do you think happened next? Trump is going after more law firms for representing people he does not like. A fourth firm, Milbank, struck a deal this week to commit $100m of free legal advice to Trump causes, and also ditched diversity-based hiring. An equity partner at Milbank can expect to earn £4m a year.
Meanwhile, all the richest law firms in America are – so far – looking the other way.
One company with Democratic Party ties, Perkins Coie, has decided to fight back. Former partner Bob Bauer described the executive orders as “exercises in intimidation”, adding: “We are at a critical moment. Which way is the legal profession going to go?”
According to Thursday’s New York Times, the answer is a collective decision to climb under the duvet and hope no one notices. None of the top 10 firms by revenue has come out in solidarity with Perkins Coie. According to the NYT: “For most of the big firms … they quietly support it, but are concerned that signing the document would draw Mr Trump’s ire and cost them clients.”
And that’s how the Great Grovel unfolds.
Back to universities: you’ll be amazed to hear that, following Columbia’s surrender, the Trump administration has decided to “review” roughly $9bn in grants and contracts awarded to Harvard.
A former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, called out what was happening in a punchy piece in the NYT this week. He accused Trump of trying to “bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission”, and noted: “Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.”
Like the fabulously wealthy law firms, Harvard has immense riches should it choose to resist. If not Harvard, who?
As Summers argued: “Institutions such as Harvard, the administration’s most recent target, have vast financial resources, great prestige, and broad networks of influential alumni. If they do not or cannot resist the arbitrary application of government power, who else can? Without acts of resistance, what protects the rule of law?”
The pattern of attacks by Trump and his cronies is hardly accidental. A law-based democracy is based on the reality created by science, the academy, journalism, law, and the government itself. So, if you want to manipulate your own version of the truth, then of course you target the “fake” media, the lawyers, the judges, and science (hello RFK!). And you get your mates to dismantle the government.
Over 200 years, America has built up a system of institutions and norms that, together, helped form what the social historian Jonathan Rauch has called the constitution of knowledge.
“The entire system rests on a foundation of values: a shared understanding that there are right and wrong ways to make knowledge,” he wrote in 2021. “Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the US constitution does for politics: they create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. If we want to defend that system from its many persistent attackers, we need to understand it – and its very special notion of reality.”
But defending the system also requires a measure of courage. What if Zuckerberg and Bezos had held their nerve? What if ABC had told Trump they’d see him in court? What if the Ivy League universities had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Columbia? What if the fabulously wealthy law firms had joined together to sue Trump for trying to blackmail them?
But that would require powerful and wealthy people to show a bit of backbone. Cowardice is contagious. Welcome to the Great Grovel.
