Donald Trump was done on January 6. Republican lawmakers failed to overturn the 2024 election after the violence was quelled. Mike Pence did his job, confirming Joe Biden’s victory. Social-media companies locked Trump out, and even allies issued rebukes. Two weeks later, the 45th president jetted off in disgrace for would-be exile in Mar-a-Lago. Democracy held.

Next, 67 senators could’ve voted to convict Trump in impeachment proceedings, barring him from running for office; state and federal prosecutors could’ve put the former president on trial for conspiracy and election subversion. However, two men, Mitch McConnell and John Roberts, helped ensure that such accountability would never come to pass, paving the way for Trump’s return to power. The former Senate majority leader and chief justice of the Supreme Court each deservedly get a chapter in Profiles in Cowardice, Jacob Weisberg’s searing “study in collaboration in the Trump era.”

First McConnell, despite believing Trump committed an “impeachable offense,” refused to bring back the Senate to vote until after Biden took office. He then, somehow, concluded that Congress can’t punish a former president, and while accusing Trump of being “practically and morally responsible for provoking” the insurrection, voted against impeachment. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while in office,” McConnell said, noting that “we have a criminal-justice system in this country.” About that. Some 40 months later, Roberts wrote in a majority opinion that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for official acts in office, unraveling multiple prosecutions. “It’s a shockingly bad decision,” Weisberg tells me. “John Roberts gave him a blank check to do whatever he saw fit.”

Weisberg ranks McConnell’s and Roberts’s abdications of duty as tied for worst among the eight collaborators he chronicles, given that they effectively worked in tandem. “It’s not that they crafted it together, but they are two pieces of the puzzle that save Trump,” he says. There are other jagged pieces, from the worlds of business, law, media, tech, and academia, that connect to cement Trump’s power in a second term and fuel his authoritarian tendencies. Weisberg, a veteran political writer, doesn’t dwell on the Stephen Millers of Trump 2.0, the true believers willfully carrying out the administration’s hard-right agenda. He’s focused on the people who presumably know better, and in some cases proved it the first time around. There’s Megyn Kelly, who confronted Trump at the start of the 2016 election cycle about his history of misogyny, only to endorse him in 2024 as a “protector of women.” And Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, an admirable steward of the Washington Post in term one who killed the paper’s endorsement of........

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