The Swelling Ranks of Influential Men Knuckling Under to Trump

To read Part One of this story, click here.

I’ve told CEOs to engage as fast as possible because the clock is ticking.… If you’re somebody who endorsed Harris, and we’ve never heard from you at any point until after the election, you’ve got an uphill battle.

—Unnamed Trump aide quoted in The Washington Post on October 28

Last week, I profiled the teeming ranks of America’s leadership class who are capitulating to a second Donald Trump term in office. There were a lot of them—so many that I couldn’t possibly shoehorn all of them into one piece. I did manage to drop in, later, the breaking news that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos canceled his editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. But even with that update, there were too many knee-bendings left undocumented when the printer’s devil arrived at my door. Hence this sequel.

In Part One, I explained that excluded from my hall of shame are prominent Republicans who denounced Trump before handing over their party to him. At this late date, it’s an old story. Mark Leibovich published a book about it (Thank You for Your Servitude) two years ago, and in the September Atlantic he furnished a handy update. I won’t duplicate his excellent work here.

Instead, I’m focused on the powerful and influential people who (we can safely presume) oppose Trump but dare not endorse Harris for fear of retribution from Il Duce Arancione or his admirers. I designate these people the Fraidy-Cats. That there is no Fraidy-Cat category of powerful and influential people who oppose Harris but dare not endorse Trump is yet another reason you should vote for Harris. The vice president is not running a protection racket (see epigraph, above). She will not use the Justice Department and other parts of the government to punish her enemies, as Trump has repeatedly promised to do.

In Part One I reviewed the acquiesences of Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, Mitt Romney, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, and Bezos. Yes, Romney is a Republican senator, but I included him because he remains bluntly anti-Trump even as he shies away from endorsing Harris. I mostly ignored military leaders, such as Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the grounds that people in the uniformed services, even after they retire, have persuasive reasons to avoid political endorsements. But Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, and McMaster, a retired Army general, occupy a different category because they changed into their civvies to become Homeland Security secretary, chief of staff, and national security adviser to Trump. They are political virgins no longer. That frees me to call them cowards for not endorsing Harris.

As I stated previously, the 2024 election is the most consequential in our lifetimes because if Trump returns to power he will, by his own admission, defy the Constitution, militarize immigration policy, bankrupt the Treasury with tax cuts, undermine the civil service, and pursue innumerable other reckless policies that violate liberal and conservative principles alike. This election is, in a very real sense, an emergency. I’ve resisted treating it as such until now because I felt it was more important for Democrats to give voters affirmative reasons to support them. And it’s not like there weren’t many others making that case already.

But here in this final week, with Harris and Trump running neck and neck, we all bear a responsibility to do everything we can to elect Harris and oppose Trump. To those who say endorsements don’t matter, even newspaper endorsements, that’s true—they don’t sway votes. But their secondary effects can be profound. Some who were holding back from giving Trump money, fearing public criticism, may now open their checkbooks. As Trump fundraiser Bill White told The Washington Post: “Bezos not endorsing Kamala Harris—I think that’s a $50 million endorsement for Trump. Not picking a horse is picking a horse.”

It’s also likely that the Post, along with other institutions and people that allow themselves to get intimidated into silence, invite a second Trump administration to intimidate them further. That’s how bullying works. They are “obeying in advance.” Trump may be losing his marbles, but he can still smell weakness from a mile away.

Those American leaders who duck their responsibility to endorse the only practical alternative to Trump should, if Trump wins, never live down their disgrace, and to that end I’m trying to compile as complete list of Fraidy-Cats as I can.

Let us continue.

Mark Zuckerberg

After a would-be assassin tried to kill Trump in July, the Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg phoned him to express sympathy, which was appropriate, and to assure Trump that he would not endorse any Democrat in the 2024 election, which was not appropriate—not unless Zuckerberg also phoned Biden or Harris to assure them that he would not endorse any Republican. I doubt he did because, among other difficulties, that wouldn’t have been quite true. After the shooting, Zuckerberg told an interviewer:

Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life. On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy.

That there’s some serious Fraidy-Cat sucking up.

It is perhaps not coincidental that in March Trump called Facebook “a true Enemy of the People” and cited as a reason for switching his policy on TikTok, which Trump once wanted to ban, that if TikTok disappears, “Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business.” Trump is also still smarting from Meta’s Facebook and Instagram banning him for two years after January 6.

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used to be significant political donors. According to the nonprofit Open Secrets, they have since 2011 given $159,000 to federal candidates and committees, directly and indirectly. Of the direct contributions, 62 percent went to Democratic causes. In 2015 Zuckerberg gave $10,000 to the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, and as recently as 2021 Chan gave $750,000 to fight a recall of California Governor Gavin Newsom. By 2020 Zuckerberg had been intimidated into staying out of presidential politics, and instead donated $400 million to efforts to aid government election offices around the country. But trying to maximize voter turnout is a partisan issue in an era when Republicans do everything they can to suppress it, and inevitably Zuckerberg came under attack from the GOP. So this year he isn’t doing even that.

Glen Taylor and Steve Grove

Taylor (net worth: $2.9 billion, per Forbes) is owner of the Minnesota Star Tribune, formerly known as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Steve Grove is the paper’s publisher and chief executive. The two are to be commended for expanding coverage at a time when most regional newspapers are cutting budgets. But at the end of September the Star Tribune ran a piece announcing it would not endorse political candidates in the general election, except perhaps in some downballot elections. The news story (under the obsequious headline, “Minnesota Star Tribune Endorses Voters, Not Candidates, In Upcoming Election”) claimed that this had earlier been announced in August, when the newspaper rebranded itself in various other ways. I can’t find it, but I’ll take them at their word. Even August, though, is sufficiently close to Election Day that this decision must be chalked up to cowardice, not creative experimentation, and anyway, the Star Tribune didn’t say whether this represents a permanent policy change.

The Star Tribune has endorsed presidential candidates for many years, and even though its owner, Taylor, is a Republican, he’s a moderate Republican of the old school, which these days means he’s effectively a Democrat. The Star Tribune endorsed Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016. What else do you need to know? The only mystery is how much this decision was made by Taylor and how much by Grove, who was an official in Tim Walz’s gubernatorial administration. Either way, it’s a dive.

Mike Reed and Larry Kramer

Reed is chief executive of Gannett, which owns USA Today. Kramer is USA Today’s publisher. As with Taylor and Grove, I can’t enlighten you about the division of labor, but late Monday USA Today said that it too won’t endorse any presidential candidate this year. It endorsed Biden in 2020 and, in 2016, it didn’t exactly endorse Hillary Clinton but it did tell readers not to vote for Donald Trump, saying Trump was “unfit for the presidency.” USA Today had never published presidential endorsements before; it broke with that tradition in 2016 and 2020 only because Trump was an obvious menace. As it said in 2020:

If this were a choice between two capable major party nominees who happened to have opposing ideas, we wouldn’t choose sides. Different voters have different concerns. But this is not a normal election, and these are not normal times. This year, character, competence and credibility are on the ballot. Given Trump’s refusal to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power if he loses, so, too, is the future of America’s democracy.

Now it’s 2024, and every syllable of this statement remains true. Yet USA Today is, Josh Fiallo in The Daily Beast reports, sitting this one out. It has fallen to the newspaper’s spokesperson Lark-Marie Antón to explain why:

Why are we doing this? Because we believe America’s future is decided locally—one race at a time. And with more than 200 publications across the nation, our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.

Translation: “None of your goddamned business.”

William Barr and John Bolton

I’ve tried to keep partisan Republicans out of this hall of shame, on the grounds that they never endorse Democrats. But these two guys have been so withering in their criticism of Trump that their refusal to endorse Harris is impossible to ignore.

William Barr, who was Trump’s attorney general, gets a Fraidy-Cat gold star because he publicly endorsed Trump. Barr’s initial reason was that “Biden is unfit for office,” but after that excuse expired Barr said Harris “doesn’t have the background.” So instead, Barr will support the man whose attempts to overturn the 2020 election Barr last year called “nauseating” and “despicable.” Barr also said that “someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system and to our self-government shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” Which may pose some practical difficulties should Barr’s new best friend win next week.

Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser, wrote in his book The Room Where It Happened that Trump is “unfit to be president” and that “if his first four years were bad, a second four would be worse.” Bolton also wrote that “Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term.” More recently, though, Bolton has leavened this criticism with contempt, arguing (in the apt summary of my colleague Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling) that Trump is too dumb to be a fascist. “To be a fascist,” Bolton explained,

you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that.… You know, Adolf Hitler wrote a profoundly troubling book called Mein Kampf, “My Struggle.” Donald Trump couldn’t even read his way all the way through that book, let alone write something like it.

Last spring, Bolton said that instead of voting for Trump he’d vote for his onetime boss Dick Cheney because Cheney’s a “principled Reaganite conservative.” That Cheney was not on the ballot, and that any vote withheld from Harris amounted to a vote for Trump, did not trouble Bolton. Then Cheney announced, in admirable solidarity with his daughter, that he’d support Harris. This, Bolton said, “caused me to reassess whether to vote for Dick.” Just to be clear, Bolton didn’t mean he might follow his mentor’s lead and vote for Harris. “I am not going to vote for either Harris or Trump,” Bolton said. “Neither one are qualified to be president.” Perhaps by Election Day this Fraidy-Cat will have figured out whose ass he wants to kiss, but it won’t be Harris’s.

Union leaders Edward Kelly, Harold Daggett, and Sean O’Brien

Unions don’t have the clout they once did, but being president of the International Association of Firefighters (Kelly), the International Longshoremen’s Association (Daggett), or the Teamsters (the permanently enraged O’Brien) still situates you inside America’s leadership class, particularly at election time. None of these three unions is endorsing any candidate this year. All three of these alleged tough guys are Fraidy-Cats.

• The Firefighters endorsed Biden in 2020 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but they didn’t endorse anyone in 2016, the year Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee, and they aren’t endorsing anyone this year, when Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee. Maybe firefighters don’t like girls?
  
• The International Longshoremen’s Association, last heard from when its members briefly went on strike before putting it off until January 15 (after some creative arm-twisting from the Biden administration), endorsed Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2023 Daggett reported having a “wonderful, productive 90-minute meeting” with Trump in which Trump “promised to support the ILA in its opposition to automated terminals in the U.S.” Daggett claims a “long relationship with Donald Trump going back decades in New York City” and noted that they both hailed from Queens, so perhaps this affinity is a factor in the union’s decision not to endorse any presidential candidate.
• The Teamsters endorsed Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. But O’Brien scored a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican convention, and subsequently the union decided not to endorse anybody. In an interview earlier this month, O’Brien said, “I’m a Democrat, but they have fucked us over for the last 40 years” and that “we’re standing up as a union … saying, ‘What the fuck have you done for us?’” O’Brien also called Chuck Schumer a “piece of shit” for not signing some letter during a standoff with UPS. Never mind that Schumer helped secure the Teamsters a $960 million pension bailout for the Teamsters and other unions with multiemployer plans.
  

There is no dividing line between Democrats and Republicans more stark than on support for unions. Democrats consistently work to increase labor rights and make it easier to join a union. Republicans just as monomaniacally work to reduce labor rights and make it harder to join a union. All three of these union leaders are well aware of this, so the only rational explanation for their behavior is fear—either of Trump or of rank-and-file members who support Trump.

Typically, one-third of all union members are Republican; for Teamsters it may be higher because Robert Kennedy’s relentless investigation of Jimmy Hoffa’s mob ties in the 1950s and 1960s caused the union to briefly embrace Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s. At any rate, this political dynamic is not new. In the past, union leaders took it upon themselves to educate members about why, even if they differed from Democrats on cultural issues, their economic interests required them to support Democratic candidates. Now, for whatever reason, these three aren’t doing that. Cowardice strikes me as a very likely explanation. Should Trump win, the organizations these men run will be hurt most of all.