Capitulation to Trump Is the Real Risk

Knuckling under may seem like the safe option, but it isn't.

Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

Life under the rule of a truly despotic system can be fairly straightforward: Do what the despot instructs, don’t criticize the despot, don’t display loyalty to any person or value other than what the despot demands, and you’ll probably be okay.

Our current system, on the other hand, is more complicated. We have a would-be despot who is constantly trying to enhance his power, but our democratic institutions, though under siege, are still substantially intact. That can leave people within those institutions — particularly those at the higher levels — in a position of extreme uncertainty, especially when they come under direct attack.

You can have a bit of sympathy for a college president, media executive, or law firm CEO who finds themselves under the heat of Donald Trump’s malevolent gaze. Even when they make the wrong decision about how to react to Trump’s intimidation — and many certainly have — there’s at least a plausible case to be made for knuckling under. The choice, some believe, is between bending the knee and allowing their organization to be destroyed. Trump is adept at forcing those with less power than him to choose between terrible alternatives.

There are examples of individuals and institutions who have decided not to kneel when Trump demands that they do so, but also some that have prostrated themselves in the most humiliating ways. The simple way to think about this is a conflict between principle and practical risk: Stand up for free speech and democracy, or minimize the harm you endure (for now). But that may be the wrong way to think about it.

In fact, standing up for principle may sometimes be the best way to keep yourself and your organization safe.

Let’s look at some recent examples.

The CBS liedown

Trump has long wielded frivolous lawsuits as a weapon of unequal power. If he had a dispute with someone, he could sue them knowing that even if his claim was absurd and he was sure to lose in court, if he was more willing to absorb the expense and hassle of a lawsuit, the other person might just settle. News organizations were among the targets of these suits, though they sometimes called his bluff (that was what happened in my own experience being sued by Trump, which I discussed here).

In comparison to his first term, today Trump has both a more corrupt administration behind him and a greater eagerness to use the power of government to attack news organizations. Now when he files a lawsuit, it comes with a message so obvious it does not even need to be articulated: Put some money in my pocket, and maybe I won’t sic the Federal Communications Commission on you or use government’s power against you in some other way.

This is what a number of news organizations have already done; ABC News, for instance, paid him $15 million to settle one suit (technically the money will go to his presidential library, but if you think that entity will be anything other than a slush fund for Trump’s personal use I’ve got a condo in Trump Tower to sell you). His suit against CBS may be the dumbest of all: He alleges that when 60 Minutes did completely ordinary editing of an interview with Kamala Harris in 2024, the show was trying to make her look good and therefore harmed him. He has demanded $20 billion in compensation.

The critical bit of background is that CBS’s parent company Paramount is seeking federal government approval for a merger with Skydance. Paramount’s leadership, which evidently cares far more about completing this merger than about the journalistic integrity of CBS News, has entered into mediation with Trump over the lawsuit.

I have no trouble believing that the corporate leadership, particularly Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, are nothing but cowardly greedheads, and that’s why they’re happy to hand Trump some significant chunk of money to protect the merger. But if you asked them, they’d probably say that they have to account for the risks to the corporation and its future, including all the fine people who work there and the noble shareholders whose investments could be at risk.

It’s hard to know what would happen to those interests if the merger fell through. But it does seem that Paramount has failed to account for the risks they faced in buckling. There was something of a revolt at 60 Minutes, in which the executive producer resigned in protest, the show attacked its own corporate bosses on air, and now the head of CBS News has been sacked (“it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward,” she said), apparently in part because she rebelled at the idea that the network would actually apologize to Trump.

There’s also reason to believe the suits are telling the news division not to be too hard on Trump; 60 Minutes has spiked a report on the effect DOGE’s mass firings have had at the IRS, on the rather implausible grounds that some of the fired employees are supposed to be hired back.

So how is CBS going to emerge from this period? Now that the corporate leaders have shown themselves to possess gossamer spines, the damage to CBS News as an authoritative source of news could be profound. It may lose audience (just as the Washington Post did after its own Trump capitulation), the best journalists are not going to want to work there, and it could gain a reputation as a less than trustworthy news source. Conservatives aren’t going to start watching it, and liberals will see it as an organization that doesn’t have the guts to tell the truth.

All of which is just fine with Donald Trump, by the way. He wants everyone to bend to his will, but if you destroy yourself in the process, he’ll be only too happy.

That applies to another area where Trump is looking for supposed enemies he can crush under his boot: academia

The Columbia conundrum

Columbia University faced a similar dilemma: The target of direct attacks from congressional Republicans and Trump, they had to decide how to respond. When Harvard was faced with a similar assault — federal grants cancelled, obviously bad-faith accusations of rampant antisemitism, threats to endowments and tax-exempt status — its administration stood firm and was hailed around academia as a hero. However this conflict turns out, Harvard has not damaged its reputation, which is essential to the long-term health of an institution of higher learning.

Columbia, on the other hand, responded to an extortionate demand by giving the Trump administration what it wanted and more. Nick Summers has a long piece at New York about the university’s disastrous response to the crisis that began on October 7, and the story is a complex one, full of competing interests, a board that is quite sympathetic to the attacks on the university, and a couple of presidents who faced crises they didn’t know how to handle. But in the end, Columbia achieved the worst of all possible worlds.

It hasn’t gotten its federal funding restored, and the university’s reputation has been terribly damaged. It will have trouble recruiting the kind of talented scholars who a few years ago would have been overjoyed to come work there, and its ability to attract top students will probably also be affected.

Something similar happened with the law firms that groveled before Trump when he threatened them agreeing to spend huge sums on pro bono work for causes he approves. They destroyed their reputations — likely losing top law school recruits and potential clients — and in return got nothing more than a temporary reprieve. He will probably keep coming back to them and demanding more tribute.

This is a complex problem; by amping up his willingness to strike at a wide variety of targets with the power of government, Trump has successfully produced anticipatory compliance from a wide variety of actors. For instance, the New York Times reports that “Roughly one quarter of the corporate donors to New York City’s annual Pride festivities have either canceled or scaled back their support this year, citing economic uncertainty and fear that the Trump administration could punish corporations it viewed as supporting a celebration of gay and transgender rights.” Corporations are also rapidly dismantling their DEI programs (which, let’s be honest, most of them instituted just for PR purposes in the first place) not because they have to but because they don’t want to incur Trump’s anger. For many, that could be the end of the story; if they keep their heads down for four years, they might be okay.

But once Trump decides he wants to start a real fight with you, the dynamic shifts. The lesson of these stories is that when Trump comes after you, what looks like the safe route may not be. Standing up to Trump has risks, but so does giving in. And if Trump’s term turns out to be the disaster it looks like it’s headed for, universities like Columbia and news organizations like CBS will be long remembered as cautionary tales of the cost of cowardice.

Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.