Courage Can't Wait

The people who built Trump's movement are finally finding their nerve. Funny how it showed up right when it got cheap.

Peter Thiel, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and John Kennedy have been staunch Trump allies for most of his time in politics. They also share courage expressed too late.

Peter Thiel is known as a betting man.

In 2004, Thiel wrote a $500,000 check to a website for college kids. Plenty of serious investors thought it was a fad. That check became a stake in Facebook, and Facebook made Thiel a billionaire.

That’s Thiel’s reputation: see what’s coming before everyone else and invest first.

In 2016, he made another early bet. He spoke for Donald Trump at the Republican convention when most of Silicon Valley wouldn’t say the man’s name out loud. Later he bankrolled JD Vance’s run for the Senate.

And those bets paid off in a big way. Palantir, the data company he co-founded, has landed lucrative federal contracts under this administration, including work powering its deportation push.

This week, Peter Thiel saw the political market shift and started selling.

In an interview, Thiel said Trump’s second term has been “more dangerous than I thought.” And that this administration is “staffed by not very smart, but very loyal people.” And he warned that voters are tiring of Republicans the way they tired of them at the end of the Bush years.

So, what changed? Not Trump. He has been the same selfish, boorish man that came down the escalator in 2015.

The polls changed. Democrats are surging, Republicans are bracing for November, and Thiel can see that the upside of his support for Trump has been fully extracted.

That may be a smart investment strategy. But it isn’t courage.

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Courage, On Conditions

Thiel isn’t the only one suddenly finding his voice this month.

On Sunday, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, one of Trump’s most reliable defenders, told Margaret Brennan there “ought to be a rule” that no public official, “including President Trump,” spends taxpayer money on ads promoting himself.

The White House is running those ads nationally right now, blatantly flouting campaign finance laws in the process. Then Kennedy went further. No politician, he said, should have a building named after him while he’s still alive. Everyone watching knew whose name has been plastered on the Kennedy Center.

“I may end up with a sombrero on my head,” he said, bracing for Trump to mock him.

Kennedy deserves a small modicum of credit for speaking up at all in today’s GOP. But in the same interview he backed the president on Iran and on his budget cuts. Don’t expect much more from Kennedy.

Then there’s Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Last week in Austin, Greene called herself “politically homeless.” She said MAGA is dead. She called it a cult.

To be fair, she broke with Trump over the Epstein files while she was still in office, and she paid for it. But she spent the years before that defending him through January 6th and everything that came after.

What she’s saying now is true. That doesn’t make her an ally of the pro-democracy cause. This is simply another case of a public figure finding a dollop of courage once the cost of taking a stand goes away.

I know the difference from personal experience. I voted to impeach Trump a week after January 6th, with my career still in front of me and no way to know the full chaos to come. My own party censured me. Strangers threatened my family. I left Congress and lost friends I thought I would have forever.

I tell you all this because the words Greene and Kennedy are saying might be the same, but they mean something different when you know uttering them comes with a cost.

C.S. Lewis put it best. In The Screwtape Letters, he wrote that “courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Honesty that folds in the face of danger, he argued, is only honest on conditions.

That’s exactly what we’re watching with Thiel and Kennedy and Greene. Their criticisms of Trump aren’t wrong. They’re late.

That’s the story of most people in public life. By the time the honesty finally shows up, it’s too late to matter.

The Test Comes for Everyone

Most of us will never sit across from Margaret Brennan or have a fortune to protect. That doesn’t let us off the hook. The same test eventually finds us. It just shows up in ways that look like the rest of our lives.

It’s the friend getting insulted in the group chat while everybody else goes quiet. It’s the school board meeting where the loudest people in the room are pushing something cruel, and you’re deciding whether it’s worth giving up your Tuesday night to stand up and say no. It’s a coworker, a neighbor, a relative at Thanksgiving.

Speaking up in any of those moments costs you something. Maybe your comfort. Maybe a friendship. That cost is exactly what makes it count. If you wait until it’s safe, you’ve waited until it doesn’t matter.

This country has never been held together by the people who spoke up once the polls turned. It’s been held together by ordinary people who told the truth, the thing you know in your gut is right and you just can’t shake, while it could still cost them. Our country still depends on that. It depends on you.

Peter Thiel built a fortune on getting in early. On the one bet that mattered most, he got in late.

You don’t need a fortune to get in early on being courageous. You just have to go first.

— Adam