The Juicy Subtext of the Paul, Weiss Debacle
I can’t wait to see a movie about the Brad Karp saga. Everyone is talking about last weekend’s riveting NYT narrative about the esteemed chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the titanic white-shoe law firm celebrated for its nine-decade championship of such iconic liberal causes as the wrongly convicted “Scottsboro Boys” and Brown v. Board of Education, who was the first to sell out to Trump’s second-term tsunami of blackmail. It is a classic study in the corrosion of character by money, the surrender of first principles to elective expedience. The trouble is, in today’s entertainment world, I can’t see David Ellison greenlighting it.
Karp soared to the top of Paul, Weiss with a combination of litigation smarts and sinuous networking skills. He brilliantly straddled running a firm that managed to be both a behemoth money machine and ethical powerhouse. In Trump’s first term, Karp was a leader of meaningful resistance, standing up to the then-all-powerful NRA in 2018 by calling for the repeal of a law shielding gun makers and sellers from lawsuits. He was the face of the firm’s decision that same year to flood Texas border detention centers with pro-bono lawyers, helping reunite more than 250 immigrant children with their families. “The world is watching,” he sermonized in a 2018 NYT op-ed, “and the private bar is mobilizing to serve the thousands who have been imperiled by the Trump administration — and to ensure that the rule of law is protected as well.”
The world wasn’t just watching, it was gobsmacked when Karp seemed to have a head transplant in Trump’s second term. The NYT piece reveals why: between Trump 1 and Trump 2, the culture at Paul, Weiss had been subterraneously transformed by the arrival of a hard-ass corporate attorney Scott Barshay (casting note: Christian Bale or Jeremy Strong), who generated an exploding new revenue stream from private equity clients. Karp had, unwittingly, brought in the Trojan horse who would blow up his delicate dance between spigot-busting profit and a make-your-grandchildren-proud halo. He deluded himself he could have both.
When Trump rode his vengeance train back into the Oval Office in 2024, one of his first acts was to kill all the lawyers. At the suggestion of his personal legal Iago Boris Epshteyn, a man who validates the old expression that, after the age of 40, you get the face you deserve, Trump went after Paul, Weiss with Executive Order 14237, which, by depriving the firm of federal contracts, would have effectively put it out of business. The Karp cave was instantaneous. His solipsistic rationale to himself and his critics was that the firm would have suffered an immediate brain drain had he resisted Trump. According to someone who was at a Yale management seminar hosted by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld a few days after the Paul, Weiss deal, Karp was questioned on this logic.
Q: “Brad, didn’t your partners average $7 million last year?”
Karp: “Actually, it was $7.5 million.”
Q: “So what if they had to take a haircut of a million or two for a year or two?”
Karp: “Half or more of them would have quit.”
Q: “And you call those partners?”
No answer.
It turns out that the only reason Karp et al. stood up to Trump in the first term was because there were no consequences for defiance. Moral courage was really moral vanity. The Trump reckoning moment exposed how costly the real work of morality can be. As one Karp friend put it, “It’s hard to call anyone making $20 million a year a tragic figure, but he is.” Karp must know that his prostration to Trump will be the first line of his obituary.
Silence of the Lambs
The real story here is the abdication of the liberal elite. All that gavel-pounding in congressional outrage hearings. All that resistance posturing in the first term now lapsing into establishment silence or evasion. A new word has crept into the lexicon of entertainment decision-makers when pitched a project that has any whiff of critique of America’s authoritarian heavy breathing: appetite as in “we don’t have the appetite (aka balls) to do that right now.” A recent NYT exposé about the speed with which major corporations from Microsoft to Google to Pepsi have scaled back their green policies since Trump’s demonization of clean energy, is another index of quietly crumbling backbone in the corridors of leadership.
Should we be surprised that a young generation of Democratic socialists abhor the stale facades of their party leaders? Or rooted for a rampant douchebag like the now-booted Senate contender Graham Platner from Maine, rather than suffer a sixth term of Susan Collins’ pasty-faced promises? Watching Donie O’Sullivan’s gripping CNN doc on Sunday about the rise of the far left, I felt distinctly unsettled by the sneering, shifty affect leaking out of social media antisemite Hasan Piker – 3.1 million followers on the streaming platform Twitch. (Piker got his start playing video games online and effectively still does). It’s easy to see why the insurgent left has concluded that it makes no sense to be sane when crazy so clearly pays. They don’t want no Trump. They want their own Trump.
Excellent essay yet again! I wish I were surprised about Karp's flip. What shame he brings on himself and his family. On a different topic: Tina, would you please go on Bill Maher's CNN show and unclutter his mind? He's such an arrogant shit. He routinely features the worst Democrat candidates, suggesting all liberals are fools and/or far-left Commies who want to defund the police and eradicate all borders. I'd like to slap him. If you should encounter the man, maybe you could do that for me.
I remember those heady days in the late 60s, gathered in lounges of universities, discussing how "we", the Boomers born in the early 1950s, were going to make a difference. No more war. No more racism. Women liberated in every possible way. And now here we are. Not even pretending anymore. What happened between now and then? How was it that we lost our way so badly.
The easy answer is everyone decided they had to make a living, principles were all well and good but they weren't going to buy that house, that lifestyle that we saw on billboards and TV commercials. And we decided if we were going to live, it had to be living large. No matter who it cost. It cost us the most because we lost ourselves.