As the bottom falls out of Donald Trump’s second term, I find myself trying to imagine what’s going through the minds of his collaborators during the endgame. Not so much the thugs, mad dogs, buffoons, and rabid ideologues like Hegseth, Miller, Patel, and RFK Jr. — their conscience-free inner swamps leave nothing to the imagination. What’s more intriguing are the elites among this gang who did have some reputation for probity, independence, or at least sanity before enlisting in MAGA Republicanism: Cabinet members like Todd Blanche, Scott Bessent, Doug Burgum, and Jay Clayton and Trump’s billionaire cheerleaders on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. These guys — they are mainly guys — used to be thought of as the adults in whatever room they occupied (with the exception of Elon Musk, that is). You’d think they would have wanted to protect the good names they had once worked hard to build.

The room these collaborators find themselves in now is a bunker retrofitted to serve as a toddler’s gilded playpen. The lame-duck president they cater to is running amok in a second childhood of ceaseless tantrums and slobbering irrationality. He is most often found playing with his treasure chest of toys: the ballroom, the supersize Barbie dollhouse he calls the “National Garden of American Heroes,” the South Lawn helipad, the Kennedy Center, the Reflecting Pool, the Qatari Air Force One, the “championship level” golf course in East Potomac Park, the expanding Trump product line of government currency, cryptocurrency, and passports. Do his supplicants recognize this reality? Do they care? If they did, they might speak out about the destruction his presidency inflicts daily on his own country and its allies. If they don’t have the guts or principles to rise to that patriotic occasion, they at least might make a dash for the exits to avoid self-incrimination. But loyal they remain.

They stay despite knowing that if either or both houses of Congress change hands in the midterms, they will be ensnared in nonstop investigations in the New Year. They are operating as if that tomorrow will never come or, if it does, they will escape any consequences for their allegiance to a gangster president. Perhaps they assume preemptive pardons or their money and the legal firepower they can buy with it will insulate them from serious jeopardy. After all, it took just a $5 million donation to the Republican 2026 electoral effort from Howard Lutnick, timed to his appearance before the House Oversight Committee, to shut down any investigation into why he lied about his visit to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island or what he did there. It may cost Lutnick a lot more to deflect forensic probing into any correlation between his Commerce Department dealings and the swelling coffers of his former firm Cantor Fitzgerald (now controlled by his sons) and the 40-some other companies he has. But maybe he’s just too rich to care. His $5 million donation was a mere bagatelle for a guy worth $7.2 billion per Forbes (up from $3.2 billion in 2025).

Or maybe he and his peers are counting on another potential escape hatch — Democratic political malpractice. A third Trump-impeachment show could drown out any targeted reckoning for the president’s top tiers of enablers and accomplices.

Most of all, I suspect these elites are telling themselves that they’ve done nothing wrong and that Trump’s presidency is controversial but not a dumpster fire for the ages. As they rationalize it, any sins have been inflated by the opposition’s Trump Derangement Syndrome, by a woke Establishment press, and by the president’s own stubborn (but in their view harmlessly performative) refusal to control his shit fits on-camera and online. “Trump is just being Trump,” this apologia remains, and it’s your fault if you are still hyperventilating every time he (or Natalie Harp) tosses a hand grenade on Truth Social. It’s not as if Trump were Hitler, his allies can reassure themselves. And so they see little risk of punitive blowback, legal, financial, or reputational, once their autocrat-in-chief passes from the scene.

They are correct in this at least: Trump is not Hitler, no matter how insistently the comparison has been made over the past decade. It’s not for want of trying on Trump’s part. In Hitler’s People, the 2024 addition to his long-running chronicle of Nazi Germany, the British historian Richard J. Evans pointedly steers clear of making any direct analogies between the two leaders even as he unfurls a long list of similarities, from Hitler’s botched military and economic leadership down to his dream to build a new city called Germania that would have included, among other “overblown constructions,” a “triumphal arch larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.” (Evans presciently completed this book more than a year before Trump proposed his own arch.)

For all those parallels, though, Trump is a bus-and-truck stand-in for the real thing. He cuts a buffoonish figure that more resembles the singing-and-dancing Führer in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. The kitsch décor of Mar-a-Lago makes Berchtesgaden look as austere as Camp David. And Trump does not match his predecessor in heinous deeds. The now-defunct Alligator Alcatraz was not Auschwitz. The more than 200 detention centers where ICE has inhumanely stashed immigrants are not executing a genocide. Despite his efforts, Trump has not yet shut down the courts or the press or ignited a new world war.

This exercise in moral relativism, nevertheless, cannot stand. That Trump falls short of Hitler does not let his collaborators and enablers off the hook. To use the Third Reich as a yardstick to measure a government’s criminality is to define deviancy down. Trump’s White House is a crime scene even if the likely sum of its felonies hasn’t approached the high bar set by the Nazis.

By most non-Nazi measures, the Trump administration is off the charts. Its Department of Justice, which pursues the president’s personal vendettas in lieu of protecting anyone’s human, civil, and voting rights, has enabled a kleptocracy that might make Suharto and Marcos look like shoplifters. The wholesale corruption and theft have exponentially increased not only the net worth of the president and his family but that of the large cast of cronies and grifters who have been cut in on the rackets rife in every corner of our government. Just a shortlist of the likely roster of criminal operations would include 24/7 insider stock trading; quid pro quo–driven real-estate deals in the Middle East, Europe, and even Yosemite National Park; no-bid government contracts handed out to favored vendors for federal boondoggles; crypto grabs engineered by Trump’s sons with the sons of his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff; prediction-market investments benefiting Donald Trump Jr.; the direct and indirect purchase of presidential pardons; and the curbing of antitrust and IRS enforcement for well-connected fat cats. It will take an army of sleuths just to track down the untold taxpayer dollars expended during the extravagant joyride of the ousted Bonnie and Clyde of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski.

That 6 million detainees have not been exterminated in the ICE incarceration network doesn’t neutralize the reality that in Trump’s second term, an estimated 57 have died in government custody under circumstances shrouded in secrecy. Every one of those lives counts, too. So do the lives of the uncounted scores of ICE deportees being treated like animals — shackled, abused, and beaten — on government flights speeding them to often unspecified international hellholes where they face torture by authoritarian regimes. Many of ICE’s domestic dungeons for immigrants are run by private contractors such as the Geo Group, which in July handed over $1.4 million to a Trump PAC after securing $165 million in government work. (The Geo Group’s holdings include the notorious Delaney Hall in Newark, the site of three known deaths.) It just goes to show that if you crack open any Trump scandal, you’ll find another nesting inside — a bottomless procession of Russian dolls reeking of dirty and sometimes blood-soaked money that might impress even Vladimir Putin. In this White House, it’s a shock when any transaction is not a pay-for-play conflict of interest.

What drives a member of America’s elite to aid and abet a regime like this? Sheer greed can never be underestimated — whether the profits are personal or corporate. The historical record of business collaborators during the Nazi era is instructive; German industrial tycoons raced to sign on in Germany in 1933, just three weeks after Hitler became chancellor. Here’s how the French writer Éric Vuillard describes their first meeting with the new leader in his 2017 book, The Order of the Day: “There they stand, affectless, like twenty-four calculating machines at the gates of Hell … It seems like any meeting of business leaders. They’re wearing the same suits, the same dark or striped ties, the same silk pocket squares, the same gold-rimmed spectacles, the same bald heads, the same reasonable faces as we might see today.” For sure. We saw such reasonable faces lined up like calculating machines at Trump’s second swearing-in: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook.

Though some of those German industrialists who acquiesced to Hitler in 1933 were “ardent Nazis,” wrote the former Bloomberg News reporter David de Jong in his revelatory 2022 investigation, Nazi Billionaires, most “were simply calculating, unscrupulous opportunists looking to expand their business empires at any cost.” Such opportunists were not confined to Germany. As the young British historian Tim Bouverie wrote in his acclaimed 2019 reexamination of prewar England, Appeasement, corporate subscribers to the Anglo-German Fellowship, an elite vehicle for German propaganda created in 1935, included Lazard Brothers, Price Waterhouse, Thomas Cook, and Unilever. They were not Nazi sympathizers, but they didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity “to further their business interests.” In Trading With the Enemy, Charles Higham’s crusading 1983 pursuit of buried evidence of American corporate entanglements with the Nazi war machine, he concluded the same. The complicit leaders at Ford Motor Company, Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Chase bank in Nazi-occupied Paris, and the telephone conglomerate ITT were linked by a single ideology, “the ideology of Business as Usual.”

Trump’s billionaires have held to the same credo: They joined his cause for tax breaks and deregulation, for federal contracts, for lax antitrust enforcement, and for any other goodies they could grab — not for the gutting of the Constitution. Busy fattening their bottom lines, they remained onboard for the rest: the bigotry, the ICE shootings of American citizens and innocent “aliens,” the assault on public health, the betrayal of America’s friends, and the cozying up to the American adversaries China, Russia, and North Korea. The problem for these tycoons is that you can’t pig out on column A and then pretend column B wasn’t included in the menu.

Some of them made a pretense of moral rectitude in Trump’s first term by criticizing his more outrageous early moves and his later unleashing of a mob to sack the Capitol on January 6. Yet that was then. Once Trump got in a second time with a narrow plurality in the popular vote, they grabbed at it as a sign that the coast was clear to get richer quick. And so all of them turned on a dime — in this case a dime worth the multibillions that collaboration with a corrupt government could yield. Early in Trump’s first term, Bezos had endorsed the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” for the Washington Post in his professed mission to strengthen the paper. In term two, Bezos decided darkness was a profit center — specifically the darkness of outer space, which he could colonize at a faster pace if Trump favored Blue Origin, his private aerospace company. So he wrecked the Post and cozied up to POTUS.

There are other motives besides financial self-interest for collaborating with autocrats, of course. In Profiles in Cowardice, his book conceived as a chastening bookend to John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage of 70 years ago, Jacob Weisberg offers a rogues’ gallery of eight portraits that includes not just some of Trump’s billionaire toadies but the ancien régime Republicans Mitch McConnell, John Roberts, and George W. Bush — our iterations of the Pétainists of Vichy France. They stand in devastating contrast to Kennedy’s eight subjects — U.S. senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, who risked and sometimes sacrificed their careers to put principle over party. Weisberg’s feckless political animals sacrificed any “flickers of integrity” to prioritize partisanship and self-preservation. Their collective cowardice enabled Trump’s annexation of all three of America’s branches of government as well as one of its two major political parties.

Men like Bessent, Blanche, Burgum, and Clayton are in another category. Unlike Weisberg’s cowards, they didn’t have the power to impede the MAGA juggernaut, but they at least might have resisted implementing its poisonous agenda. They are in the timeless tradition of small men with disproportionately large ambitions and little sense of decency who end up as cogs facilitating authoritarian regimes. A novel by the brilliant German writer Daniel Kehlmann, The Director, has gained a large international following since it was first published in 2023 in part because it nails the soullessness of such second-tier collaborators. Its raw material is the true story of G. W. Pabst, the Austrian film director who discovered Greta Garbo and is best known today for the silent classic Pandora’s Box. After an unsuccessful stint in Hollywood, he returned home to care for his ill mother just as World War II began and was trapped there when the borders closed. Before long, Pabst succumbed incrementally to the Faustian blandishments of the Nazi film industry that Joseph Goebbels created to try to replicate Hollywood’s escapist blockbuster entertainments. Among the studio’s assets was access to slave labor in the form of emaciated concentration-camp inmates who were shipped in to serve as involuntary extras in costume dramas.

Pabst was neither a Nazi nor an antisemite — he was a gifted artist who leaned left to the extent he had any politics. But his heretofore pristine résumé no more inhibited his surrender to a toxic career opportunity than Bessent’s successful tenure as George Soros’s chief investment officer prevented him from seizing his moment with Trump. When Bessent was profiled upon being nominated as Treasury secretary, the New York Times cited a source who described him as “apolitical in the workplace” and The Wall Street Journal found another who called him “reserved and professorial.” Before you knew it, Bessent was ringside for a UFC celebration of Trump’s 80th birthday featuring human cockfights in an outsize cage erected on the White House South Lawn. Also in attendance at that wet dream of manosphere violence was Blanche. He had been a registered Democrat and well-regarded criminal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York before his 2023 recruitment as Trump’s defense lawyer in the Stormy Daniels hush-money prosecution led to a new career as the White House crime family’s answer to The Godfather’s Tom Hagen.

Men like this are incapable of shame. Blanche paraded his daughter and granddaughter as props during his Senate confirmation hearing even though it was a certainty that he would be grilled about his subterfuge with the Epstein files, his refusal to meet with Epstein’s victims, and his role in transferring Epstein’s pimp and accomplice in pedophilic human trafficking and rape, Ghislaine Maxwell, to a country-club prison. That Jay Clayton was an esteemed corporate lawyer for two decades at Sullivan … Cromwell didn’t prevent him from incinerating his reputation in his own confirmation hearing as director of national intelligence. His legacy — assuming no shady behavior in office — is likely to be the mortifying video replay of his repeated refusal under oath to give a simple answer to the question “Who won the 2020 election?” Burgum, who entered the Trump administration as a popular former governor, instantly betrayed his one achievement in public life, his championing of wind energy back home in North Dakota, by shutting down clean-energy initiatives at the Department of the Interior. Now he is most likely to be remembered as the putz who presided over the Reflecting Pool fiasco and continued to push the cock-and-bull “vandalism” cover-up after even the most craven of MAGA hacks, Jeanine Pirro, decided to preserve a shred of dignity by disavowing it.

Private-sector Trump sycophants have left their own parallel trail of public disgrace for future historical exhibition. Nearing his retirement as Apple CEO, Tim Cook turned up at the black-tie White House screening of the Amazon documentary Melania, a Bezos-gifted package of MAGA propaganda. What was Cook thinking when he chose to party on at the Trump White House just hours after ICE murdered Alex Pretti? The photo of him preening in formalwear next to the Melania director, Brett Ratner, became an Instagram keeper thanks to the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault that had made Ratner persona non grata in Hollywood, if not MAGA-wood. It won’t be easy for Cook to launder that self-inflicted stain from his once-vanilla image as a competent corporate manager.

In a class of his own is the financier Stephen Schwarzman, who in 2024 presented his blanket support of Trump and all Republicans “up and down the ticket” as a means to counter “the dramatic rise of antisemitism.” This takes a level of gall and disingenuousness that is too gross to label as chutzpah or even a shande. It is ingeniously contrived to let Schwarzman wrap himself in a cloak of bogus self-righteousness even as he reaps the big beautiful rewards of Trump tax and regulatory breaks.

To claim Trump as a dedicated foe of antisemitism doesn’t pass the laugh test no matter how many Ivy League universities his administration sues in that ostensible cause. The most powerful antisemitic voices in America by far are on the right — the media stars Tucker Carlson (the J. D. Vance bro who has the second-largest audience among Spotify news podcasts, just behind The Daily) and Candace Owens (No. 4). When Carlson hosted the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his podcast in November, he was defended by Trump and Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 supplied both the White House’s policy agenda and a lion’s share of its second-term personnel. Trump had previously claimed to have no idea who Fuentes was when he had dinner with him and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago just after he announced his 2024 presidential campaign. Maybe he’s heard since then that Fuentes has reiterated his call for Jews — Schwarzman presumably included — to “get the fuck out of America.” For her part, Owens’s contributions to the antisemitic cause have included trying to whitewash Josef Mengele’s “medical” experiments and embracing the ancient blood libel that Jews kill Christian children in religious rituals.

Trump paid a first installment on his political debt to antisemites in his first term by extolling the “very fine people on both sides” after the Charlottesville Unite the Right march, in which white nationalists shouted “Blood and Soil,” an old Nazi catchphrase (Blut und Boden) in translation. In his second term, Trump has stepped it up by pardoning members of Fuentes’s growing Bund of young neo-Nazi foot soldiers, the Groypers, along with other January 6 Nazi admirers, one of whom was photographed inside the Capitol in a CAMP AUSCHWITZ T-shirt. Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a Nazi fanboy known for statements like “Hitler should have finished the job,” had been sentenced to four years in prison by a Trump-appointed judge for his role in January 6 before the president pardoned him. Hale-Cusanelli spoke twice at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club in 2024, including at a gala for fellow January 6 defendants to which Trump contributed a video saluting them as “amazing patriots.”

There are antisemites on the left and in the Democratic Party, too. However, you are either against all antisemitism or not. Schwarzman has given $30.4 million this cycle to a GOP whose midterm candidates up and down the ticket include the Ohio senator Jon Husted, the Texas representative Brandon Herrera, and the Georgia Senate hopeful Mike Collins, all of whom are now trying to explain away their Nazi ties or associates or relatives (or combination thereof). The party’s presumptive post-Trump leader is Vance, a cheerleader for AfD, the rising German political party that harbors neo-Nazis and pushes for the downsizing of the Holocaust in German history.

Schwarzman revealed his actual, less noble reason for throwing Trump his support in a public 2010 outburst after the Obama administration proposed raising taxes on private-equity income. “It’s a war,” Schwarzman said at the time. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland.” He later apologized for his analogy, but the truth was out. A tycoon whose go-to definition of Nazism is a tax hike is bound to support a virulently anti-tax president no matter how many Jew-haters he welcomes into Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster.

Schwarzman can shed crocodile tears about antisemitism all the way to the bank. He is rich enough, and perhaps canny enough, to stay clear of Trump’s brand of blatant corruption and sidestep any legal potholes. In some precincts of the Trump-collaborators camp, there’s a dawning awareness of dangers looming ahead. The Wall Street Journal reported in August that Democratic investigators preparing for a House majority, starting from the unassailable assumption that they’ll be stonewalled and lied to by Trump officials, are contemplating subpoenas for “the president’s outside political allies or companies that have donated to Trump and his favored causes.” In fear, some potential inquisitional targets, such as Meta, are already writing checks to Democratic political committees, while Paramount Skydance is hiring former Obama and Biden aides and lining up Democratic lobbyists.

An alarm warning of the scrutiny lying in wait for individuals, private companies, and nonprofits alike in MAGA-land was sounded loudly by Michael Zona, a former communications director for the Iowa senator (and Trump lapdog) Charles Grassley in a Journal op-ed cri de coeur with the headline “CEOs, Get Ready to Be Subpoenaed”: “Every internal email, text message or Slack exchange discussing political strategy, government contracts, DEI policies, tariffs, antitrust, AI moderation, donor relationships or regulatory negotiations could someday appear on a hearing-room screen.” Surely it will be must-see TV when investigators unveil an Imax-size Venn diagram charting the overlaps among Don Jr.’s multiple business interests, the Russian oligarch who bankrolled his wedding after-party, each and every one of his wedding guests, and Putin.

Let’s assume, as many of those in the crosshairs seem to, that most everyone can escape a Democratic Congress’s scrutiny scot-free however excruciating the hearings. That is hardly the end of the saga. The unprecedented scale and variety of misdeeds in the Trump presidency are bound to usher in an avalanche of civil litigation, post-Bondi-Patel-Blanche federal investigations, tell-all memoirs, tranches of unsealed and leaked documents, heretofore hidden archives, and more investigative journalism of the high quality that has been surging nearly everywhere except CBS News in Trump’s second term. The revelations will play out for years in the courts. The costs in legal fees, humiliation, and time for those swept up in the ensuing dragnet will be astronomical.

Those who can’t afford these costs — especially those in the federal bureaucracy who were eyewitnesses or potential accessories to crimes committed in the vast executive branch — will have many stories to tell. Some will be motivated by the patriotic principles dishonored by their bosses; others will just be hoping to save their own asses. The Washington Sun reported in August that at least four of the top seven officials in Bessent’s Treasury Department — all Senate-confirmed Trump appointees — have quit “after disagreements with the White House over demands to stretch, if not violate, tax law.” Mark Mazur, a former IRS official in both Republican and Democratic administrations, said the departed had been tasked “to do stuff that is well beyond the norm, and for some things that may or may not be legal … A lot of these people expect to have careers after this administration, and being disbarred would be a bad thing for them.” Their exodus will be joined by countless others’. Politico reported that Burgum is so spooked about potential snitches at his Interior Department that, in violation of the Federal Records Act, his minions are routinely shredding paper documents and using Hegseth’s favorite mode of clandestine communication of classified information, Signal, for text messages.

While there’s a statute of limitations to the legal fallout, there is none to reputational damage for the big fish in the Trump regime. Todd Blanche’s daughter and granddaughter should live long enough to judge for themselves if he came clean in his sworn testimony about his Epstein and Maxwell dealings, whether the full story emerges within his lifetime or not. The same goes for his sketchy account of what he knew about the $1.8 billion White House slush fund and when he knew it. As it gradually unfolds, the densely packed narrative of Trump scandals will have a long tail and a wide audience for every last sleazy morsel.

The postwar fate of the elite American and English Nazi appeasers and collaborators offers a glimpse of what may come. None of them were implicated in the Third Reich’s crimes against humanity. But that didn’t free them from taint and guilt. In Marcel Ophuls’s 1976 documentary about the Nuremberg trials, The Memory of Justice, a high-powered German defense lawyer whose clients included the Nazi admiral Karl Dönitz and the industrialist Alfried Krupp codified a trio of distinctions: If you were ignorant of what went on, you were a fool; if you knew but looked the other way, you were a coward; if you knew and took part, you were a criminal. Those Americans and Brits who fell into the first two categories sometimes experienced their own form of comeuppance.

The classic example, of course, is Charles Lindbergh, who was at best a fool and at worst a coward. His role in the original “America First,” an arguably well-meaning isolationist crusade that ended up harboring brownshirts and antisemites (some of whose bigotry Lindbergh echoed in a speech three months before Pearl Harbor), has darkened his profile ever since. Today, it’s a close call whether more Americans know of him, if they know of him at all, from his epochal transatlantic flight on the Spirit of St. Louis or from Philip Roth’s counterhistorical novel The Plot Against America (and the subsequent television adaptation), which imagines the Jew-scapegoating fascist America that Lindbergh was on a path to lead if he had gone unchecked.

Lindbergh received a medal from Hitler. So did the unrepentant antisemite Henry Ford and the General Motors executive in charge of European operations, James Mooney. (GM’s wholly owned German subsidiary, Opel, built engine components for Nazi bombers in the run-up to the war.) With time, more evidence has claimed more reputations. The prewar appeasement machinations of Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador to England, have been stripped to their naked core by the historians David Nasaw, Susan Dunn, and Lynne Olson over the past 15 or so years. In 2001, Edwin Black published IBM and the Holocaust, the product of an exhaustive international archival search that detailed how IBM punch-card technology under Thomas J. Watson facilitated the efficient culling and transporting of Jews sent to concentration camps in Nazi Germany and Vichy France. The British media barons who appeased and sanitized Hitler, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, remain lasting case studies in catastrophic failures of judgment. As their fawning attendance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics survives as a sordid historical footnote, so may the assemblage of elite gawkers taking in the exceptionally bloody seven-bout UFC jamboree at Trump’s White House. None of those Hitler enablers were criminals, but to be posthumously deemed (at best) cowards and fools hardly constitutes vindication.

Among the reasons it was often slow going to get to the bottom of these powerful men’s malignant wartime behavior was their herculean efforts to cover their tracks. In his years spent investigating the American businessmen implicated in what he calls “the Nazi-American money plot” for Trading With the Enemy, Charles Higham discovered that he had “to carve through an ice cream mountain of public relations.”

But it may not take as long to uncover the malfeasance of those ensnared in the tawdry schemes of the Trump White House. We are not only far removed from the postwar era, when powerful wrongdoers could easily bury their paper trails, but from the Watergate era, when the world had to wait for the exposure of Nixon’s damning but analog White House tapes. We are now even well past the WikiLeaks era. By convening the AI titans at the White House in late September and giving them carte blanche, Trump has increased the likelihood someone will deploy AI to hack the digital trail of his government, its cronies, and opaque private cash machines like the crypto piggy bank World Liberty Financial. Trump will further help grease the skids thanks to his habit of carelessly spilling secrets in every medium, including the classified paper documents he has carted between Washington and Palm Beach.

One thing we have learned from the Purdue Pharma crimes that impaled the Sackler family is that power and money can still — sometimes — fail to shield supposedly unimpeachable Americans at the top of our economic, cultural, and political order if their behavior is ugly enough. The Sacklers were not only punished by the law but saw most of the many monuments to their philanthropy, from the Metropolitan Museum to NYU Langone Health, scrub their names. So strong was the stench that even the demonstrably innocent Arthur Sackler, who died nearly a decade before his brothers marketed OxyContin, had his name stripped from a medical facility at Tufts. The YouTube video capturing the letter-by-letter removal of that signage is a visual antecedent to the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center — and perhaps, eventually, from other buildings, public and private, that will shed his brand once the coast is clear.

In his scathing portrait of Schwarzman in Profiles in Cowardice, Jacob Weisberg points out that he is a particularly chintzy billionaire philanthropist: When he was chairman of the Kennedy Center for a single six-year term that began in 2004, he gave less than a tenth as much to the institution as his successor, David Rubenstein (who was ousted last year when Trump seized the chairmanship for himself). In exchange for his largesse to the New York Public Library — a rounding error compared to his fortune — Schwarzman had his name emblazoned five times in “specified fonts and sizes” on its 42nd Street palace in a desperate attempt to convince the world — and perhaps himself — that, as Weisberg puts it, he was a “somebody.” (He later brokered a sixth engraved recognition at the entrance for people with disabilities. Classy.)

It’s small compensation for the damage Trump has inflicted on America, but as the full record of his reign is uncovered, there may be a public reckoning not just for the legally guilty. Consequences may arrive for somebodies like Schwarzman who didn’t break the law but supported Trump’s plundering of democracy and nonstop cruelty with dollars and silence. Hard as it is to summon any optimism at this awful moment, it’s not entirely fanciful to imagine a tomorrow when every last vanity font on the white marble façade of the 42nd Street library is erased even as the dark epic history of the Trump presidency remains enshrined in perpetuity within.