How Niall Ferguson Learned to Love Trump
… and snagged a pundit slot at CBS News in the Bari Weiss makeover.
EMBATTLED CBS NEWS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss held an all-staff meeting on Tuesday to talk about her vision for the network news division—mostly boilerplate talk about “seeking the truth, serving the public, and ferociously guarding our independence,” as well as regaining the trust of mainstream, politically independent audiences. (One could ask how well those ostensibly admirable goals were promoted by Weiss’s handling of the 60 Minutes segment on the deportations of Venezuelan migrants to a gulag-like prison in El Salvador, yanked from its slot at the last minute in December and delayed by nearly a month in the futile chase for an interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan for “balance.”) Weiss’s only specific announcement on Tuesday, however, was the hiring of nineteen CBS News contributors—including several people affiliated with her right-of-center and arguably MAGA-friendly web publication, the Free Press. A CBS News post on X hails these pundits as “the sharpest minds on the topics that matter most.”
This lineup has some fine voices: Iranian dissident and feminist Masih Alinejad, Harvard economist Roland Fryer, the Atlantic’s Elliot Ackerman, and “abundance” journalist Derek Thompson. (Amusingly, Thompson pointed out that Weiss hadn’t hired him: The old regime at CBS put him on contract seven years ago.) There’s also former Trump national security advisor turned ferocious Trump critic Lt. Gen. (ret.) H.R. McMaster, whose presence should at least partly defuse the charge of a Trump-pleasing agenda at Weiss’s CBS News. But there are also the red flags, most notably two names strongly associated with the administration’s junk-scientist-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: wellness entrepreneur and Trump surgeon general nominee Casey Means, and physician/educator Mark Hyman, an RFK Jr. coauthor and occasional peddler of the debunked vaccine/autism link.
Another name that leaps out is historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, whose move from England to the United States—he became a naturalized citizen in 2018—has gone hand in hand with a devolution from respected if controversial academic and author to Trump hagiographer. (Notably, Ferguson is also a key figure in another Weiss venture: the “heterodox” University of Austin, UATX, which even some of its erstwhile supporters are now criticizing for its embrace of right-wing orthodoxy rather than intellectual pluralism.)
A former adviser to Trump’s GOP archenemy John McCain, Ferguson was once a harsh Trump critic. After January 6th, he not only blasted Trump as a “would-be tyrant” but cheered “the long-overdue end of the Republican establishment’s sordid affair” with him and expressed optimism that “we can achieve herd immunity against Trumpism.”
Fast-forward to the fall of 2024, when Ferguson penned a column for the Daily Mail arguing that Kamala Harris was by far the greater threat to democracy. (Tufts University political scientist Daniel Drezner called it “the single-dumbest op-ed of the 2024 presidential campaign.”) The day after the election, Ferguson published a breathless ode in the Free Press to Donald Trump’s “stunning victory”—“a crushing defeat for political lawfare, critical race theory, woke campuses, biological males in women’s sports, genital mutilation of teenagers, the Ivy League, the legacy media, and Hollywood.” Trump’s impeachment over January 6th was mentioned only as part of the “lawfare” that was meant to kill Trump politically but only made him stronger. (In an interview with the London Times last January, Ferguson explained that he had come to see the Capitol Hill riot as merely a combination of general pandemic-era craziness and a possibly deliberate failure of policing, and Trump’s role in it as an expression of a sincere belief that he had won the 2020 election.) In a still more bizarre embrace of hardcore MAGA narratives, Ferguson also suggested that “Trump’s political opponents” tried to kill him quite literally, listing the two assassination attempts by mentally disturbed loners with no political affiliations in his catalogue of efforts to take down the ultimate “Comeback Kid”—or make that “Comeback King.” Ferguson also hailed the coming of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” and its chainsaw assault on wasteful federal spending. (A few months later, the Free Press itself would acknowledge that that didn’t go very well.) He also confidently predicted that Trump would end the war in Ukraine “by exerting greater military pressure on Russia.”
In the months that followed, Ferguson didn’t always toe the party line. In February, he was sharply critical of Trump’s attacks on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and even found himself on the receiving end of a nasty slam from Vice President JD Vance, who called him a “globalist” and dismissed his criticism as “moralistic garbage.” His writeup of Trump’s first hundred days in office acknowledged the fiasco of the tariffs, Trump’s failure to accomplish any of his legislative agenda, the Russia/Ukraine floundering, and the ham-handed attempt to combat the excesses of campus leftism by cutting off funds for scientific research.
But lately, Ferguson has been back in full Trump-booster mode, praising the peace deal in Gaza, voicing cautious optimism about the Ukraine-Russia peace negotiations in late November, and lauding Trump’s new National Security Strategy for its Monroe Doctrine revival and its bluntness about supposed unpleasant truths with regard to Europe, like the threat of “civilizational erasure” by immigration.
And in the past week, Ferguson celebrated his imminent CBS News job with a pair of articles in which his Trump lovefest reached a new nadir of cringe: a column titled “How Trump Won Davos,” and a follow-up explaining why “Trump’s full-time haters” who laughed at his column were wrong and he was right.
The gist of Ferguson’s Trump-in-Davos panegyric is that Trump not only “won” the World Economic Forum but “owned it” and utterly humbled the Davos “elites”: “I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.”
You could point out that contrasting Trump to “the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important” is a bit like contrasting Kim Kardashian to vapid celebrities. You could also point out that if Trump “dominated” Davos, it’s mainly in the sense that a drunk guy who jumped on the stage during an opera premiere, belted out an obscenity-laden rap song and concluded by peeing into the orchestra pit could be said to have ‘dominated’ the night—particularly if he was such a big donor to the theater that no one dared to have him hustled away.
But the biggest twist in Ferguson’s column was his explanation of the alleged purpose of Trump’s weeks-long Greenland-grabbing fantasies. Ferguson indignantly rejects the common view that the Europeans won the day by getting Trump to back down (or chicken out) and settle for a “deal” that basically reaffirmed the status quo. Silly rabbits, says Ferguson, he never had any intention of either attacking Greenland or pressuring Denmark into selling it—or of slapping tariffs on NATO countries that sent troops to Greenland for a military exercise: Those poor Euro-weenies still haven’t figured out that you need to take Trump “seriously but not literally.” Apparently, it was just a combination of bluff, social media trolling, and a diversion intended to distract the Europeans so that they wouldn’t try to talk Trump out of strikes on Iran, or meddle in the Russia/Ukraine peace negotiations. In other words, “all the fuss about Greenland was a classic example of Trumpian maskirovka.”
First of all: Even if this were true, a distraction or maskirovka that nearly causes an international crisis, severely strains NATO, and makes the president of the United States look like a deranged clown—particularly given his extended tantrum over the Nobel Peace Prize he didn’t get—is actually quite bad. Second: While Trump’s antics did regrettably take the forum’s attention off Ukraine, he also more or less engineered Zelensky’s unscheduled visit to Davos by abruptly announcing their meeting—so there really doesn’t seem to be much of a coherent plan at work. Third: Trump’s threats against Greenland date back to 2019. They began again last March, then went quiet—before resuming on December 21 when he appointed Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland, and when Landry tweeted that his mission was “to make Greenland a part of the U.S.” The protests in Iran did not begin until December 28. If Trump’s Greenland moves were intended as a diversion from Iran, that’s not only forward planning, it’s downright clairvoyance. Plus, are we to think that White House adviser Stephen Miller was just playing Trump’s game when he went on CNN to deliver a we-take-what-we-want soliloquy? This seems less like clever maskirovka by Trump than a weak-sauce rationalization from Ferguson to make the case that “Trump won.”
In his follow-up piece, Ferguson doubles down, indicting the “haters” for their stubborn refusal to consider that the hated Trump could do something good. But that’s simply not the case; many of us, for instance, were willing to applaud the removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, at least until it became increasingly clear that Trump intended to keep the successor regime in power as long as he could make oil deals with it. Ferguson’s only other argument seems to boil down to I’m a Hoover Institution senior fellow, and you’re not. (Really.) So much for scorning the “elites.”
Maybe the Niall Ferguson who shows up at CBS News will be the one who is at least sometimes willing to criticize and challenge Trump. But I’m not holding my breath, given his steady trajectory in the direction of fulsome ode-making.