Donald Trump has a unique way of making people smaller.

Suddenly folks who carried themselves with dignity look like shadows of who they were. They bend, they flatter, they swallow their own voices. Ted Cruz. Mitt Romney. Marco Rubio. Tim Cook. The list is both shameful and (seemingly) without end.

The irony, which I can’t shake, is that the few who resist him - the ones who say no, who absorb the punishment and ridicule - emerge larger, not smaller. They grow in stature, even if only by contrast. It’s a moral inversion: the strong come out stronger, the weak expose themselves as weaker. If Hamlet thought conscience makes cowards of us all, I’d argue Trump does the job far more efficiently.

The Jimmy Kimmel x Disney flare-up is a case in point. The late-night host was suspended because the President of the United States didn’t like what he said. Corporate executives, supposedly stewards of shareholder value, bent under pressure from the government. They caved. They justified it as prudence // necessity. But tell me, when did cowardice become prudent? When did bowing to presidential rage become fiduciary duty? Disney might defend itself in boardrooms talking about contracts, affiliates, and stock fluctuations. But to anyone watching, all they really did was buckle.

I don’t say this lightly. I’ve spent years watching and writing about how institutions react to Trump. Time and again, they choose accommodation over confrontation. They hope he’ll go away. They fear the heat, the Twitter storm, the boycott threats, the possibility of regulatory retaliation. But in trying to avoid trouble, they entangle themselves in it. The executives who flattered him in the Oval Office, the senators who bit their tongues as he demeaned colleagues, the media figures who adjusted their commentary to avoid his wrath - how do they look now? How much have they shrunk? And how much bigger does Harvard look, does Gavin Newsom look, simply for having said no?

That’s the law of Trump. He distorts the moral calculus. The price of resistance seems high, but in the long arc, it proves cheap. The price of submission seems low, but it compounds. You pay it over and over, with your reputation, your integrity, your soul. And yet so many keep paying. Why?

Maybe because Trump has discovered the soft underbelly of modern America: the institutions are run by people who fear embarrassment more than failure. He has a genius for making you feel personally humiliated. He doesn’t merely disagree; he mocks. He belittles. He attaches nicknames that stick like gum to a shoe. It’s playground politics, and it works. Adults in high positions become children again, trying to avoid the bully’s glare. What they don’t see - what some are only now realizing - is that the humiliation is worse when you give in.

Bob Iger was considered one of the most skilled corporate leaders of our time. He had built Disney into a global powerhouse. But now his name is permanently attached to a shameful episode of capitulation, folding under pressure from a president raging about a late-night comedian. Iger may have had a thousand reasons, some of them quite rational. But history won’t remember the nuance. It will remember the collapse. Contrast that with Jimmy Kimmel himself. He took the blow, lost a week on air, endured the wrath. And then he returned, ratings higher than ever, his stature only enhanced by the punishment meant to diminish him. Who came out looking better?

Trump makes cowards of us all - unless you resist. He creates the conditions for a heroism he is ill equipped to meet, because standing up to him requires no great eloquence, no grand strategy, only the refusal to bend.

I’ve heard the argument that executives, politicians, journalists have to be realistic. They say compromise is survival. But what they miss is that Trump doesn’t respect survival. He respects defiance. The obsequious, on the other hand, get nothing. They think they’re protecting themselves, but they’re only hollowing themselves out.

And so the pattern repeats. Trump bullies, some cave and some resist. The cowards are forgotten, or remembered with contempt. The resisters are elevated, if not in his camp then in the eyes of the world - most of whom saw through Trump long ago. What kind of leader wants to be remembered as a cave-in artist? What kind of CEO wants his legacy defined by the moment he gave in to a doddering would-be tyrant’s tantrum?

It would be one thing if this were just about entertainment. But it’s not. It’s about America's precious First Amendment, about corporate independence, about whether Western institutions (the world over) still have the spine to stand on their own feet. A president who can cow Disney into suspending a comedian can cow anyone. And once that precedent is set, it doesn’t stop. You think you’re avoiding a fight. You’re really training the bully to keep

We are living through a giant civics lesson in reverse. The Constitution assumed ambition would check ambition, branch would check branch, leader would check leader. What it didn’t anticipate was a figure like Trump, who could turn ambition into submission. What it didn’t count on was leaders who would rather hide than fight. Trump has rewritten the rules: confrontation is costly, but capitulation costs more. And yet the players keep misreading the board.

I don’t know how many more examples we need before people understand. Submit to him and you’ll be remembered as weak. Resist him and you may get bruised, but you’ll come out stronger.

And you’ll prove that Donald Trump can’t make cowards of us all.