Assistant US Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC's “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain many controversies for the Trump administration: the disclosure of the Epstein files, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about potential conflicts of interest between President Trump's family business and his work. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy agreement that Trump's son Eric signed with UAE national security advisor Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump's inauguration in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in Trump-owned World Liberty, a newly launched cryptocurrency company at the time. A few months later, the United Arab Emirates gained permission to purchase sensitive American artificial intelligence chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major stake in the company of the incoming president of the United States.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these newspapers talk about something that is unprecedented or has never happened before,” Blanche responded, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration hadn't done the exact same thing and were simply in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is completely transparent about his questionable business practices: “I have no comment on this other than Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business. They don't do it secretly. We don't find out about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We find out when it happens.”
Unfortunately, Stephanopoulos didn't offer the obvious answer, which could have gone something like this: “Okay, but the president and countless prominent Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they called 'the Biden crime family' and insisted that his business dealings were corrupt and, indeed, that his corruption merited impeachment. So how can being 'transparent' about similar corruption be a defense?”
Now, I must make it clear that I believe the Biden family's business dealings were corrupt, whether the laws were broken or not. Others disagree. I also think Trump's dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden supposedly did. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and the Republicans is the relevant political standard, and according to the deputy attorney general himself, the Trump administration is doing “the exact same thing,” only more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a police officer or a judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I've been completely transparent about it. So what's the problem?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy in America,” the old world had a different way of addressing the moral deficiencies of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, much less kings, had the right to behave in ways that were forbidden to humble people.
In the United States, titles of nobility were prohibited in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (despite the obvious exceptions for blacks, women, and Native Americans), no one has access to special exceptions or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, especially in secret, seems like a betrayal of the general idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites – of all ideological stripes – have violated that agreement. The result is not that we have abandoned any notion of good and evil. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up turning principles into a weapon, using them as a club against the other side, but not against our own.
Pick a topic: violent rhetoric from politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption, etc. With each revelation, the debate almost immediately devolves into a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B signals that Team A has changed positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone misses the point.
Of course, hypocrisy is a moral failure and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual failure. But neither of them changes the objective facts. This is something you are supposed to learn as a child: no matter what others do or say, wrong is wrong. It's also something that lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the prosecutor's hypocrisy (or his client's transparency) means his client did nothing wrong would earn him nothing more than a laugh.
UNKNOWN: @JonahDispatch
