Eisen is a senior fellow at Brookings and a former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. Sonnett is a former federal prosecutor, criminal defense attorney and a board member of Lawyers Defending American Democracy. Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to LDAD.
Shootings continue in America, including the slaughter on July 4 in Highland Park, Ill. The legislative breakthrough that happened late last month didn’t stop them.
But it was a breakthrough nonetheless, one created by Americans committed to making a better country, along with bipartisan elected officials pushed into adopting the first gun safety bill in 30 years. Few believed it could occur.
President Biden’s June 25 signature on the legislation followed a 65-33 Senate vote that included 15 Republicans. The House bipartisan vote was 234-193. The NRA could not stop it. Polling shows that Americans support it 3-1.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, was an unexpected lead sponsor. He garnered GOP votes to overcome the filibuster, even though his “A+” NRA rating will surely, as Politico reported, “ take a downgrade.”
Give major credit to the citizen activists who were not daunted by Congress’ repeated failures to do anything, despite hundreds of mass shootings at schools, grocery stores and hospitals.
Those activists seem to have made their mantra Winston Churchill’s words in October 194,1 amidst his country’s against-the-odds survival of relentless Nazi bombing: “Never give in, never, never ... never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
To be sure, the bill accomplishes far less than gun safety advocates sought. Still, the measure reverses the “anything goes,” unrestricted gun culture trend that is, literally, killing us. And perhaps with continuing gun massacres, one Senate success will inspire the next legislation so desperately needed.
As it is, the new law provides billions of dollars for state “crisis intervention programs,” state “red flag” laws, drug courts and veterans courts. The measure authorizes an “enhanced search” window to determine the background of gun-buyers between 18 and 21, and it helps close the “boyfriend loophole” allowing court-adjudicated unmarried domestic abusers to buy guns.
Here are four lessons about fighting for what seems beyond reach:
1. Commitment and persistence matter. Just look at Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed in 2018 in Parkland, Fla. He became the face of the gun safety movement. The day after that shooting, a vision of his new life-work emerged: “I walked into my home that night, and ... said: ‘I’m going to break that f...ing gun lobby.’”
Along with others, Guttenberg has lived that vision. He never surrendered to the “overwhelming might of the enemy.” Determined individuals, joined by others, can bring change that most of us doubted would ever happen.
2. Organizing counts. The Senate first announced a “framework” for its package on Sunday, June 12, the day after activist and former Parkland student David Hogg had organized national gun safety demonstrations. It appears that senators did so on a Sunday because of the prior day’s demonstrations.
Hogg applauded the bill as "more than has ever been done in my lifetime on the federal level.”
3. Democracy remains alive. A pivotal moment occurred after many thought mass shootings had become so normalized that we would never cross this red-blue continental divide.
The slaughters in May in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, the Tulsa hospital killings and the non-stop shootings since brought us here. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat and a lead negotiator, explained why: Public pressure was being put on lawmakers “at a rate that I've never seen before.”
4. Bipartisanship is possible. The Senate once got bipartisan deals via negotiations by a “Gang of Five.” Today, more mass is needed to overcome polarization. The gun bill required a Gang of 20.
Other important bipartisan legislation has been adopted on Biden’s watch – a Covid relief bill, an infrastructure bill and other smaller but still significant packages. Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, along with Democratic colleagues, are leading Jan. 6 committee hearings consisting of a stream of Republican witnesses speaking out against a former president of their own party.
Bipartisanship, though difficult, is not dead. The gun bill stands out for advancing our safety. The victory rises from the ashes of tragic, needless deaths and from our compassion for the living.
Even in a polarized Congress and country, citizens can flex their muscle and fight with heart. At least so long as they speak out and follow activist leaders who “never, never give in.”
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI 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 ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
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 dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.