Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
In another pivotal moment, the Supreme Court decided Wednesday to take up former president Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. This development, arriving as we edge closer to the 2024 presidential election, fuels further delays and injects a new level of uncertainty, casting a shadow over the electoral landscape. It’s increasingly perceived as a strategic maneuver by Trump to entangle legal proceedings with the electoral timeline, complicating the discourse and deepening the national polarization ahead of a critical election. The scenario is one glimpse into the broader threat of Trump’s 2024 candidacy.
On Monday, Just Security published The American Autocracy Threat Tracker, a new public resource that meticulously catalogs the plans, promises and propositions being developed by Trump and his circle. The tracker amalgamates data from media outlets, resources such as Protect Democracy’s The Authoritarian Playbook, and direct information from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Noteworthy is its inclusion of data from Trump’s campaign website and Truth Social – as well as an always-updating searchable data set of all of Trump’s Truth Social posts.
This tracker is more than a repository; it’s a call for critical engagement, starting with its initial chapters that paint a vision of the beginning of Trump’s potential second term, marked by authoritarian pledges to serve as a “ dictator on day one ” to enforce his plans to “close the borders” and “drill, drill, drill.” It equips citizens and organizations with a unified framework for dissecting the realities of the Republican frontrunner’s campaign narratives, fostering a necessary national dialogue.
Amidst this backdrop, a January 2024 survey conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and YouGov produced a startling finding: a significant portion of respondents showed a perplexing openness to Trump’s authoritarian undertones. This result contrasted sharply with a broader aversion to dictatorship revealed in a separate Economist and YouGov poll from December 2023, potentially indicating a nuanced, though troubling, interpretation of “temporary autocracy.” Such findings continually underscore an alarming dissonance in public sentiment towards the foundational principles of American democracy.
The discourse on democracy’s relevance in contemporary America is reaching an inflection point. Recent polls, including a longitudinal survey by The Democracy Fund, indicate a waning commitment to democratic norms among Americans, a sentiment further corroborated by Danielle Allen’s insights published last week in The Washington Post. Allen’s analysis reveals a generational divergence in the valuation of democracy, posing a stark challenge: The sustainability of democracy hinges on the people’s desire for it.
In my tenure with the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, my underlying quest has been to identify a unifying thread that could weave together the diverse strands of the healthy democracy ecosystem. Our mission is to enhance and amplify the work of those working in civic education, engagement, electoral reform, social cohesion and trusted information. It is intuitive that these spheres of practice enhance one another and are all vital to a healthy society and the institutions that serve it.
However, the collective insight and power of the ecosystem can only coalesce into a movement with at least one specific, shared goal. We must continue focusing on a wide range of work areas to repair our country's social and political infrastructure. Still, it's also essential that we consider our work aligned with the goal of a constitutional democracy supermajority. That means a supermajority of citizens agreeing, as Allen puts it, on “the basic rules of the game.” Inside the bounds of those rules we will disagree, but hopefully we can disagree better within the stability of those boundaries.
The path forward demands more than passive endorsement; it calls for active defense and promotion of core democratic values, including “constitutionalism, the rule of law, inclusivity, nonviolence, and respect for the electoral process”. It is not just possible but imperative for us to rise to this challenge, fostering a culture of dialogue and advocacy that strengthens, rather than erodes, the bedrock of our democratic republic.
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.