Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
On Jan. 23, 2016, Donald Trump was campaigning in Iowa when he made a remarkable announcement: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"
Unfortunately, with less than two weeks to go until the 2024 election, it appears that despite the absurdity of that statement Trump might have been right.
He’s a convicted felon. He’s been impeached twice. There are a multitude of other criminal charges still outstanding. Yet polls indicate he is running neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris.
An ABC-Ipsos poll conducted in April — after he was found guilty in a hush money case in New York — indicated only 4 percent of Trump supporters said they would not vote for him and 16 percent said they would reconsider it.
Despite all that and The New York Times recently reporting that “the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past,” Trump’s supporters are standing by him.
And leading Republicans are ignoring his behavior.
On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper had Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on his program. Tapper noted that Trump has referred to Democrats as “the enemy from within” and threatened to use the military against fellow Americans. He then played a clip in which Trump said:
“The bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the big — and it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by the National Guard or if really necessary by the military, because they can't let that happen.”
Johnson responded by saying, “Jake, you know that's not what he's talking about there. What he's talking about is marauding gangs of dangerous, violent people.”
But Tapper pushed back, quoting Trump again and saying the former president was specifically talking about former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
As I listen to the excuses and denials by the speaker of the House and so many other members of Congress, I can’t help but wonder if there is anything that Trump could say or do that would change the minds of his supporters.
And that is what is so frustrating for Americans who believe in the ageless human, religious and philosophical values of truth, trust, reason and civility, and believe in the dignity of people across all cultural, economic, political, racial and gender demographics. It just doesn’t seem to matter.
Maggie Haberman of The New York Times summed it up well: “Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media processes every day, has for years. The systems ... were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does.”
The sentiment was echoed by Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “The people who don’t like or are infuriated by him cannot believe his success and would like the press to somehow persuade the people who do like him that they are wrong,” he said. “And the press can’t do that.”
Many Americans have already voted, either by mail or at early in-person locations. Those who have not yet cast a ballot need journalists to provide an accurate portrayal of Donald Trump, holding him to account for his words, just like Tapper did on Sunday.
Yet will any of that make any difference? Or was Trump correct back in January 2016?
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.