When you join the lobbying profession, you know immediately you become Public Enemy No. 1. Frankly, you can't blame the public for feeling this way.
As a profession we let Washington define who we are and how we operate. We don't have a bully pulpit the way candidates, members of Congress and presidents do. We do not have a public forum where the people can hear us.
When attacks come, we bury our heads in the sand and don't stand up for ourselves and what we do. We simply hide and wait for the onslaught to pass. It's easy for elected officials to blame lobbyists for the dysfunction in Washington, the alternative being for them to look in the mirror and point the finger at themselves for their direct failures on behalf of those who elected them. When in doubt, create a boogeyman the public hates or distrusts more than you.
When you become a lobbyist, you know that every election year you will become the scapegoat for all the failures of both Congress and the incumbent president's administration. You know that in one breath members of Congress and the president will blame you for a policy stalemate — and then in the next breath call you and ask you for a campaign contribution. These same elected leaders will tell their constituents how they need to halt the influence that lobbyists have in Washington. But when they leave their campaign rallies, they will call us asking for help on their campaign.
The reality is that it's good politics to trash a profession the public does not know much about. It's good business to spread lies, and only then to turn to us and use us to get you elected. Frankly, shame on people in our business for allowing it.
Joe Biden campaigned on improving ethics in the capital, but now that he's been elected that seems like it was just a tagline to get votes. He is imposing restrictions on lobbyists serving in his administration and on government boards, yet his transition team is filled with big-name lobbyists. His team has said that not all lobbyists will be banned. Some will be given waivers to serve.
My questions for the president-elect are: Why some and not all? If our profession is the problem in Washington, as you claim, then why does your team include lobbyists? Why the need for waivers? Why not simply ban all of us, not just some of us?
The answer is simple. You have been in elected politics for more than 40 years and you know the true value of what we do — and the information and expertise we will offer you and your new administration. So, while it may get you a good public reception to claim you are banning lobbyists, then quietly you will enlist us. It is the Washington way.
But while Biden's policy discriminates against a class of people because of what they do, it makes exceptions for people close to you or who have been big donors to you over the years. The American people deserve better than this. Frankly, our profession deserves to be treated better than this.
The next president campaigned on the promise to create a diverse administration. Some will say he is doing just that. I take a different view. The policies he is putting in place not only discriminate against a whole class of professionals, but they also tell lobbyists of color they are not welcome to serve in the new administration. At a time when we should be celebrating public service and are asking corporate America to be more inclusive, Biden is doing the exact opposite. His bans limit lobbyists of color from creating opportunities to be selected to top positions in government and their chosen fields. That is exactly what the president-elect has criticized corporate America for doing.
As his new administration begins, I would urge Biden to reconsider his lobbyist ban for the reasons here. Barack Obama did much the same after he was elected president a dozen years ago and it turned into a black eye for his administration, which relaxed its rules six years later in the aftermath of an unfavorable federal appeals court ruling.
Since 2009 we have seen a growing trend of people taking themselves off the lists of registered federal lobbyists so they could serve in the Obama and Trump administrations. We suspect that will continue under a Biden administration unless he changes course.
Such shadow lobbying is a real problem — and one our profession is fighting against. The new president should work with us on creating policies that create more transparency, not less. But an outright ban is going to continue the rise of shadow lobbyists at a time when the American people are tired of corruption in government.
Please, Mr. President-elect: Work with us and not against us. I would urge you to be honest in your policies. If you ban lobbyists, you need to ban all lobbyists, not just some. You need to return the campaign donations you have taken during your campaign to every lobbyist or political action committee. You need to stop taking money from lobbyists or corporate America for your inauguration. And you need a universal diversity and inclusion policy that is inclusive of all, not just some.
As a profession, we want to work with you on transparency. We want to work with you on ethics reform. This is only possible if your administration is open and honest about your policies and does not create carve-outs for big donors or close friends. You cannot hold the rest of us accountable if you are not going to follow your own lead.
Leadership starts at the top with one policy for all, not just some well-connected Washington insiders.
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.