Jeanne Sheehan Zaino, Ph.D. is professor of Political Science. Follow her on Twitter @JeanneZaino or visit https://jeannesheehanzaino.net/ to learn more.
We hear a lot these days about the American government being in crisis. And it is, although not necessarily for the reasons the media is talking about. The crisis predates the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the 2020 presidential election and the issues that prompted the Biden administration to host the “Summit for Democracy” late last year.
The crisis goes back to the Founding and is rooted in something much more fundamental — the structure of the American state. The Madisonian system of government was built for “inaction and deadlock,” and it was designed that way for an important reason — to protect liberty.
Since the system has changed structurally very little since the late 18th century, it is still working largely the way it was designed. This reality has led to the crisis in the American state, an almost consistent inability on the part of the government to address the needs of its people and the crises of the day (i.e., immigration, gun violence, infrastructure, the high cost of pharmaceuticals, etc.). In those cases when it does finally act, it does so only after years of delay, obfuscation, stalemate, discussion and cries for help. Case in point:, health care reform, which was achieved after almost a century of calls and, even then, to the satisfaction of almost no one involved. We are often told this is the result of incompetent leadership, polarization, institutional disarray and the like. While all these things may be true, they miss the root cause of the problem — it’s the system.
President Biden has repeatedly said that if the United States is going to meet the key challenge of the 21st century, the battle between autocracy and democracy, we need to “prove that democracy can deliver.” That is not possible unless we follow the advice of people like Saul Alinsky, Irving Zola and the late great Rev. Desmond Tutu and “go upstream” to examine the root of the problems we are confronting: how the Framers designed the system, why they did it that way and what the ramifications are for us today. Only after we understand this can we have a much-needed and public conversation about whether the system should be modified and, if so, how.
This short video series by Jeanne Sheehan Zaino is designed to help move us in that direction.
Additional videos in the series will be published in The Fulcrum in the coming days.
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.