Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
There's no record of Edmund Burke -- the great Irish-born British statesman and father of modern conservatism -- actually saying what is often attributed to him: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." But it does capture his worldview well enough.
It also captures a renewed, possibly short-lived triumph of courage and wisdom within the Republican Party.
Amid threats to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson for allowing a vote on aid to Ukraine, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) captured the party's own divide between the good and the rest in colorful terms on CNN Sunday. "It's my absolute honor to be in Congress," he said, "but I serve with some real scumbags."
Gonzales was taking aim at Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Bob Good (R-Va.), but he could have included quite a few others.
For the last few years, congressional Republicans have been split into factions that are not ideological in the traditional sense. Pick nearly any standard domestic policy issue -- abortion, gun rights, taxes, immigration -- and you won't see much evidence of the schism. Even (public) support for Donald Trump doesn't delineate the divide.
No, the difference is largely over tactics, rhetoric and psychology. One faction, comprising an overwhelming majority of the House GOP caucus, is interested in accomplishing the possible. The other is more interested in aiming for the impossible and then complaining about falling short.
Of course, members of the latter group don't admit to the impossibility of their goals; that would ruin the con. They insist that with enough willpower, particularly among their leaders, they could impose their will on the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House. They make that case on television, on social media and in floor speeches. And when they inevitably fail, they whine that they were "betrayed" by Republican quislings who collaborated with the Democrats, all while raising money off the notion that they're courageous warriors who are willing to lose on principle.
The success of their shtick has depended on a number of factors. One is that the Republicans' narrow House majority empowers the fringe.
To become speaker last year, Kevin McCarthy agreed to a change in the rules that makes it possible for a single representative to move to "vacate the chair" -- that is, trigger a vote on whether to depose the speaker. That's what happened last year after McCarthy avoided a default on the national debt, kept the government open and committed other alleged outrages.
Gaetz and seven other Republicans, representing less than 2 percent of the country, were enough to oust McCarthy against the wishes of 95 percent of the Republican caucus, with Democrats uniformly hewing to the bipartisan tradition of refusing to support a speaker of the opposite party. In other words, the Republican firebrands, who think the worst sin imaginable is to work with Democrats, voted with Democrats to oust their leader.
McCarthy's successor, Johnson, brought four bills to the House floor Saturday -- three to provide vital military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and one to force a Chinese company to sell TikTok or cease operating in the United States. The bills passed overwhelmingly, with all but the Ukraine bill winning a majority of Republicans' votes.
Now Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) want to oust Johnson for his "betrayal" -- not of the caucus, country or Congress but of the tiny fringe faction that thinks it should call the shots.
They'll probably fail, for several reasons. First, few Republicans -- including some who oppose Johnson -- want to be seen following the lead of the House's most notorious cranks and bigots. Second, Trump doesn't want the Republican caucus to turn into an embarrassing circular firing squad while he is running for president. (It's remarkable that Trump is worried that other Republicans will make him look bad.) Third, Democrats have signaled that they will help Johnson keep his job after he courageously did the right thing. And finally, no one appears to want Johnson's job who could also get the job.
The most important development for the party in all of this is that the rest of the caucus has realized that going along with the arsonists -- all of whom have safe seats and would be happy to throw their bombs from the House minority -- amounts to politically suicidal appeasement.
"The majority of the majority -- the vast majority of the majority -- is sick and tired of these high school antics," Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) said last week. He also noted that "the only way to stop a bully is to push back hard."
One can only hope that realization sticks.
First posted April 24, 2024. (C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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.