Weichlein is the CEO of FMC: The Former Members of Congress Association.
Rep. Rodney Davis joined a number of his fellow Republicans on June 14, 2017, for an early morning baseball practice on a field in Alexandria, a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. They were getting ready for an annual charity game that Republicans and Democrats have played for over 100 years, and the recurring time and place of their practice was not something anyone thought needed to be kept secret.
The first gunshots rang out about 30 minutes into practice, and if it had not been for two Capitol Police officers who happened to be at the field, there’s a good chance that Davis and most, if not all, of his colleagues would have been massacred that morning. The shooter, who does not deserve to have his name in print, had approached one of the members of Congress before practice began to make sure that those were indeed Republicans on the field that morning. In other words, had they been Democrats, he would have not pulled the trigger.
Davis has continued to represent Illinois in Congress despite that morning’s attempt on his life, and we are better off for it because he is a thoughtful legislator with integrity and commitment to making this country better. While performing this public service, he continues to routinely receive death threats, sometimes for being a Republican and other times for not being Republican enough. The other side of the political aisle is not exempt from the very real possibility of violence against them or their families. Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, said that threats are expected and come with the job. He should know, since his wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head and nearly died in 2011 while holding a campaign event in her district.
The number of death threats against members of Congress actively investigated by police reached an astounding 3,939 in 2017. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. The next year it almost tripled to nearly 10,000. That means that on average a member of Congress receives a message that the police classify as “disconcerting or a direct threat” every three weeks. And when I say “a member of Congress receives,” what I should say instead is “the staff of a member of Congress receives” because the person picking up the phone and being harassed, screamed at with vicious and profanity-laden language, and told in no uncertain terms that the world would be better off without them, is usually an intern or the most junior staff member.
Public service comes in many different forms, and the health of our communities depends on citizens stepping up to the plate, either by volunteering or by foregoing more lucrative private-sector opportunities. They pay a price, which is why it is called public service. However, in our age of riling each other up via social media and call-to-arms cable news, the sacrifice we are asking of our public servants is much too steep a cost. School board members across the country dread town hall meetings because they know they will be shouted at for hours.
Many need security to make it out the door to their cars, and quite a few are reminded that “we know where you live.” Police officers, who have to assess the danger of a situation in a split second in order to keep themselves and the public safe, are as a group lumped in with every bad apple who ever put on the uniform. And teachers have been fully thrust into the middle of the mask mandate debate, having to deal with angry parents on both sides of the dispute.
The great “I’ve done my part, but now I’m done with this crap” tsunami is headed our way, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. We are losing members of Congress with years and years of experience and a track record of actually legislating. Congressional staffers at all levels are analyzing their quality of life and monthly paychecks and then updating their resumes as a result. Classroom sizes next year and for years to come will only get bigger because we’ll have fewer teachers for more students. Police officers are working more and longer shifts because there are fewer bodies to help keep our communities safe. And on school boards across the country, there are now countless opportunities for extremists from either side of the political spectrum to pick up vacated seats and transform what and how our children are learning.
It is crucial that we as a society figure out how to tone down our disagreements. We each have the responsibility to take the spotlight away from those whose business model is anger and division. It is time to come to our senses and stop empowering those who peddle tribalism and belligerence for personal gain, be they on the airwaves, internet or Capitol Hill. They are the ones who are actively stoking the flames of anger and threats, and they are the ones preventing Americans from living up to the best versions of ourselves.
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.