Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, is of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
The rule of law, including the media’s right to speak freely for us and criticize our leaders, is at stake this election. The risk comes from Donald Trump, the candidate whose brand has become revenge and retaliation against anyone who opposes him.
A free press is vital to a free people. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1786 letter to James Currie, his daughter’s physician: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
Why? Because ordinary Americans are busy with their lives and their survival. So much of the burden of speaking out in an effort to keep the government honest is carried for all of us by journalists. It’s also done, of course, by those who have the ability to use their voices on social media, in letters to editors and in other forums.
Trump has talked of terminating the Constitution. It includes, of course, the First Amendment’s protections for individuals’ speech and for the press. He’s threatened to investigate MSNBC, the cable news outlet that criticizes him regularly. Trump, mimicking Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s catchwords for those he slated for elimination, called the network an “ enemy of the people.”
On June 5, Trump told Fox News that he “would have ‘every right’ to go after his adversaries.” The next night, it happened again when Dr. Phil suggested to Trump that if re-elected, “ you don’t have time to get even.” Trump agreed to disagree: “[R]evenge does take time. ... And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest.”
History, Yale professor Jason Stanley has noted, is riddled with moments when the people, to their eternal regret, have disbelieved the threats of would-be authoritarians. “Believe what they say,” Stanley told The Associated Press. Trump “is literally telling you he’s going to use the apparatus of the state to target his political opponents.”
Indeed the former president has promised, if re-elected, to weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies, including President Joe Biden. That threat is built on his conspiracy theory that Trump’s May 30 conviction on all 34 felony counts was Biden’s doing.
Nonsense, experts have answered. History professor Allan Lichtman told USA Today’s fact-checkers that “[t]here is not a shred of evidence that Biden has anything to do with this prosecution.” Law professor and former prosecutor Kimberly Wehle called Trump’s attempt to blame Biden for a local district attorney’s decision making “obviously, blatantly false.”
That’s never stopped Trump from trying to intimidate his enemies. “If you come after me,” he famously said, “I will come after you.” If re-elected, he says, he will have members of the 117th Congress’s Jan. 6 committee indicted. The televised summer 2022 hearings, which informed the American people about Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, led up to MAGA underperformance in competitive midterm races.
But that was far from the end of the story. Trump has used the support of enablers to claw back. Most recently, following Trump’s conviction in New York, it quickly became de rigueur for Trump’s enablers to express blood thirst for prosecuting Democrats in retribution.
As The New York Times wrote, “What is different now is the range of Republicans who are saying [that like-kind] retaliation is necessary.” Barbara McQuade, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, responded sharply:
As all Americans should know, vengeance is an improper motive in our criminal justice system. Prosecution based on politics would distort the very concept of justice.
There are at least two obvious problems with the MAGA right’s “fight fire with fire” mentality. First, Trump’s conviction was of his own making, a long overdue reckoning with the rule of law after a lifetime of rule breaking. A jury of 12 ordinary citizens found him guilty of criminally covering up his corruption of the 2016 election.
Second, first responders don’t fight fire with fire; they use water. More application of the law is in order, not less. Even so, these enablers are normalizing lawlessness, including political prosecutions in the future and threats to the freedom of the press.
It is up to common-sense Americans to answer. Our ballots are our power. Preserving our rights to a free press and avoiding government by retribution will depend on getting out to vote in force this November. Vengeance may be Trump’s, but liberty is ours to keep.
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.