Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor in San Francisco, is co-counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
March 1 was a good day. We learned that Asteroid 2022 AE1, a heavenly body large enough to do real damage and thought to hit Earth on Independence Day 2023, will miss us.
Of course, the climate apocalypse, symbolized by the meteor hurtling toward Earth in the recent pop film “Don’t Look Up,” is still before us. But if you scan the headlines from the past week, some positive light shone through, but time will tell its duration.
Internationally, in Ukraine, for the moment at least, David has Goliath stumbling.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has established himself as a global hero, inspiring resistance in his country, world-wide demonstrations, and a rebirth of the European Union as a powerful, unified force.
Autocratic leaders in Hungary and Poland, whose knee-jerk response is usually to back Russian President Vladimir Putin, have opposed the invasion. Neutral countries that usually stay silent have taken sides against Putin, Finland even contemplating aligning with NATO.
The Russians, supposedly masters of propaganda, are losing the battle for the narrative day after day. On March 1, former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter lambasted Putin.
The world has unified in applying severe sanctions against Putin, and, while not likely to stop his mad and illegal assault, will soon take a deep bite out of the Russian economy and build a foundation for national opposition to the war and potentially to him. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 1 that traders will not buy Russian oil for fear they will get stuck with it.
On March 2, Russian oil, gas and bank stocks collapsed on the world market. You can’t run a war on economic fumes. Television cameras captured Russian citizens standing in impossibly long bank lines to withdraw cash.
In Washington, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection reported new activity. On March 1, it subpoenaed six Trump lawyers. That list included Cleta Mitchell, who was on Donald Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during which Trump asked him to find 11,780 votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, and Kenneth Chesebro, who reportedly played a role in the forged electoral slates that the Trump campaign arranged to have sent to Congress for the electoral vote count.
The same day, momentum built toward Republican support in the Senate for Biden’s Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black woman with a stellar resume. The highly regarded Republican lawyer William Burck, who represented Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn, followed two esteemed conservative former federal judges in endorsing her nomination.
On March 1, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that it was “ unacceptable ” for fellow GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to have stood on a podium with neo-Nazi Nicholas Fuentes on Feb. 25. The day before, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had also excoriated Greene. These actions show shared American values still working in party leadership amidst the damage done to them by disinformation and political fear over the past five years.
Those shared values showed themselves again on March 1 in the unusual fact that 201 House Republicans and 221 Democrats joined together to pass the Emmett Tillett Anti-Lynching Act. Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy whom Mississippi Delta racists murdered in 1955, after he was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. They weighted his lifeless, beaten body and threw it in the river.
Social media companies have gotten more aggressive about hateful speech and disinformation. On March 1, Twitter suspended the account of U.S. Senate candidate Vicky Hartzler for an anti-transgender tweet attacking “men pretending to be women.” On the same day, YouTube took a similar aggressive approach by blocking channels linked to Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik.
All these are good things. It’s okay to look up.
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.