Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.
One of Aesop’s 725 fables was called “The Donkey and His Purchaser.” In the renowned Greek storyteller’s tale, a man wished to purchase a donkey and decided to give the animal a trial to see how it would fit in with his herd. He took the donkey home and put it in the field with the other donkeys. Quickly the donkey on trial joined the laziest and greediest donkey. Seeing who the new donkey chose to spend time with, the man returned the donkey back to its owner because he knew it would also become lazy and greedy. The moral of the story: A man is known by the company he keeps.
Likewise, a parallel five-word phrase from the Bible speaks volumes: “Bad company corrupts good character” (1 Corinthians 15:33).
The phrases are all about ethics and morals. If you hang around dishonest people, your association with them reflects a lack of good judgment, moral standards and character. Might an examination of our 2024 presidential candidates’ associations assist America’s 161.4 million registered voters when they decide how to fill in their ballots on Nov. 5? Your choice for president could also be a direct reflection on your judgment, moral standards and character.
Let’s examine Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s respective election associates.
To date, Biden’s re-election campaign is based upon seeking advice, guidance and counsel from Julie Chavez Rodriguez (campaign manager), Quentin Fulks (principal deputy campaign manager) and Mike Donilon (chief strategist).
Biden’s national campaign co-chairs include Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (Del.), Rep. Jim Clyburn (S.C.), Sen. Chris Coons (Del.), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), media proprietor Jeffrey Katzenberg, former Rep. Cedric Richmond (now Democratic National Committee senior advisor) and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Thirteen others assisting in Biden’s re-election campaign include Colleen Coffey, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Mia Ehrenberg, Grace Landrieu, Charles Lutvak, Alana Mounce, Kevin Munoz, Michael Pratt, Michael Press, Roohi Rustum, Sara Schreiber, Becca Siegel and Michael Tyler.
None of Biden’s 23 re-election associates have a criminal record, are under investigation or on trial.
Donald Trump’s national staff campaign is composed of two co-campaign managers (Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles), two senior advisors (Brian Jack and Jason Miller), Steven Cheung as communications director and Karoline Leavitt as national press secretary. These individuals have no criminal record.
But other Trump campaign aides, allies, assistants and associates — according to Reuters – have faced criminal prosecution, including Steve Bannon, Elliot Broidy, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Peter Navarro, Stewart Rhodes (Oath Keepers), Roger Stone and Allen Weisselberg.
Four more people can be added to what MSNBC referred to as “ Trump’s team of felons ”: Tom Barrack, Kenneth Chesebro, George Papadopoulos and Sidney Powell. USA Today claims five additional Trump election associates who’ve had legal trouble of their own: Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows.
The right-wing Wall Street Journal notes that we should not forget Ray Smith III (one of Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the criminal conspiracy to alter the outcome of the 2020 Georgia election) plus Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly mishandled — with Trump — federal classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
And let’s not forget Trump acolytes in the House — Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Scott Perry (Pa.) — who have violated ethics rules by defying legitimate congressional subpoenas related to their involvement in or knowledge of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol meant to overturn the results of a free and fair election.
The Washington Post reported the number of people in Trump’s orbit “who’ve been convicted of crimes is so great” and a “remarkable universe of criminality.” That article was published in 2019. The size of Trump’s current universe of criminality is even more daunting.
William J.H. Boetcker (1873-1962), a revered Presbyterian minister, is credited for stating, “A man is judged by the company he keeps and a company is judged by the men it keeps, and the people of Democratic nations are judged by the type and caliber of officers they elect.”
What will be the caliber of officers we the people elect on Nov. 5? Will the ethics, morals, judgment and character of the company Biden and Trump respectfully keep be a plausible voting guide? Your good (or poor) judgment, moral standards (or not) and character (or lack thereof) may very well be measured by who you vote for on Nov. 5.
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.