With his loyalists lining up for key law-enforcement roles, Trump is fixated on former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who helped lead the January 6 congressional investigation. “Liz Cheney has been exposed in the Interim Report, by Congress, of the J6 Unselect Committee as having done egregious and unthinkable acts of crime,” Trump recently said. Then he added: “She is so unpopular and disgusting, a real loser!”
This accelerates a dangerous trend in American politics: using the criminal justice system to settle political scores. Both the Trumps and the Bidens have been entangled in numerous criminal law controversies, as have many other politicians this century, including Scooter Libbey, Ted Stevens, Robert Coughlin, William Jefferson, Jesse Jackson Jr., David Petraeus, Michael Fylnn, Steve Bannon, Bob Menendez, and George Santos.
Some of these cases represent legitimate law enforcement work. Some don't. The overall trend is clear: the bloodlust to imprison political rivals is intensifying.
The implications are profound. First, criminalizing politics undermines the fundamental principle that the rule of law applies equally to all people. Entangling the passions and biases of politics with the criminal law leads to different prosecutorial standards depending on someone's political affiliations—instead of evidence regarding their guilt or innocence. In American politics, the messenger matters more than the message; the actor matters more than the act. With the rule of law, the opposite is true: all individuals must be treated equally, and their specific alleged misdeeds—alone—are what counts.
Second, criminalizing politics accelerates a disturbing trend toward ever more polarization. It ramps up the stakes from treating opponents as political rivals to treating them like personal enemies.
Hardball politics is, of course, nothing new. It's woven into the fabric of our democratic system. But ultimately, we are one nation in a dangerous world. Our internal disputes shouldn’t consume too much national bandwidth. According to Trump, “I always say, we have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.”
This is a dangerous perspective and he couldn't be more wrong. Trump's mentality undercuts Americans’ ability to respond to the myriad international threats we face together. If looked at from a global perspective, Americans’ interests overlap far more than they diverge. Our energy should be focused on understanding and addressing big global challenges, not sending officials we don't like to jail.
Finally, criminalizing politics deters quality people from even entering the political arena. The United States government already has a personnel problem. Look no further than the presidency. We will soon transition from a man with obviously declining mental facilities to a man who tried to reverse the previous presidential election. This is neither normal nor the way it's always been. We shouldn’t further dissuade talented people from entering government over concerns that imperfections and ambiguities in their past will be twisted into politically motivated criminal accusations. The downside of winning office should be losing the next election and not going to jail.
These concerns must be understood in context. It's, of course, true that entering government should neither absolve someone from past crimes nor serve as a license to commit new ones. And even-handed justice requires prosecuting not just the weak and anonymous but also the powerful and well-known.
Striking the right balance is hard. But there should be a strong presumption in favor of leaving politics—and its inherent passions and prejudices—outside the courthouse.
Politicizing the rule of law doesn't just undermine our government and poison our justice system. It imperils our nation as a whole.
William Cooper is the author of “ How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t. ”
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.