I love our country. I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa in the 1970s. I served as a Foreign Service Officer (diplomat) for the State Department in assignments in the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Canada in the 1980s and 1990s. Because of that love and my sense of service to this country, I have now become an anti-government rebel. I take to the streets every weekend to protest the cruel and incompetent actions of the Trump administration. I don’t even recognize my country now. A government that is sloppy in rounding up supposed immigrants and entrapping American citizens in dark vans that transport them to hidden locations by masked men is not one I can honor today. A country that targets people because they “look like immigrants” is not one I can serve today.
How does this happen? How does patriotism and love for a country translate into a call to action to fight what is happening to our nation? Here’s my story.
My ancestors immigrated to this country in the early 20th century from Hungary and Italy. My Dad’s father was a gravedigger who never really mastered English. Fortunately, gravediggers don’t need to speak much. As the grandson of an illiterate gravedigger, I know how fortunate I have been to rise to become an official representative of this country abroad in American embassies. I loved that job. Diplomats do tough jobs in some dangerous corners of the world. Many Americans understand little of what diplomats do, but if you travel and lose your passport or get arrested, you will soon discover how vital the services of an American embassy officer are.
But our country has fired—without cause—thousands of American diplomats in a DOGE-inspired hacking away at the federal workforce under some misguided notion of rooting out waste. Robbing embassies of adequate personnel opens the door for China—already investing more in its foreign policy professionals than we do—to continue its move toward world domination. Do we really want to live in a world where China decides everything on the world stage? That’s where we are headed.
Foreign policy has always been crafted in our country by professionals who adhered to strict notions of being apolitical. Today, the State Department is full of Republican-approved diplomats who have to pledge allegiance, not to our Constitution, not to our country, but to the 47th president. The politicization of diplomacy reduces policy choices to only those approved with an eye to a certain groupthink ideology. This does not serve the national interest, as it shuts out other ways of sizing up a problem and deciding how best to preserve what is best for our country’s future.
In order to flatter Trump, diplomats are choosing what he deems best. This 79-year-old president shows daily how ill-informed he is about our country’s history. We are being led now by someone whose “maybe the people want a dictator” is undermining the very principles established by our Founders. Principles of three equal branches of government with a system of checks and balances to prevent the rise of a monarch. The attacks on judges who disagree with the president are likely to lead to more political violence. After the assassination of Democrat politicians in Minnesota and Charlie Kirk, do we really want this?
photo courtesy of Michael Varga.
The deference Republican politicians show toward Trump’s decisions is setting up our nation as a pariah on the world stage, now apparently allied with Russia and North Korea, and some of the despots ruling in the Middle East. The State Department’s decision to no longer report fully on human rights abuses means that people around the world who are suffering under autocratic regimes are likely to get much worse. Is this the profile we want for America in 2025?
This moment has compelled me to take to the streets to raise my voice against what I see as a dangerous attempt to remake our country according to the Project 2025 blueprint. For me, resistance means showing up, standing firm, and saying NO. But each American must decide for themselves how best to respond. Some may choose the ballot box, others may write, organize, or speak out in their communities.
Whatever your conscience calls you to do more, I honor that. Love of country requires each of us, in our own way, to defend the core democratic values that have guided our nation for 250 years.
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.