After a series of jobs in marketing and media during her first decade after college, Justine Lee was motivated by Donald Trump's election to augment her career. She created Make America Dinner Again based on this simple premise: Gathering politically diverse strangers for good food and guided conversation about hot-button issues could improve listening skills and enhance cross-ideology understanding — and as a result make a small but meaningful dent in the polarized partisanship at the core of our democracy's challenges. Thousands of dinner participants and almost four years later, there are chapters in a dozen cities. Lee runs the operation in New York while working as an audience development consultant. Her answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
We do not aim to change minds, but to help people grow by sharing stories and learning from one another. There are many avenues to protest, donate, fight and be heard; our gatherings are an avenue to listen.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
This will age me, but the first I remember is voting in Pennsylvania's 2008 Democratic presidential primary during senior year at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. I voted for Barack Obama even though my friends were for Hillary Clinton. I was drawn to Obama's backstory, intelligence and confidence, his ability to speak clearly and passionately, and his capacity to capture hope. He was the underdog at that point in the race and that appealed to me, too.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
If it has to be one moment, then when one of our earliest dinners was featured on NPR. As a result, we heard from hundreds of people across the country interested in hosting their own dinners — participating and collaborating with us. That moment planted a seed with a big audience that respectful dialogue about politics is possible. But the real triumph has been in the journey. I take pride in growing from our first meal in San Francisco to hundreds across the country, and in partnership with one of my closest friends. We've created and nurtured a community that exists against many odds.
And your most disappointing setback?
Not being able to find a publisher for a MADA book to be written with co-creator Tria Chang. We were eager to tell the story of our bridging work through vignettes about our dinner guests. We also liked the idea of having a book as an artifact to memorialize our work in the context of the political moment. It was disappointing that publishers passed on it, but writing the proposal did help us take stock of our progress and "assets," refine our vision — and get a glimpse into the world of publishing.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
My Taiwanese immigrant parents came to the U.S. for graduate school. They lived off small stipends, learned English in between classes, faced discrimination — and generally struggled to find their place and make sense of a new culture and environment. With hard work, good timing, favorable immigration policy and a good economy, they were able to build a comfortable life for me and my brother. Through their example and guidance, they instilled in me tenacity and the practice of gratitude. I learned from them the ability to not be discouraged by rejection, recession or moments of self-doubt. They taught me life might not work out the way you planned or wanted, in small and big ways, but there is always something to be thankful for and it's important to honor that.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
This quote from Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist, linguist and popular science author: "We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one."
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
It's called It Takes Two to Taro and it's based on one of my favorite root vegetables, which is often used in Asian cooking and desserts. This is cheesy, but taro's light purple color is a blend of red and blue, and that represents my group's spirit of bridging divides.
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
For laughs, "Veep." I've heard it paints a more accurate picture of politics than "House of Cards," which I also enjoyed. These days, I've been listening to "The Weeds," the Vox policy and politics podcast. It truly gets into the weeds. And I find the banter, and the sometimes long-winded explanations full of details, comforting and illuminating.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Scroll through Twitter! It's a bad habit.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I rarely read all the dozens of extracurricular articles open on my browser. At the end of each week, I "clear" my tabs by bookmarking them with the intention to get to them at "another time."
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.