In an unusual show of bipartisan collaboration among campaign operatives, seven leading political consultants from each party have united to endorse efforts to boost the regulation of online political advertising.
The continued absence of disclosure rules about who's paying for such ads, which were central to Russian interference in the 2016 election, "pose substantial threats to vital democratic norms and institutions," the group said in a statement this week. "The funding sources of digital political ads on all platforms and all systems must be made transparent. Voters are entitled to know who is paying for these ads."
The 14 operatives issued their declaration after a meeting convened by the University of Chicago. The group urged everyone in their industry to voluntarily disclose the identities of clients who pay for social media spots.
And, while they did not endorse any government action, what they are proposing is effectively what would be mandated by both legislation and regulations that have recently stalled.
The bill enjoys some bipartisan backing in Congress and the support of most Democratic presidential candidates, but it has been shelved under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's policy of keeping all measures designed to enhance election security and integrity off the Senate floor. Draft regulations were percolating at the Federal Election Commission before its membership shrank to three this fall, meaning it lacks a quorum for altering policy .
Both would subject paid political advertising to the same disclosure and disclaimer regulations as TV and radio spots. The bill would make Facebook, Google and other big-time social media platforms disclose the identity of those who spend as little as $500 on political ads on their platforms. The proposed FEC regulations would require the funders' identities to be displayed on the ads.
The statement from the 14 operatives did urge the government to focus on transparency measures that "target bad actors" without forcing "unnecessary disclosure of legitimate competitive information."
"Unfortunately, American policy makers, to date, have been largely unable to effectively address these threats, at least in part because they have been unable to identify, in today's highly polarized and contentious political environment, meaningful principles and policies that might receive the bipartisan support necessary for adoption," the seven Republicans and seven Democrats said in offering their proposals as a starting point.
The group also urged all campaign ad makers and political consultants to disavow any messaging that "incites violence or that is maliciously 'manufactured' to intentionally misrepresent actual events."
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.