This summer VoteAmerica, which operates nationwide registration and turnout programs, hired seasoned Democratic operative Aisha McClendon as national constituencies director — focused on bolstering the nonprofit's work with churches and historically Black colleges and universities. She had previously been a regional constituency director for Mike Bloomberg's 2020 presidential campaign, after running national African American outreach for the Beto O'Rourke campaign. Before that she'd worked for a state legislator in her native Texas. Her answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
VoteAmerica works to ensure high turnout. We provide easy resources and tools to register to vote, sign up to vote by mail, request an absentee ballot, get election reminders, find a polling place and contact local election officials, etc.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
Registering people to vote on the campus of Dillard University, the historically Black college I attended in the 1990s.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
Spearheading the inaugural prayer service by the Black Caucus to open up the 2012 Democratic convention. It is always a struggle to get people to think outside of what they have ever done, and we had a lot of roadblocks — from buy-in from the party to getting sponsorships and finding speakers to volunteer their time. It was a huge task, and I had to call in a lot of favors, but we did it, and it was terrific. You know it's a good night when Rev. Jesse Jackson and Michael Eric Dyson crash your party!
And your most disappointing setback?
Struggling to deal with people acting against their self-interest. People are not often empowered to get out of their own way.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
Who I am is my work, who I am is my profession, what I am is my calling. I will always be a Black woman. I take the task of ensuring that Black people, especially women, are always included in the picture of what America should like.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
It was from the late civil rights and women's rights leader Dorothy Height, when she saw me trying to move to the far edge of a group posing for a photo, almost hiding myself. She said to me: Don't stand on the end; that's how women get cut out of history.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Non-dairy Blackberry Cannoli. Who knows how it would taste, but those are two of my favorite things!
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
"The West Wing," hands down. It reminds me of one of my first jobs, working in the executive office building next door to the White House during the Clinton administration.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Honestly, scroll through Facebook.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I may or may not have a "W" from an old school computer keyboard!
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.