By Jonathan Chait
Monday, August 17, 2026
Attorney General Todd Blanche has made abundantly clear
that he will not act independently of President Trump’s desires. So yesterday,
NBC’s Kristen Welker posed an obvious question to Blanche on Meet the Press:
“If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or
legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied confidently, “The president will
never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never
will.”
This particular formulation—never has, never will—has
become a new mantra for the administration. Last month, in response to reports
that Trump had personally gained $2 billion in the previous year, the White
House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “Neither the President nor his family has
ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.” When ProPublica
reported in December that Trump had personally used the same
mortgage-application fraud that he has called an imprisonable offense for
various political targets, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump
has never, or will ever, break the law.”
This is an epistemic frontier of impunity that can be
understood only in the context of Trump’s disregard for legal or normative
guardrails against his abuses of power.
In some circumstances, to state that you never have and
never will do something bad might be unremarkable, and perhaps reassuring. But
when the category of behavior is something you engage in constantly and with
little disguise, the effect is quite different, akin to a company accountant
solemnly promising that he would never dip into the kitty as he boards a
helicopter to his private island.
To begin with, we know that giving an improper order to
the attorney general is something Trump would do, because he has more or
less done it. Last year, for instance, in a social-media post that was intended
as a private message for her but was mistakenly posted on Truth Social, he
pressured then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge several people that Trump
wished to punish for political reasons. Blanche has personal experience with
Trump’s obsessive habit of demanding federal investigations of his enemies,
having been asked to bring new charges against David
Hearn for his alleged defacement of the Reflecting Pool, even after the
Justice Department conceded in a court filing that it had no evidence that
Hearn had done such a thing, and that the damage to the floor lining had been
caused by faulty installation.
Likewise, Trump’s conflicts of interest are of the most
flagrant variety. Since the 1970s, previous occupants of his office have placed
their investments in blind trusts. Jimmy Carter gave up control of his peanut
farm to avoid the appearance of even the subtlest pro-peanut bias creeping into
his decision making. Yet Trump has controlled a business empire and made
numerous decisions that benefited it directly.
The same holds true for the assertion that he has never
violated the law. Trump’s first brush with fame occurred in a lawbreaking
context—he and his father were charged with excluding Black tenants from their
apartments. They settled with the Justice Department without admitting
wrongdoing but also agreed to abide by the Fair Housing Act. Trump was also
convicted of falsifying business records in New York in 2024 and escaped more
criminal charges (for stealing classified material, storing boxes of it in his
home, and refusing to return it while lying to federal officials about it)
through delaying tactics and questionable decisions by a sympathetic judge he’d
appointed.
The power of the “never has, never will” defense lies in
its brazenness. The administration is not attempting to defend the specifics of
any particular acts. Instead, it broadly declares that all of its actions are
outside the realm of plausible scrutiny.
During the first Trump term, the president pushed against
or sought to flout long-standing norms. His first attorney general, Jeff
Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation because he was a
potential subject of it, a standard application of traditional ethics for which
the president has never forgiven him. Another attorney general, William Barr,
begged Trump not to publicly direct his work for fear that doing so would taint
the process. Trump scaled back some of his business activity, taking
comparatively small profits (for instance, foreign countries could book blocks
of rooms in his hotels).
During his second term, he has abandoned all restraint.
He won’t bother trying to argue that the Justice Department is not a personal
weapon of vengeance or that his business interests do not overlap with his
public conduct. Instead, his appointees declare that such behavior will
continue and is perfectly legal.
Just as Trump took the term fake news, which
originally described deliberately falsified stories on social media, and
applied it to news outlets that attempt to report objectively, his
administration now casts his own unethical conduct as being ethical. Any Trump
demand upon the justice system is, by definition, proper. Any Trump business
activity is, by definition, not a conflict of interest. Any action Trump takes
is, by definition, legal. This latter doctrine is one Trump arrived at early in
his presidency, when he wrote on social media, “He who saves his Country does
not violate any Law.”
Blanche is saying, as clearly as he can, that this
administration deems the very concept of Trump doing something unethical to be
self-evidently absurd. When he says that Trump never has and never will make an
immoral demand, he is actually telling us that he himself never has and never
will resist such a demand.
No comments:
Post a Comment