What Trump Officials Mean by “Never”
· The Atlantic
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.”
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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.
[Read: Does Todd Blanche have a red line?]
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).
[Quinta Jurecic: DOJ enters a new, even more aggressive phase]
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.