What Trump Officials Mean by “Never”

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. [ 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.