What happened
In a move that stunned government ethics experts, the Trump administration last week rolled out a $1.8 billion fund to compensate supposed victims of Biden-era “lawfare” and barred the IRS from pursuing “any and all” pending tax claims against the president, his family, or his businesses. “This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald Sherman of the non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The “anti-weaponization” fund, set at $1.776 billion in a nod to America’s founding, was created by the Justice Department to settle a $10 billion suit President Trump brought against the IRS for failing to stop the leak of his tax returns during his first term. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the fund will compensate people targeted under Biden for “political, personal, or ideological reasons,” and that Trump and his family will not receive payouts.
Blanche refused to rule out payment to rioters convicted of assaulting police in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump said he wasn’t involved in creating the fund, but that it would aid people who were “imprisoned wrongly” and who “turned out to be right.” Democrats assailed what they called a “slush fund” for Trump’s allies. It’s “nothing short of the sitting president of the United States looting from the Treasury for his own gain,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Two police officers who clashed with rioters on Jan. 6 sued to block the fund, saying it would help “finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence” in Trump’s name. Sen. John Thune, the top Senate Republican, said he was “not a big fan” of the fund and expected it to receive a “full vetting” from lawmakers.
What the columnists said
This is Trump’s “most brazen theft of taxpayer cash yet,” said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. Everything about this “obscene” setup is designed to “short-circuit all outside accountability.” Blanche’s order says the U.S. has “no liability” for “misuse of the funds.” And the five-person panel Blanche will pick to run the fund will not only get to “keep secret how they’re making disbursement decisions, they can also keep a lid on who’s getting paid.” This is “emperor stuff” and grounds for impeachment under any Congress with “a shred of dignity.”
Trump’s IRS lawsuit was bad, said National Review in an editorial. But this “boondoggle” is even worse. It amounts to a new government program not authorized by Congress, created under the “fictional pretense” of settling a dubious lawsuit the presiding judge seemed poised to throw out. The disbursement of the money through the U.S. Judgment Fund—a pot of money used to settle lawsuits against the U.S.—“may be legal.” But there’s “nothing in the Constitution that requires Congress to passively let this sort of thing happen.”
The “most egregious part” is the dropping of all tax audits of Trump and his family, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. It shields them from “any scrutiny of their business deals and financial arrangements,” and comes just after financial disclosures revealed that Trump bought and sold stocks worth at least $220 million—including in companies he’s promoted—in the first quarter of the year. The financial stakes for Trump are significant: In 2024, the Times reported Trump could face a more than $100 million tax liability.
This grift couldn’t be more blatant if Trump walked out of Fort Knox with a “shopping cart filled with gold bullion,” said David Rothkopf in the Daily Beast. And it’s just the cherry atop a vast “campaign of corruption.” He’s accepted a luxury jet from Qatar, solicited donations “to projects designed to glorify him,” doled out pardons to deep-pocketed donors, sold Trump watches and other “swag,” and engaged in shady crypto ventures that have tripled his wealth to an estimated $6.5 billion. “We are no longer a shining city on the hill. We are instead a stinking cesspool of corruption, a republic for the rapacious.”
Look beyond the pure corruption and you’ll see an even uglier message in this fund, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Trump has all but declared that he’s going to use this $1.8 billion to reward the insurrectionists who were punished for trying to violently overturn his 2020 election loss. He could have handed out that cash toward the end of his term, but he’s doing it now—as the midterms approach and his popularity plummets—“to communicate directly that loyal allies can expect lavish rewards.” As Republicans sit quietly or tut-tut from the sidelines, “his intentions grow only more naked.”
The $1.8 billion fund has critics on both sides of the aisle
