President Trump is stealing your money to pay for crime and insurrection | Editorial
His $1.776 billion supposed settlement of his own lawsuit stands out even in a historically corrupt administration.
President Donald Trump, having taken the unprecedented step of suing his own government while in office, now claims to have settled for an improbably large and symbolic sum: $1.776 billion. That is the value of the presidential slush fund being set up by the administration, supposedly as the price of dismissing his frivolous claim against the IRS for a leak of the sort of tax information his predecessors have disclosed voluntarily.
While the U.S. Department of Justice claimed to be guided by “the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” against the fund, the dollar amount’s hokey historical reference proves that the choice was unilateral and arbitrary. That makes sense given that Trump was, um, “negotiating” with Trump.
But how is this scam related to the struggle and principles commonly associated with 1776, the country’s founding year? Only in that the president has taken corruption to a truly revolutionary level.
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The administration is pretending not only that this is a legal settlement, but also that an aboveboard commission will distribute the money to victims of the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the government. To borrow the previous president’s patois, that’s a lot of malarkey. This should not be mistaken for anything other than a daylight robbery of the United States Treasury.
Before Trump and Co. announced the fund and dropped the suit to ensure it would never see the inside of a courtroom, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams was weighing whether it cleared the minimal constitutional hurdle of amounting to a “case or controversy” that could even be considered. The trouble was that the plaintiff and the defendant were one and the same, meaning there could be no genuine dispute between them. Trump himself had admitted as much, noting at one point that it was “awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” You think?
The president also appears to have missed the usual statutory deadline for such a claim against the federal government, and the purported harm was done by a contractor rather than the IRS itself. Similar claims have yielded no such windfalls: Ken Griffin, a hedge-fund billionaire whose tax information was disclosed in the same leak, dropped his lawsuit against the IRS two years ago in exchange for an apology. Trump’s, meanwhile, yielded not only the 10-figure settlement, but also, for no identifiable legal or logical reason, protection from all government tax claims.
The disposition of the nearly $2 billion purloined from the public purse is similarly free of oversight. While Trump is supposed to be ruled out as a beneficiary, people and entities close to him are not. The members of the committee distributing the loot are to be hired by Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer turned acting attorney general, and may be fired by the president at will. Nor is there any provision for disclosing the beneficiaries or challenging the payouts. Congress, to which the Constitution gives authority over federal funds, is not involved.
This is obviously a vehicle for Trump to enrich his allies, his foot soldiers, and ultimately himself — with our money. The pardoned Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists are already jockeying for their piece of the proceeds, which will thereby reward past crimes and encourage future subversions of law and democracy on Trump’s behalf.
This brazen theft of taxpayer money might be the apotheosis of corruption under a president who was already historic on that score. Trump has leveraged his office to peddle watches, sneakers, and overpriced Bibles; profiteered from federal and foreign government payments to his properties; accepted a jumbo jet as a gift from a petro-dictatorship; pardoned campaign contributors and their close associates; taken shady investments in his dodgy cryptocurrency; and engaged in astonishingly active trading of stocks whose value he directly affects.
But none of that quite approaches the strong-arm mugging of Americans at hand. It’s a monarchical exercise of power beyond the reach of the branches established to check the executive. And it’s in the service of spending taxpayers’ money without the approval of our congressional representatives.
The fund’s only relationship with the founding is that it belongs in the kind of “long train of abuses and usurpations” the Declaration of Independence attributed to a king. There is no trace of the spirit of ’76 here, just its exorcism.
