One now often hears Donald Trump described as the most corrupt president in U.S. history. It may sound like hyperbole—just another extravagant insult from those afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—but it is the plain, well-documented truth. It may even be an understatement: Trump is not only the most corrupt U.S. president; he is more corrupt than all other corrupt presidents, including Richard Nixon, by orders of magnitude.
If this isn’t obvious to everyone, it’s partly because we tend to associate corruption with secrecy, and so much of Trump’s corruption is out in the open, with no effort made to conceal or deny it. Did he accept a $400 million plane from Qatar, to be turned (at great public expense) into the new Air Force One? Yes, of course he did! “I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’… I thought it was a great gesture.” Never mind the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. Has he issued pardons and commutations for dozens of white-collar criminals who made large donations to his campaign? He has, and what of it? They were all victims of “lawfare,” like Trump himself. In Trumpland, prison is for immigrants and plebes, not for rich businessmen and elected officials on the make. Has the Trump administration done favors for foreign governments that have invested money in his family’s cryptocurrency business? Have lucrative government contracts been awarded to companies Trump’s sons are involved with? Has his Justice Department dropped cases against a powerful Indian billionaire who promised to invest money in the United States and a mayor who promised to cooperate with ICE? Yes, yes, and yes. With little pretense and without apology.
But all this shameless venality pales in comparison with the creation of a $1.776 billion (in honor of the United States’ semiquincentennial) “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate Trump allies and henchmen who claim to have been wronged by the Biden Justice Department, including those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The fund was established as part of a “settlement” between Trump’s Justice Department and Trump’s Internal Revenue Service after the president and his sons agreed to drop a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for failing to prevent the leak of their tax returns to The New York Times and ProPublica. As part of this peculiar “settlement”—between two parties that both ultimately answer to Trump—the president also agreed to drop his demand that the DOJ pay him $115 million in damages for an FBI investigation of his mishandling of classified material and another $115 million for an earlier investigation into possible coordination between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russian intelligence agents. Money from the new fund is to be doled out to the victims of Democratic “weaponization” by a panel whose five members will serve at the pleasure of the president. As The New York Times notes, the fund “appeared to contradict a specific policy instituted by the Trump administration last year under former Attorney General Pam Bondi that largely prohibited payments to groups not involved in an underlying lawsuit.”
Administration officials insist that neither the president nor his family will receive any money from the new fund, but the day after the deal was announced, Trump’s acting attorney general and former criminal defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, inserted an addendum stating that the IRS would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his businesses. Immunity from all future prosecution for tax violations is potentially more valuable to Trump than any direct payment from his new slush fund.
Such flagrant self-dealing is an obvious and outrageous abuse of presidential power. Even some Republican officials who usually stand by Trump no matter what he says or does have distanced themselves from the “settlement.” Senate majority leader John Thune has said that he is “not a big fan” of the new fund, which is South Dakotan for “it stinks to high heaven.” The Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, resigned as soon as the deal was announced so that he wouldn’t have to oversee this highly irregular disbursement of taxpayer money to insurrectionists and other MAGA martyrs. Two police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 have already sued the Trump administration to block the fund, arguing that it lacks congressional authorization.
In the wake of Watergate, the Justice Department established a Public Integrity Section tasked with investigating corrupt public officials at every level of government. When Trump began his second term, there were about forty lawyers working in the section; today there are only two. In the same period, the number of cases the section was working on went from about two hundred to twenty. It can reasonably be assumed that Trump’s new slush fund will not occasion the twenty-first. Theoretically, Congress could still rein Trump in. But with the GOP in control of both the House and Senate, that would now require the cooperation of Republican lawmakers more loyal to the Constitution and their constituents than to the unhinged grifter who has hijacked their party. It remains an open question how many such Republicans are left. The good news is that only a few are needed. The better news is that the midterm elections are just around the corner, and the president has just handed Democrats yet another issue to campaign on.
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