President Donald Trump’s new $1.776 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration is the kind of scheme that might once have irrevocably stained a presidency.
Yet Trump has spent years shattering ethical expectations surrounding his office. His brazen leadership has long shed the power to shock.
Still, the plan, announced by the Justice Department on Monday and denounced by critics as a slush fund, is a study of his political project in microcosm.
It exemplifies several of Trump’s cardinal rules across two presidencies: harbor grudges, never admit defeat, and always seek retribution.
Trump’s belief that he was uniquely persecuted because of his politics remains a burning motivating force despite his sidelining of criminal probes against him by winning back the presidency.
In his business career, Trump was a prolific litigant and was party to countless lawsuits. During his criminal cases in recent years, he used his rights to their full extent to successfully delay cases against him. Now, in his self-awarded capacity as the nation’s top law enforcement official, he’s stretching the legal system in a new and highly controversial way.
The fund also exemplifies another prominent characteristic of Trump’s administration — a desire, demonstrated many times, to use the power of the presidency to punish foes and reward friends. It reflects an article of faith among Trump’s narrowed-down inner circle that he was victimized by probes into his first campaign’s contact with Russians; over his refusal to concede the 2020 election; and over the business activities of his family and the Trump Organization.
Ultimately, the idea is another of the vast executive power grabs that define his second term: Trump is claiming the authority to use vast amounts of taxpayer cash to distribute according to his own desires.
The plan comes with a patina of legitimacy. It will include a commission of five members to make adjudications on claims. But Trump will have the power to fire any of them. This structure emulates his packing of the entities that rubber-stamped his transformation of the Kennedy Center and his plans to build a massive ballroom on the site of the destroyed White House East Wing.
But the president insisted he was interested only in making up for a “terrible period of time” in US history.
“This is reimbursing people that were horribly treated,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “They’re getting reimbursed for their legal fees and the other things that they had to suffer.”
Trump supporters storm the US Capito on January 6, 2021.Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Another assault on democracy, rooted in January 6
If the plan goes ahead, it will be seen by critics as yet another attempt by Trump to gut the institutions and traditions of American democracy.
This is because it seems likely that Trump supporters who were convicted over the January 6, 2021, onslaught on the Capitol and who disrupted the certification of a democratic election not only will be eligible for an apology from the US government, but also may get a payoff from law-abiding taxpayers.
On his first day in office, Trump granted sweeping clemency to more than 1,000 people charged in the attack, and pardoned or commuted the sentences of everyone convicted of January 6-related crimes, including hundreds who were found guilty of assaulting police or other violent crimes.
Trump has spent years trying to erase that day of infamy from history. Now he may enrich those who helped perpetrate it.
The compensation fund, like many of Trump’s policies, will almost certainly trigger an immediate and fierce legal battle that might end up before the Supreme Court. And, typically, it seems to ignore the fundamental constitutional principle that Congress decides how to spend the people’s money. It is not in the president’s remit.
Trump often told rallygoers during his 2024 presidential campaign that “I am your retribution.” So this is a campaign promise fulfilled. It emerged from a settlement from an audacious $10 billion lawsuit the president filed against the US government claiming the IRS failed to protect Trump and the Trump Organization over an unauthorized leak of his and his firm’s tax returns. As absurd as it might seem to critics, he can argue that he’s taken a financial hit himself to reward those who stood by him.
This also recalls Trump’s many gambits designed to goad the Washington establishment and the press. It will allow conservative media to whip up a construct of the president again defying entrenched power centers his supporters hate. Using this device to enliven the base — as Trump must do before the midterms — has often worked before.
Still, the unveiling of the fund at a fraught moment of Trump’s second term, when his approval ratings are at historic lows, is a big political risk. It may be the latest indicator of a bunker-dwelling administration that has lost its once-uncanny touch for the fulcrum of public opinion. Or it may reveal a president who will use maximum power, as long as he has it, for political gain and profit.
President Donald Trump speaks during a healthcare affordability event at the White House on Monday.Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images
Does Trump have a point?
There’s another classic Trump trait revealed by this latest unconventional move. Often, the president asks questions that others won’t — though he frequently obliterates honest debate with a nuclear political response.
On one level, it’s fair to ask whether Trump and the Trump Organization got more scrutiny in a fraud case that it lost than other New York businesses because of who they were. (An appeals court last year threw out a roughly $500 million judgment against the president, his sons and the firm. But it did not overturn the verdict.) The case was hyper-politicized from the start, since New York Attorney General Letitia James had made no secret of her disdain for the Trumps.
Historians may also debate whether the Biden Justice Department was overzealous in charging rank-and-file Trump supporters who entered the Capitol on January 6, as opposed to the ringleaders, far-right activists and others caught on camera in criminal acts.
Still, these cases were adjudicated by a genuine legal process. No equivalent legitimacy can be expected from the DOJ compensation board.
Indeed, the fund epitomizes the way the department has been transformed from a quasi-independent law enforcement agency into a tool of Trump’s political aspirations. It is run by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney during two federal cases brought against his boss by special counsel Jack Smith over election-meddling and hoarding of classified documents. Time ran out before justice was served either way in those cases, as they fell by the wayside when he returned to the presidency. Trump has pleaded not guilty in every criminal and civil case against him.
The way the DOJ may try to use the new plan may be foreshadowed by its previous efforts to offer restitution to Trump supporters.
In March, it agreed to pay more than $1 million in an agreement with Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser who sued for wrongful prosecution. In a criminal case brought in 2017, Flynn admitted to lying to the FBI about his interactions with then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak, and in a Justice Department disclosure regarding his lobbying firm’s work for Turkey a year earlier. He agreed at the time to cooperate in the Mueller investigation. Trump pardoned him in 2020.
The DOJ also reached a settlement with former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who sued the DOJ and FBI over flawed government surveillance he faced due to his Russian contacts in 2016.
President Donald Trump arrives for a “Rose Garden Club” dinner at the White House on May 11.Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images
Blanche said in a statement Monday that “the machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.”
The department said there would be “no partisan requirements to file a claim” before the cutoff date of December 15, 2028 — a month before Trump’s second term ends. But a commission under the threat of dismissal from Trump seems unlikely to reward anyone but his friends.
Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, lambasted a “shakedown of every taxpayer.” He added: “This is a corrupt, circular transaction which could allow the president to essentially write checks to his friends with public money.”
Monday’s announcement is already causing huge political blowback.
Democrats are bolstering their portrait of what they say is a lawless president who leads an administration wallowing in corruption.
Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee filed a suit to block the Trump settlement with the Internal Revenue Service from which the compensation fund springs. Among their arguments was the claim that only Congress has the power to appropriate federal dollars.
Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden accused Trump of setting up a “$1.7 billion slush fund for right-wing political violence.” He wrote on X that if “Trump follows through, it will be the most brazen theft of taxpayer dollars by any president in history.”
All this puts Republicans in a familiar vise.
Do they defend a president who is beloved by their base, but who keeps taking steps that further harm their own political fortunes? Or do they break with him and risk his fury, which still has the power to destroy GOP careers?
History suggests there’s only one answer.
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