It is a sick joke on America’s history that Donald Trump chose the amount of $1.776 billion to bilk from taxpayers to pay his MAGA friends.
He has already picked a sport with a fragile hold on the rules—UFC—to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary with a cage fight at the White House on June 14.
Now the president is using 1776—the year the thirteen colonies declared independence from Great Britain—to frame an unprecedented challenge to the U.S. Constitution, which has been the nation’s guiding light for 237 of those 250 years.
By forcing through a self-serving settlement in his $10 billion case against the Internal Revenue Service, Trump has dangerously blurred the separation of powers that has governed the United States through 46 presidencies, including his own first term.
The blatancy leaves you breathless, because in Trump’s IRS lawsuit, he was effectively both the plaintiff and the defendant.
And by manipulating the proceedings, he ended up being the judge.
The sordid tale began with Trump once again breaking with presidential tradition and refusing to release his tax returns, right back in 2015. When the documents were leaked to the New York Times in 2019, Trump, his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, and the family organization complained that the IRS was negligent for allowing a former contractor to leak them.
The Trumps were not the only billionaires who were annoyed that their taxes were made public.
Billionaire Ken Griffin was among the wealthy taxpayers, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, whose taxes were also leaked. Griffin sued the government in December 2022 for failing to prevent the leak. The DoJ initially fought the case, insisting the lawsuit should be dismissed because the contractor was not a federal employee.
Griffin won an apology from the IRS in June, 2024.
Ethical questions were raised the moment Trump filed his $10 billion lawsuit in January under the same code that Griffin cited, which allows taxpayers to seek redress from the government if their private records are illegally made public.
The Trumps argued in their suit that the IRS’s failure caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”
The contractor who leaked Trump’s taxes, Charles Littlejohn, was jailed for five years in 2023.
But the judge appointed to oversee the Trump lawsuit had a more fundamental decision to make, even before she could decide on whether the president and his family had been wronged by the leak.
Judge Kathleen M. Williams, of the Southern District of Florida—an Obama appointee—was reportedly considering dismissing Trump’s lawsuit for the simple reason that his personal lawyers were bringing the case, and his government lawyers were responding to it.
According to the New York Times, she had given both teams of Trump lawyers—personal and government—until this Wednesday to explain how it was all supposed to work when they were all reporting to the same person.
But the judge was rendered helpless on Monday when Trump announced he was withdrawing his lawsuit. At the same time, Todd Blanche, the president’s hand-picked acting attorney general—and his former defense attorney—announced that a settlement in the case had been agreed to create an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to feed money to allies of the president who feel they have been wronged by the (Biden) government.
It is, of course, a cause close to Trump’s heart. He remains bitter over being targeted on multiple criminal and civil counts after his first term.
“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,” said Blanche, in a statement. “As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”
Democrats jumped on the arrangement, describing it as “highway robbery” and accusing the DoJ of “colluding” with the president.
“Never in the history of the United States has a sitting president sought a monetary settlement from the government he leads, let alone sought many billions of dollars in taxpayer funds,” they wrote in a lawsuit seeking to block the deal.
Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden said if the creation of the fund was allowed to move forward, it would be the “most brazen theft and abuse of taxpayer dollars by any president in American history.”
As for Trump, he will receive an apology but no compensation from the fund, the Justice Department said.
We have become all too used to the president’s grifting. He makes no secret of the ways he has enriched himself and his family during his years in office.
But if he can take the rule of law and turn it upside down, we are in real trouble.
Trump has already shown his disdain for elections he doesn’t win and Supreme Court decisions he doesn’t agree with. Now he is running roughshod through the legal system.
The question must be asked. If we cannot rely on America’s rule of law, what do we have left?
1,776 reasons why Trump should be impeached.
