How to Rob Taxpayers of $1.8 Billion Without Really TryingStart by completely bypassing Congress and the Constitution.
For the second time in two months, Donald Trump is walking back maximalist threats against Iran by claiming another nation talked him out of an attack he was totally going to make. In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump said that the Emir of Qatar, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and the president of the United Arab Emirates had asked him to “hold off on our planned Military attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran” in the hope that “a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America, as well as all Countries in the Middle East, and beyond.” Hope springs eternal! Happy Tuesday. Bill and Andrew will be on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT for Morning Shots Live. See you there!
Trump’s Ultra-Corrupt Settlement Fund Is Even Worse Than We Thoughtby Andrew Egger When I wrote Friday about the news that Donald Trump was about to drop his $10 billion IRS lawsuit in exchange for the creation of a $1.776 billion taxpayer-cash slush fund for his allies who claim the Biden administration “weaponized” the law against them, I noted that nothing was yet set in stone. At that moment, it still seemed possible that this obscene settlement—Trump’s biggest, most lawless, most brazen theft of taxpayer cash yet—might yet give them cold feet. But no: Yesterday, they made the thing official. In fact, it’s somehow even worse than advertised. It’s impossible to overstate this basic fact: Everything about the settlement fund, from the circumstances of its creation to the claims it makes about its own enforcement, is deliberately structured to short-circuit all outside accountability, government oversight, or judicial review. As I wrote Friday, there was a reason Trump’s guys (who happened to be both the plaintiffs and the defendants in the case) were hustling to reach the settlement quickly: The judge in the IRS case had been signaling her suspicion that Trump and his government were not actually on opposite sides of the claim, suggesting she was considering throwing out the case altogether. If they wanted to carry out the heist, time was of the essence. The Justice Department’s enforcement order, released yesterday, and the settlement terms released last night carry on in this dubious fashion. According to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the United States loses custody and control of the $1.776 billion the minute it hits the settlement account created for the purpose: “Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account,” he wrote in the order, “the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.” Meanwhile, the terms of the settlement fund make clear that the money’s disbursement—which, again, Trump’s United States government is trying to wash its hands of any liability for—will be a complete black box. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund shall have the power to determine its own procedures for submitting, receiving, processing, and granting or denying claims,” the settlement reads. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund may make those procedures public in whole or in part, at its discretion.” Not only can the fund’s members keep secret how they’re making disbursement decisions, they can also keep a lid on who’s getting paid. The requirements for this are astonishingly open-ended: “To be eligible for relief,” the settlement states, a claimant must merely “assert at least one legal claim stating that the claimant was a victim of Lawfare and/or Weaponization.” Meanwhile, the only person the fund’s administrations will be required to brief on who got how much money is the attorney general—in a “confidential written report,” and even then only quarterly. The cherry on top of this shit settlement sundae is this claim: “Because the claims process is voluntary, there shall be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which is stated to be “enforceable and challengeable solely by Plaintiffs, Defendants, and the United States”—in other words, by Trump, Trump, and Trump. The first opportunity to head off this disaster seems already to have passed. Nearly a hundred Democratic lawmakers signed an amicus brief filed in court Monday urging the judge not to dismiss the case as the parties requested, but to insist on weighing in on the terms of the settlement. But Judge Kathleen Williams ruled in a brief order yesterday that she lacked the power to do this—the settlement agreement was never docketed in the case, she said, so she had no authority to adjudicate it. Once again, then, Trump’s aptitude for unprecedented shamelessness seems to have exposed yet another piece of our government that ultimately runs on the honor system: If a corrupt president wants to dip into the Treasury for literally any purpose whatsoever, all he has to do is sue the government, then settle with himself outside of court to create a payout fund for whatever purpose he might desire. “It is Congress who appropriates money and it is the executive who spends it,” Matt Platkin, the former attorney general of New Jersey who is representing the Democratic lawmakers in the suit, told The Bulwark yesterday. “Put aside all of the potential corruption with this case—if the president can just sue himself and then settle with himself . . . and then spend huge amounts of money outside of that appropriations process, why would any president ever go to Congress for money ever again?” It’s a great point—and one that reminds us that, ultimately, the responsibility for reining in this rampaging president falls not with the courts, but with Congress. It is not just the courts but Congress as well that Trump is cutting out of the loop with his obscene and indefensible settlement. Even here, Trump requires at least the legislature’s tacit permission to spend this money: They could pass a bill today to block a penny of that money from going out the door. Because of the funhouse-mirror world we live in and the villainous, power-hungry president we have, that bill would need to have the supermajority support required to overcome a presidential veto, but they do still have the power, if only they were to choose to exercise it. But that funhouse-mirror reality is enough to prove on its own that just blocking the money wouldn’t go far enough. Trump is not merely asserting the power to jailbreak $1.8 billion from the Treasury to parcel out to his fans and allies. He is trying to create an upside-down new status quo where his single say-so is enough to overturn the will of two thirds of Congress minus one on all spending matters that really, really matter to him. It’s utterly un-American. It’s emperor stuff. If they had a shred of dignity left, they’d impeach the son of a bitch today. Trump’s Shrinking, Aging GOPby William Kristol In the great 1939 movie Ninotchka, Greta Garbo plays Nina Ivanovna “Ninotchka” Yakushova, a stern and committed (if young and beautiful!) Soviet apparatchik sent abroad on a sensitive state mission. At one point, the rather disturbing question of Stalin’s show trials and executions comes up. The loyal Ninotchka is unfazed. “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians,” she explains. Donald Trump’s Republican party, like Joseph Stalin’s Communist Party, has many loyalists committed to faithfully executing the bosses’ orders. They include high-ranking United States senators like majority leader John Thune, who is laboring this week to deliver votes for Trump’s ballroom. And they include primary voters like those in Louisiana who last weekend purged Bill Cassidy for the sin of crossing Trump five years ago. And tonight we’ll find out if Republicans in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District follow the lead of their counterparts in Louisiana, punishing Rep. Thomas Massie for incurring Trump’s displeasure, in this case by insisting on accountability for the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. It is, as Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday, Trump’s party. The new New York Times/Siena poll shows Trump with the approval of 37 percent of all Americans, with 59 percent disapproving. But 76 percent of Republicans and Republican learners continue to approve of their leader, with only 19 percent breaking ranks. What’s more, a majority of Republican voters still want their next presidential candidate to follow Trump’s lead rather than move in a new direction. But the younger you are, the less likely you are to be a true believer. Just 61 percent of Republican voters under 45 approve of Trump, while 33 percent disapprove. By contrast, among those 45 and up, 83 percent approve and just 13 percent disapprove. Only a third of younger Republicans want the next nominee to follow Trump’s lead, by contrast with two-thirds of their parents and grandparents. And polling for today’s primary in Kentucky shows a massive generation gap, with older voters in overwhelming support of Trump’s choice, and younger voters willing to buck Trump’s orders. So it is Trump’s party. But Trump’s party does seem to be an aging one and a shrinking one. Which brings us back to Ninotchka. As the stern young Communist is exposed in Paris to the charms of the West (and of the debonair Count Léon d’Algout), she loses her faith. She discovers life beyond Stalinism, falls in love with the Count, and after various entertaining plot twists, she ends up living happily with the Count, having fled Stalin’s Russia. Real life, sadly, does not always follow the path of romantic comedy. But sometimes it does. And there do seem to be a fair number of young Republican Ninotchkas ready to defect from Trumpism. If only Democrats could learn to be as charming and seductive as Count Léon d’Algout! AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsMAKE AMERICA PFAS AGAIN: As early as October 2024, Donald Trump was already reassuring his base—and more to the point, his industrialist supporters—that there were limits to how far he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” project go. “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines,” Trump said that month at his Madison Square Garden rally. “The only thing I don’t think I’m going to let him even get near is the liquid gold that we have under our feet.” Trump would end up carving out a lot more exceptions than that. Even as Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has campaigned loudly against the number of harmful chemicals modern Americans eat, drink, and breathe, other parts of the government keep quietly working to roll back controls on some of those very same chemicals. Earlier this year, the administration took a series of actions intended to protect U.S. production of the weedkiller glyphosate—aka Roundup. And this week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to roll back Biden-era limits on four types of “forever chemicals” in drinking water. WaPo has more:
That’s our Frankenstein federal government for you: Depending which cabinet secretary you ask, fluoride should stay out of our drinking water, while PFAS can stay in. Read the whole thing. FUN WITH BALLOTS: How might Donald Trump try to meddle in this year’s midterm elections? There are all sorts of catastrophic interventions he might try. But it’s safe to say that, at a minimum, he’ll take any election-administration mistakes states might make—no matter how innocuous or how minor—and flog them mercilessly to convince his base there’s more Democratic election-stealing underway. We got a small taste of that yesterday, after Trump got wind of an administrative error in Maryland last week that resulted in a vendor mailing some voters the wrong party’s primary ballots. The error was more of a headache for administrators than anything else, requiring them to mail out an additional batch of mail-in ballots. “While it is possible only a small number of voters received the wrong ballot,” the state Board of Elections said in a statement, “and most voters received the correct ballot, all voters must be issued a replacement ballot.” Nobody has put forward any theory for how this mixup—which temporarily put a batch of Democratic ballots in the hands of registered Republicans who can’t use them¹ and vice versa—might have resulted in partisan advantage for either party. Nevertheless, the president saw fit to pop off on Truth Social with a lie-studded outburst promising a Justice Department investigation:
“I’m sure this has gone on for years,” the president concluded. “I’m going to ask the Attorney General of the United States, and the DOJ, to bring an immediate investigation into this situation.” You know, like they do in healthy democracies. Cheap Shots
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Maryland has closed primaries, which means that only registered members of a specific party may vote in that party’s primaries. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletters or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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