President Donald Trump just suffered one of the biggest self-inflicted wounds of his second term, according to one legal expert.
On Tuesday, sources inside the Trump administration claimed that the $1.776 billion so-called “anti-weaponization” fund had effectively been killed after Trump met with Republican leaders at the White House. The fund was created as part of a settlement between Trump’s Department of Justice and the IRS over the president’s leaked tax returns. It sought to pay claims by people who alleged they had been improperly prosecuted by the government, and multiple of Trump’s allies had publicly said they would seek payments. Both Republicans and Democrats sharply criticized the idea.
Harry Litman, a former federal prosecutor, argued in a new Substack essay that Trump’s retreat on the anti-weaponization fund showed that Trump knew he was “pinned between a rock and a hard place.” But it also represents another public defeat for a president whose brand is built on bravado and winning.
“So the parameters of the retreat remain unclear as of this writing. It may be a full capitulation. It may be a tactical pause dressed up as a concession. Either way, as a matter of political reality, it is a humiliation—the administration’s biggest self-inflicted wound of Trump 2.0, now compounded by a very public retreat,” Litman wrote.
Litman argued that the fund had become “politically radioactive” after reporters began asking Republicans whether they supported paying people convicted of assaulting police officers during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
He also warned that Trump may take some “serious lumps” from the MAGA base as the midterms approach because of the retreat.
“Trump is backing down precisely because the politics of supporting them became untenable—it is they whom Trump is plainly abandoning,” Litman wrote. “All of that amounts to a richly deserved comeuppance for Trump’s staggering audacity in trying to make the American people not just pardon but financially reward the most serious assault on American democracy since the Civil War.”
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