Donald Trump has been thinking a lot about his place in history. That’s one of the reasons, according to recent reporting by The Atlantic and The Times, why he’s paying so little attention to his plummeting popularity and so much attention to remodeling Washington in his own image. But there’s no arch high enough, no ballroom gilded enough, to distract from the mountain of corruption he’s constructing.
This week’s announcement of a $1.8 billion government slush fund — ostensibly for victims of what Mr. Trump has called the Justice Department’s “weaponization,” but almost certainly destined for his allies — guarantees it. The president may wish to be considered in the same class as Napoleon or Alexander the Great, but he is in danger of turning himself into the next Mobutu Sese Seko or Mohamed Suharto: a kleptocrat remembered not for his ideas, not for his power, but for his greed.
Mr. Trump has devoted a large portion of his second term to enriching himself and his family with foreign and private funds: the crypto deals, the rapid-fire stock trades, the Boeing 747 he accepted as a gift from Qatar. But until recently, there was no evidence that his most brazen capers involved taking actively, directly from you and me. That changed when he, two of his sons, and the Trump family business sued the U.S. government for $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns.
In effect, Mr. Trump, the private citizen, was suing President Trump, the head of the executive branch. He didn’t bother to pretend it made sense: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he quipped to reporters. Surprise, surprise, that settlement was really sweet. The 10-figure “anti-weaponization fund” is a new low: Mr. Trump plunging his bruised hands into public accounts and scooping out money.
Trump supporters convicted of crimes connected to the Jan. 6 riots could get large spoonfuls. But the Trump clan looks to be the biggest beneficiaries of all: As part of the settlement, the U.S. government is barred from prosecuting or further auditing the taxes of the Trumps or their family business. That saves the Trumps from penalties that some estimate could have reached as high as $100 million or beyond. More than that, it functionally puts the family beyond the reach of the law in these tax cases. The order is intended to last, according to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, “FOREVER.”
As the details of the arrangement were being announced, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court quit.
“Just in terms of sheer dollars, this is the most corrupt action in American history,” says Brendan Ballou, a former Justice Department special counsel. He’s representing a pair of police officers injured during the Capitol riots who are suing in federal court to stop the fund. “This may be the most infamous thing that Donald Trump does beyond Jan. 6, 2021.”
Mr. Trump is the defining political figure of the last decade. But despite his enormous influence, he’s had relatively few legacy-making accomplishments. As the Times Opinion columnist Ezra Klein has noted, Mr. Trump has preferred, especially in this second term, not to enact sweeping policies, but to make small-bore deals — especially if those bargains require the other side to bend the knee. He’s bullied specific schools, rather than remaking the educational system; and cut bargains with a few drug retailers, rather than recasting the U.S. government’s relationship with Big Pharma. He hasn’t been able to break NATO, not yet. And thankfully, his administration is a long way from millions of deportations. (So far, only Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and their warped decisions have amounted to truly historical changes.)
But openly monetizing the presidency — that’s a true Trump innovation. You have to go back at least a hundred years, to the administrations of Warren Harding or Ulysses Grant, to find anything remotely similar. And no one ever accused President Harding of minting memecoins. “This isn’t the ‘honest graft’ of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement,” the Times’ Jamelle Bouie noted. “It is petty theft.”
Mr. Trump has already pardoned convicted criminals after receiving donations on their behalf. The electric car executive Trevor Milton gave nearly a million dollars to a pro-Trump group before getting the good news. The convicted tax cheat Paul Walczak’s successful pardon application cited his mother’s fund-raising for Mr. Trump. Meanwhile, a cottage industry has arisen of Trump cronies who leverage their access on behalf of people seeking presidential pardons or commutations. The top entertainment executive Tim Leiweke was pardoned after the Fox News host Trey Gowdy and an attorney for Mr. Leiweke brought up Mr. Leiweke’s case over a round of golf with the president.
This new slush fund — set up with minimal guardrails, not even a definition of what constitutes “weaponization” — could take all the ethical disasters of the pardon market and multiply it by, well, 1.8 billion. Just think what people might be willing to do to get this money, and what Mr. Trump might get in return.
This fund would institutionalize that ethical disaster. Forget the one-off deals or the handshakes at the 18th hole. This would make cronyism an official function of the federal government, a U.S. Agency for Corruption.
MAGA die-hards like the election-denying MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell and the political operative Michael Caputo are already expressing interest in cash from the kitty. Some of Mr. Trump’s most dangerous supporters are likely to jump in behind them.
“The primary risk is that this money is going to be used to fund paramilitary organizations that are loyal to the president,” Mr. Ballou said. “The financial support for violence, that is going to be the most important thing, and it’s fundamentally new and different from, say, the Qatari jet.”
That could include the five members of the Proud Boys who sued the government for $100 million last year, claiming “political persecution” after their conviction for their role in the Jan. 6 riot in which 140 law enforcement officers were injured. It could also include the heads of the Oath Keepers, a group with an even longer record of violence.
The self-described “American terrorist” Andrew Paul Johnson was convicted of his role in the Capitol riots, pardoned by Trump and subsequently found guilty of molesting two children. To silence his victims, he is said to have promised them a share of the millions he said he was about to get from the federal government for being a “Jan. 6er.”
On Tuesday, Democratic senators asked Mr. Blanche for assurances that an abusive felon like Mr. Johnson or an extremist group like the Oath Keepers would be barred from receiving payments from the $1.8 billion fund. Mr. Blanche declined, saying the decision would be up to a five-person commission. (All five members will be appointed by him, Mr. Blanche noted, and Mr. Trump has the power to fire any at will.)
If political violence committed in the president’s name is not only tolerated but actively rewarded, it could take this already bleak timeline somewhere much, much darker.
What could stop such a scenario from coming to pass is how legally questionable it all appears to be. As a former deputy assistant attorney general, Harry Litman, has pointed out, federal lawsuits require a conflict between two parties, a hurdle the “conflict” between Mr. and President Trump wouldn’t seem to clear. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution bars the government from paying “any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States,” which would appear to bar payments to people who attacked the Capitol in an effort to overturn an election. The Hyde Amendment of 1997 allows for people who have prevailed against malicious charges by the government to sue and recoup funds, but “it can’t apply to the insurrectionists who were all rightly convicted,” said Jason Manning, a former Justice Department prosecutor who tried both Jan. 6 and fraud cases. Hence the value to Mr. Trump, Mr. Manning said, of “a slush fund divorced from law.”
So maybe this particular scheme gets blocked by the courts. Either way, Mr. Trump’s scheming will define him and his family. When he leaves office, the Trump name will most likely be stripped from the Kennedy Center. The challenge coins he’s affixed to the White House doors will no doubt be stripped away. His “enhancements” to the Oval Office may eventually be remodeled away. All that will be left is his reputation. Mr. Trump has made that synonymous with corruption forever.
Noah Shachtman, a contributing Opinion writer, writes frequently about government corruption.
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