# **THE KING’S TREASURY**

## **Trump’s $1.8 Billion Monument to Corruption**

Donald Trump is attempting to seize **$1.776 billion in public money** and transform it into a reward fund for his political followers, criminal allies and professional grievance merchants.

Let us dispense with the powdered language of Washington. This is not an “anti-weaponization initiative.” It is not a victims’ compensation program. It is not an effort to restore public trust.

**It is corruption designed in broad daylight, printed on government stationery and defended with the vocabulary of revenge.**

The proposed fund was born from an extraordinary settlement involving Trump’s own $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. Trump sued the government he now controls, and his own Justice Department negotiated an agreement creating a $1.776 billion fund that could benefit people claiming they were victims of “lawfare” or government “weaponization.” The settlement also included sweeping protections against certain IRS audits involving Trump, his relatives and his companies.

In any functioning republic, this arrangement would produce alarms loud enough to crack the Capitol dome.

The president is a party to a lawsuit against the government. His appointees control the department defending the government. His administration negotiates the settlement. The settlement creates a nearly $1.8 billion pot of taxpayer money that could compensate his allies. It also shields his financial empire from specified tax scrutiny.

Then Trump tells the country this is justice.

It is not justice. **It is the behavior of a ruler who no longer recognizes any meaningful boundary between the public treasury and his personal political interests.**

The money would come from the federal Judgment Fund, a permanent appropriation used to pay judgments and settlements against the United States. Congress would not have to appropriate the $1.776 billion through the ordinary annual budget process. The proposed fund would be controlled by five members appointed by the attorney general, with one selected in consultation with congressional leadership. Trump could remove any member without cause.

The panel could establish its own procedures. It could decide how claims are filed, evaluated, approved or rejected. It could choose whether to make those procedures public in whole, in part or not at all. Its decisions would not be subject to appeal, arbitration or judicial review.

Read those provisions again.

A president proposes taking nearly $1.8 billion from the Treasury. His attorney general appoints the people who distribute it. The president can remove them. The panel can devise its own rules, conceal portions of those rules and issue decisions that cannot be appealed.

Calling this a slush fund almost insults the sophistication of the scheme. **A slush fund is crude. This is a patronage system wearing a necktie.**

Among the potential claimants are Trump allies who say they were unfairly investigated or prosecuted, including people associated with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The fund’s criteria would allow consideration of prison time, legal expenses and alleged damages resulting from what applicants call “lawfare” or “weaponization.”

This turns accountability upside down.

People who attacked the constitutional transfer of power could be invited to present themselves as victims. People prosecuted for their conduct could be compensated because the president dislikes the prosecutions. The government would no longer merely pardon loyalists. It could apologize to them and pay them.

The police officers beaten at the Capitol received injuries. The American people received shame. Trump’s followers might receive checks.

No moral vocabulary is adequate for such an inversion except the simplest one: **evil**.

Evil does not always arrive carrying a weapon. Sometimes it arrives carrying a legal memorandum. Sometimes it hides behind administrative language, committee appointments and appropriations jargon. Its essential act remains the same: it takes what belongs to everyone and uses it to serve the appetite of one man.

Trump’s own conduct has exposed the political purpose. On Friday, July 31, he declared the fund “dead.” One day later, he threatened to revive it if Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis refused to support Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general.

The fund therefore became a bargaining weapon.

Support Trump’s attorney general, and perhaps the fund disappears. Resist him, and he will push to restore it. What was supposedly a solemn mechanism for compensating injustice became leverage in a Senate confirmation fight overnight.

Justice does not switch on and off according to whether two senators obey the president. A genuine victims’ fund does not rise from the dead whenever Donald Trump needs a club. His reversal revealed the truth: **the money is not about principle. It is about power, loyalty and retaliation.**

Even Republican senators have recognized the stench. Tillis described the proposal as a “payout pot,” while Cornyn demanded written limits on both the fund and the audit protections. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking its creation, finding it problematic that taxpayer money could be used to favor an extremely small group connected to conduct many Americans consider unacceptable. Another judge ordered scrutiny of the underlying settlement after 35 retired federal judges alleged that it resulted from collusion and constituted a fraud upon the court.

This is no longer a dispute between Democrats and Republicans. It is a test of whether the United States still understands the difference between a republic and a court ruled by royal favor.

Kings once rewarded loyal knights with land seized from the crown’s enemies. Dictators grant monopolies, pardons and government contracts to their inner circles. Political machines hand out jobs and envelopes. Trump’s innovation is to combine these ancient corruptions with the machinery of the modern federal government.

He has built his political identity around grievance. Every investigation is persecution. Every conviction is conspiracy. Every critic is a traitor. Every defeat is fraud. Every loyalist is a martyr.

Now he wants taxpayers to finance the mythology.

The fund would make grievance profitable. It would tell every future Trump operative that loyalty may be rewarded even after prosecution, imprisonment or disgrace. Break the law in service of the leader, maintain the proper story, call yourself a victim, and the government may eventually compensate you.

**This is how democratic institutions rot.**

They rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. They are hollowed out gradually, as personal loyalty replaces public duty, euphemism replaces truth and citizens become too exhausted to remain outraged. Each abuse establishes permission for the next. Each surrender becomes precedent.

People do not escape their choices; they become them. A nation that permits its treasury to become the personal reward chest of its president is choosing what kind of nation it will be.

Congress must prohibit the fund. The courts must continue examining the settlement. Every senator, Republican or Democrat, must be forced to vote publicly on whether Americans should finance compensation for the president’s allies while his family and businesses receive extraordinary protection from tax scrutiny.

No secret negotiations. No verbal assurances. No temporary declaration that the scheme is “dead.” Kill it legislatively, expose every document and identify every official who participated in constructing it.

Donald Trump is not seeking redress for injustice. He is trying to institutionalize vengeance and make the American people pay the bill.

**The Treasury belongs to the nation. It is not the king’s purse.**

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