Hello and happy Saturday. Does anyone else remember the kerfuffle over the Trump International Hotel in Washington from early in the first Trump administration? The hotel was located in the Old Post Office building, a federal property that the Trump Organization had leased in 2013 and continued to lease after Donald Trump became president. The idea that the president would benefit privately from an arrangement with an agency over which he had authority was scandalous, and we all got a nice little civics lesson on the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
That all feels a bit quaint in hindsight. On Monday, Trump settled a $10 billion lawsuit he had filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns in 2019. Under the settlement, the Department of Justice established a $1.776 billion fund “to issue formal apologies and monetary relief” to those “who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” While the terms of the settlement dictate that neither Trump nor any of his family members can benefit, he has broad control over who does. If that sounds a little funny to you, or you’re wondering who might be on the receiving end of our tax dollars, let Kevin D. Williamson explain:
Donald Trump has sued the Donald Trump administration over alleged wrongdoing by the Donald Trump administration, and an out-of-court settlement between Donald Trump and the Donald Trump administration will have Donald Trump’s DOJ ponying up the better part of $2 billion to be put into a fund controlled by Donald Trump and used for the benefit of—let’s check in here with dead-eyed White House trash panda J.D. Vance—“people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6th protests.”
On Tuesday, a day after the fund was announced, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal lawyer—issued an addendum to the settlement banning the IRS from ever auditing the past tax returns of Trump, his family, or their businesses. In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio had some thoughts on that:
One might assume that a taxpayer-funded payday for criminals wouldn’t look worse as details emerged, the concept already being as rotten as rotten gets. One would be wrong. For instance, did you know that the part of the settlement that bars the IRS from proceeding with any pending audits of the president’s tax returns might be worth more than $100 million to him?
Trump, a billionaire, paid a total of $750 in income tax in 2016 and $750 again in 2017. The taxman will henceforth take no notice of that fact.
Did you also know that, under federal law, the only official empowered to ask the IRS to terminate an audit is the attorney general? That was a problem for Trump in this case, per Andy McCarthy: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche used to be the president’s personal defense lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to recuse themselves in cases pitting their current client against a former one.
Blanche had an obvious conflict of interest. He ignored it and nuked Trump’s tax audits anyway.
Is there any way that any of this is legal? For that we turn to Sarah Isgur and David French at Advisory Opinions. On Thursday’s episode, they run through the ways that the settlement could possibly pass legal muster. Sarah starts by asking what, exactly, the agreement is. Is it a settlement to Trump, who sued as a private citizen? Is it a class action lawsuit? Or is it money for “future claimants”? Those could all potentially be legal under certain circumstances, they agree. But they also agree that none of those circumstances reflect what is going on with this weaponization fund. And Sarah shares an even bigger concern about the long-term consequences:
This to me feels like, if we’ve already ended the legislative power of Congress and handed that over to the president in the form of, you know, government by executive action and how bad that has been for the country in the last 15 years, this is the end of the power of the purse. The president will now have the power to legislate and the power to appropriate? We’re done.
On that cheery note, thanks for reading, and have a great weekend and Memorial Day.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who is poised to unseat Cornyn in a primary runoff next week, is the perfect specimen of a Trump-era Republican—a grotesque amalgam of personal, financial, political, and sexual corruption—who provides the definitive answer to a question that had been on many minds: Exactly how big of a putz does a Republican have to be to get himself impeached by Republicans in Texas? (The estranged wife who divorced Paxton on grounds of adultery—the adultery that helped to get him impeached—is a state senator who, bless her heart, declined to vote in favor of convicting the husband who betrayed her, sitting out his impeachment proceedings—and I suppose only Shaggy has the answer to that mystery.) Paxton is a buffoon and an incompetent and absolutely devoted to Donald Trump, another buffoon and incompetent. And Texans—enough of them—seem to love him for it. Texas goes through these phases from time to time. Imagine a rich, middle-aged car salesman who ditches his wife and starts dating a 21-year-old stripper with a meth problem, and then imagine that guy is a state—that’s Texas, Anno Domini 2026. With a slowing economy, rising prices, and the slow but steady creep of problems very similar to those facing other states—housing, infrastructure, etc.—Texas has some real issues facing it. It also has some imaginary issues facing it, such as the supposed takeover of … the Dallas suburbs … by Islamist radicals. Texas Republicans, having not very much useful to say about the real issues, currently are focused on the imaginary ones. Politically speaking, that is still working for Texas Republicans. For now.
Rep. Thomas Massie ran for reelection by railing against the “Epstein class,” Israel, and Israel supporters. The term “Epstein class” isn’t necessarily antisemitic or anti-Israel, but when it comes out of Massie’s mouth I think it is. Massie became a darling of a lot of mainstream progressives—including some who support Israel—because he defied Trump. His political sidekick, the execrable Rep. Ro Khanna, doesn’t call Massie “left-wing” but he might as well. Marjorie Taylor Greene has found ample Strange New Respect on the left for the same reason. The ranks of the younger apparatchiks of the GOP swell with mini-Massies and worse. Tim Miller of The Bulwark is no antisemite, but the ardor of his anti-Trump passion (which I obviously have some understanding of) has driven him to defend not just Hasan Piker, but Massie, and Israel bashers generally. And, once again, the double standard is amazing. Russia and China are settler-colonial imperial powers that can fairly be accused of, at minimum, cultural genocide (in Ukraine, in Xinjiang, in Tibet, etc). But Israel is the pariah that arouses passion. I get that pro-Israel groups and donors spent money on defeating Massie. Fine. Can you blame them? The echo with the 1930s is there if you’re willing to listen for it. Jews get targeted for persecution and elimination. Jews take offense and do something. Jews get attacked for doing what virtually any other group would do, and are treated as a uniquely insidious and manipulative undifferentiated blob of people for it.
On May 14, Bloomberg published an article reporting that Wall Street insiders were astonished by the amount of trades recorded by President Donald Trump between the beginning of January and the end of March, saying that “the volume of trading—more than 40 per day over a three-month period—stands out as much as the potential dollar value.” But while the more than 3,600 trades reported by Trump during the period is indeed much greater than the volume expected from a typical investor, that quantity and frequency of trading is not uncommon among ultra-high net worth individuals like Trump and is not alone evidence of insider trading, three experts in portfolio management told The Dispatch. In fact, the investment holdings reported by Trump after he began his second term and transactions made public since largely align with a common portfolio structure leveraged by ultra-high net worth wealth managers, those portfolio management experts said. … Trump’s revocable trust likely contains several investment accounts that are being managed independently by third-party investment managers investing widely across the market. These equity investments, alongside sophisticated municipal and corporate bond sleeves and a portfolio of private and alternative credit funds, are consistent with those made by investment managers at financial institutions like JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, or Goldman Sachs who work with high net worth clients.