President Trump has faced relentless, extraordinary efforts to destroy him outside of heretofore normal political combat. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago over alleged mishandling of classified materials despite its own agents’ doubts about probable cause. Officials in Colorado, Maine and Illinois sought to remove him from the 2024 ballot using a Civil War-era constitutional clause, before the Supreme Court unanimously reversed them. Trump’s infamous mugshot is the result of Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis booking him on a racketeering indictment that subsequently collapsed. And a civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, funded in part by a prominent Democratic donor, resulted in damages of nearly $90 million despite Carroll being unable to recall what year the alleged encounter took place.
It’s important context for the current debate over President Trump’s $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, established from the settlement of his lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. The fund’s stated purpose is to award money to victims of lawfare unduly targeted by a Justice Department that engaged in politically motivated prosecutions.
The President’s critics, not unreasonably, want to discuss whether the fund is legal given that the beneficiaries have no standing in the original case, and whether the commission established to award the funds is genuinely independent. But they tend to shy away from the broader uncomfortable truth: Donald Trump is not doing anything that his predecessors did not do. He is simply, as is his style, doing it more openly, without apology or subterfuge.
Consider what happened in the final weeks of the Biden administration. As the lame duck period wound down, billions of dollars went out the door to Democrat-aligned organizations that could fund, salary and support a network of political activity designed to weather the opposition years in well-funded comfort until they were back in power. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official, caught on camera in the Biden administration’s final weeks by a Project Veritas undercover reporter, described the scramble to get money out the door before Trump’s inauguration as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”
What did that look like in practice? A group that Democratic favorite Stacey Abrams advised received $2 billion in EPA funds in 2024 despite having reported just a hundred dollars in revenue the previous year. But don’t worry, taxpayer: the $2 billion came with a requirement that the grantees complete basic budgeting training within 90 days.
The real victims in all of this, whether we are talking about Biden-era grants or Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund, are American taxpayers. It’s taxpayers who fund the political machinery, and taxpayers who are then asked to fund the cleanup operation.
The principle the Anti-Weaponization Fund is trying to address is not unreasonable.
And this comes against a backdrop of revelations about fraud that should make every taxpayer’s blood run cold: systematic abuse across Medicare, defrauded child autism programmes, home health care, daycare and learning centers and a sprawling ecosystem of non-profits that have treated public money as a trough of private resources.
Working people and middle class families pay for these scandals out of every paycheck while worrying about rent, mortgages, being able to afford college tuition, pay medical bills and whether or not they will be able to retire with any dignity at all.
Neither party should have billions of dollars to distribute to its allies. The solution is less money in government hands altogether.
The principle the Anti-Weaponization Fund is trying to address is not unreasonable. President Trump is not the only American to have been caught in the crosshairs of politicized prosecutions and people who were persecuted by a weaponized justice system should have some avenue of redress.
Yet however sympathetic President Trump may be to the victims of politicized prosecutions, knowing what it feels like does not make it right to send taxpayers the bill for fixing it.
The truth here is one that neither party wants to acknowledge, because both parties benefit from the status quo. The endless cycle of grift that lets money flow to allies is too expensive for the everyday Americans footing the bill. The Anti-Weaponization Fund may be well-meaning and may redress some real wrongs – but it is a perpetuation of a cycle that needs to stop. The bill, as always, goes to the taxpayer.
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