It is of course hacky and hysterical to suggest America is turning into a banana republic. How else, though, can a reasonable person interpret Donald Trump’s settlement this week with the Internal Revenue Service?
In January, the President and his two oldest sons sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leaking of their personal business tax filings to the press. Because Trump runs the Justice Department, the case was somewhat farcical: “I’m suing myself,” Trump wryly admitted last week. “I’ll say, ‘Give me X dollars,’ and I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit.”
This week we found out. IRS lawyers felt their case was defensible on various counts: chiefly because the man who leaked the Trump family files wasn’t working for the service when he gave them to the New York Times. But for some mysterious reason the IRS folded instead, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has ruled that, to make amends, a $1.8 billion settlement fund should be set up to compensate the victims of the “weaponization” of justice under Joe Biden.
And, in a page-long addendum, the Justice Department also declared that the IRS is “FOREVER BARRED AND PRECLUDED” from investigating the Trumps’ tax affairs, though it should be pointed out that the bar applies only to past not future filings. But that doesn’t stop the whole business from stinking to high heaven. The Treasury Department’s general counsel suddenly resigned just before the settlement was announced – in disgust, presumably.
A large number of people were unjustly hounded by Joe Biden’s Justice Department over the January 6 riots, and it is right that they should receive compensation. But, as John Fund has argued in our pages, surely that process should not operate through a vaguely defined MAGA slush fund?
Trump has also clearly been the victim of a sustained lawfare campaign on many fronts from the moment he entered the Oval Office. Ever the counter-puncher, he is now using his second term power to, as he sees it, right those wrongs – and he’s doing so through various billion-dollar lawsuits.
The trouble is that as soon as the Democrats win back a congressional majority – by January, in all likelihood – we can be absolutely certain that they will vote to undo all of Trump’s legal victories, and the IRS addendum won’t hold up against the power of the legislative branch. It’ll be their turn to wage legal war. And this time, they’ll feel even more vindicated.
Because, for all his talk about the evils of a “weaponized” justice, Trump has been using justice as a weapon, and those who live by lawfare have a habit of perishing by lawfare.
Blanche, appointed by Trump to replace the ineffectual Pam Bondi, is clearly eager to do his master’s bidding. This week, he had by all accounts a blazing row with various Republican senators over the IRS settlement, as he resisted efforts to impose limits on who might receive payments from it.
For Trump, and others in his circle, the whole January 6 story was a great con perpetrated by the Democrats, who then pushed a bogus “attempted insurrection” narrative to hound innocent Trump supporters through the courts.
The MAGA version of events is not entirely untrue: Biden and most of Washington did over-egg the drama of that now infamous day. And the Trump faithful will be grateful to their hero for doling out the compensation instead of grasping it for himself. He meant what he said on the campaign trail: “I will be your retribution.”
The majority of voters, however, might feel less sanguine about nearly $2 billion of taxpayer money being handed out in such a way.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
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