Should we refer to the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization" slush fund in the past tense? The Senate failed to get the 60 senators needed to kill it last week. And, while testifying before Congress, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said it was “not moving forward,” the Justice Department told a federal judge, according to NBC News, it “still opposes the court taking any action to block the initiative on a more permanent basis.”
NBC News has reported, in any case, that there’s also the DOJ’s Judgment Fund, which “is a bottomless pot of money to settle legal claims made against the government,” and that experts have been warning for a least a decade that it’s something that is potentially susceptible to misuse by the executive branch.
Let’s refer to the recent episode itself as being of the past — that is, GOP elites’ freak-out at the $1.776bn (patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson said) fund being unveiled. Some Republican senators were naturally very upset when they realized that in an election year, they were being asked perhaps to compensate, with taxpayers’ money, people who attacked their own place of work and injured law enforcement officers on Jan. 6, 2021.
The initiative was notable in being a conjoining of two already major scandals — that each in itself in an open democracy should mark the end of a political career. The first concerns the Jan. 6 pardons, which former FBI Director James Comey called “an obscenity that will stain this country forever" (part of a twofer, the first being the insurrection four years earlier and the failure of Trump’s party to end his career). The second scandal is the mind-bogglingly brazen self-enrichment that has some commentators saying that Trump in real money terms is more corrupt than all the other 44 men who’ve been president put together. A year into his second term of office the New York Times calculated that Trump had made $1.4 billion since Inauguration Day 2025.
“President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him,” the Times editorialized.
“He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency — into finding out just how much money people, corporations and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes of bending the power of the government to the service of their interests.”
Playwright Arthur Miller in his 1987 memoir “Timebends” recalled from his New York City childhood years how Mayor James J. Walker would be pictured entering “a nightclub for some relaxation after a hard day looting the city” and that “everyone seemed to find hilarious” thefts by public officials, “stealing being the politicians’ game.”
Miller added, “In fact, there was a feeling of security in the repetitiousness of their thefts, a kind of warming dishonesty. But at the same time, mysteriously, a president or for that matter the governor was above the mire, ranking in the mind alongside bishops and the Pope as no laughing matter.”
The playwright remembered walking by a storefront that had a somber portrait of a “white-haired actorish man,” the recently deceased President Harding. “It would be many years before I learned,” he wrote, “that he had presided over a corruption of the federal government unknown since at least the time of President Grant.”
President Warren G. Harding during his term in the early 1920s.
Miller wasn’t yet 8, but the public in general did not know about Harding-connected scandals until after his death.
The current president of the United States makes no effort to be above the mire. He has apparently saved a great deal of cash by suing the IRS for $10bn and getting a deal which “forever barred and precluded [it] from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against him or his sons.
What percentage of that Times figure of $1.4 billion, if connected to a Democratic Party member occupying or aspiring to the highest office in the land, would have Hannity and Fox News yammering away for months? One percent? Or perhaps it could be as low as 0.1 percent (which would be $1.4 million) or even 0.01 percent?
Still, it was a proposed political slush fund, a term usually associated with private money, paid for by regular folks out of their paychecks that proved a bridge too far for elected officials who’ve been turning a blind eye for a decade.
The two separate scandals cited remain such — and people associated with them should be better known. For instance, Changpeng Zhao, Christopher Moynihan, Trevor Milton, Andrew Wiederhorn and Dan Wilson. Next time we will look at how much fun the right-wing media would have with any of those five being tied to let’s say, Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders.
