There are many ways that Donald Trump is currently making your life worse, not to mention generally waging war on the concept of "the future": accelerating the death of the biosphere, doing his best to eliminate the federal government and university as sites of middle-class employment, driving up the price of energy now and food in the immediate future thanks to the idiotic war with Iran he's losing alongside his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu (who, if you are Palestinian, Lebanese, or Iranian, is trying to kill your family with Trump's help), and making it impossible for you to vote against any of this. He is also straight-up stealing your money to redirect it to the freaks and sex offenders who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In January, Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit against Trump's own Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, demanding $10 billion in damages. The suit stemmed from the case of Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who pleaded guilty in 2023 to leaking the tax returns of Trump and several billionaires to the New York Times and ProPublica in 2019 and 2020. In a more sensible world, the release of those documents should have prompted national elected officials to publicly reckon with the fact that the government and the Americans they supposedly represent were being cheated out of billions of dollars, but instead, Littlejohn faced harsh prosecution. He was sentenced to five years in prison in Jan. 2024.
However, even at the time, Trump and his organization made a show of protesting the sentencing. In their view, Littlejohn had not suffered enough and Trump had not been made sufficiently whole for the revelation of information that presidents and presidential nominees customarily have chosen to make public of their own volition since the early 1970s. Trump attorney Alina Habba made a big public stink outside of Littlejohn's sentencing hearing. "A government agency and its contractors and employees have no business stealing the personal data of American citizens in reckless disregard, let alone the then-sitting president," she said. "This likely cost my client thousands of votes and was all by design."
Now that Trump is back in power and has redoubled his efforts to use the state to further his own personal aims, he is using the Littlejohn case as a pretense to shake the country down for a staggering amount of money. On Monday, the president and the IRS announced that Trump had withdrawn the lawsuit in exchange for $1.776 billion of public money to be used in what they are calling the Anti-Weaponization Fund.
The deal is not a formal settlement, because that would have to be approved by a judge. This case, of course filed in Florida, was being overseen by Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had ordered lawyers for "both" "sides" to explain to her whether they were actually in opposition or were simply colluding to steal a bunch of money. Obviously they are doing the latter, and by dropping the suit, they've undercut Williams's ability to do anything to stop it.
What will Trump use your money for? Per a statement from the Justice Department, the fund's purpose will be "to provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare." In other words, Jan. 6 rioters will be in line to get paid, though that itself is an obvious pretense. There is no independent oversight of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, and no legitimate legal basis for its existence; for all practical purposes, this money has been awarded to Trump himself, by Trump himself, to distribute as he sees fit.
The Trump family have used the powers of the state to enrich themselves to a staggering degree. They have made billions of dollars off of their crypto scams, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars from more terrestrial forms of corruption. Now they're taking your money, some of which will be used to offer fig-leaf payments to the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol, but most of which the Trumps will hoard for themselves.
