For Trump’s January 6 Slush Fund, the Impunity Is the Point

Watergate analogies, together with the cursed “-gate” suffix, are often the most glib and least useful analytic devices in assessing the scale of government corruption. Still, hear me out: The Trump administration’s extralegal establishment of a free-floating slush fund for aggrieved (and overwhelmingly white) sufferers of Biden persecution complexes stands out in stark relief, by virtue of both its bald self-dealing and its fundamental abuses of power, against the scandals that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

All of the gravest trespasses of the Watergate scandal were brewed up and executed at the behest of the keepers of the Nixon White House’s vast network of covert slush funds. The Committee to Re-Elect the President, chaired by the administration’s fathomlessly corrupt attorney general John Mitchell, was the chief sluicegate for the White House’s dirty-tricks fund—but it wasn’t the White House’s only, or even most notable, foray into mob-style governance. Four months before the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, a separate slush fund steered $400,000 in corporate dosh to the 1972 Republican National Convention in order to secure a favorable antitrust ruling from the White House. A year prior to that, a group of dairy cooperatives arranged a $2 million donation to the GOP in exchange for the White House agreeing to lift price controls on milk—which worked out to a nifty $100 million return on investment for the nation’s milk producers.

As it later would with Watergate, the Nixon White House sought to suppress and downplay critical reporting on the slush-fund scandals, but to no avail—these casual mob-style shakedowns harmed the administration’s reputation, fueled the greater lawlessness of the administration, and metastasized into what White House Counsel John Dean aptly called “a cancer” on Nixon’s presidency.

Now just review the basic background of the Trump January 6 slush fund. It is, to begin with, a complete legal fabrication—a preemptive make-believe “settlement” in a $10 billion lawsuit that Trump brought against his own Internal Revenue Service after an independent contractor leaked past Trump tax returns to the news outlet ProPublica. Trump’s suit was clearly modeled on the successful, though meritless, claims he’d lodged against CBS and ABC for editing and airing material adverse to his political interests; in all these cases, the objective was not to secure any sort of binding legal precedent but to engineer payouts that would serve to browbeat critics and intimidate dissenters. (Lost in most of the mainstream coverage of the Trump IRS suit was the critical point that the underlying harm alleged in the case—the public release of a president’s financial records—was in fact something that all modern candidates for the presidency prior to Trump had arranged voluntarily as a recognition that the public trust they seek to hold shouldn’t be compromised by conflicts of interest. That, needless to say, is not the Trump model of governance.)

Then there’s the sheer volume of taxpayer money amassed in the fund. The sums collected by Nixon’s enforcers were staggering for the time, but even after adjusting for inflation, the $1.8 billion Trump fund far outpaces them; it works out to roughly $224 million in 1972 dollars—much more than twice the astronomical payoff that Nixon’s dairy donors realized on their slush-fund investment. (The official tally for Trump’s baksheesh reserve fund is, of course, $1,776,000,000, since it was the clear aim of the American Revolution to direct tax revenues into the coffers of aspiring monarchs.)

Finally, just ponder the oversight provisions directing the disbursement of all this cash—which won’t take long, I promise, because there are none. The settlement agreement provides only for a five-member board appointed by Trump’s Department of Justice to approve quarterly payout requests from the fund. And what they decide to do, the settlement’s language stipulates, is very much their own business: “The Anti-Weaponization Fund shall have the power to determine its own procedures for submitting, receiving, processing, and granting or denying claims. The Anti-Weaponization Fund may make those procedures public in whole or in part, at its discretion.” (Calling the slush fund “the Anti-Weaponization Fund” is, like the $1.776 billion figure, a messaging mind-fuck—nothing says that you’re combating the alleged weaponization of justice like creating an unaccountable elite legal panel handing out cash on its own purblind whim.)

The contrast with the Watergate reign of slush is again instructive: Nixon and his henchmen went to great lengths to conceal their crimes, whereas Trump and his MAGA coterie are using their grip on federal prosecutorial power to reward the crime of seeking to overturn the 2020 election. The crisis point in Nixon’s coverup campaign was the “Saturday night massacre”—his effort to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which prompted the resignation of then–Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus. Congressional Republicans were forced then to concede that backing the Nixon White House and the rule of law were mutually exclusive propositions, setting the stage for Nixon’s likely impeachment and forced resignation. Trump and his apparatchiks are operating in the photographic negative of that moral consensus: They are unilaterally dictating the terms of political legitimacy and declaring themselves immune from all legal consequences in advance. When you’re brazenly corrupt, no cover-up is required.

As for what will follow in the wake of all this insurrectionist feather-bedding, well, the Board of Anti-Weaponizers disclaims all responsibility there as well: “Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account,” Attorney General Todd Blanche—who is of course Trump’s former personal attorney—wrote in his order enforcing the settlement, “the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.” And appealing any of board’s financial awards is simply forbidden: “Because the claims process is voluntary, there shall be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the settlement agreement states. The board’s awards are “enforceable and challengeable solely by Plaintiffs, Defendants, and the United States”—i.e., the very grifters who set up this self-dealing boondoggle at taxpayer expense.

As with virtually every other act of this administration, from its DOGE raids on federal agencies, workforces and taxpayer privacy to its mass-deportation sieges in American cities to its illegal wars and foreign murder campaigns, the impunity is the point. The administration is not interested in anything so drawn-out and laborious as an official inquiry into the purported “weaponization” of justice and law enforcement, let alone a reformist remedy. No, the aim is to use power as a brute reminder to everyone else that you’re in power, and are free to declare new public directives, casus belli, and policy mandates out of thin air. You can concoct bogus crime waves in Washington, DC, or a phantom Somali day care fraud epidemic in Minneapolis or nonexistent fentanyl trade routes in Caribbean waters—and then blithely proceed to intimidate, menace, and kill on virtual autopilot, while of course all the while proclaiming your own bitter victimization at the hands of the woke and weaponized liberal administrative state. The impunity zone is the ideological sweet spot where the tinpot corruption of the Trump clan merges seamlessly with the wrecking-ball agenda of Project 2025.

The impunity dividend was on blinding display the day that the settlement creating the Trump slush fund was announced. The White House dispatched Vice President JD Vance, the Yale-credentialed venture capitalist who likes to pose as a heartland empath, to Missouri to tout his farcical race-coded crusade against government fraud before voters in Missouri. Vance asserted that Medicaid fraud runs into the billions—a claim both unsubstantiated and overblown, designed chiefly to distract attention from the administration’s own punitive Medicaid cuts—and then sought to stick his demagogic landing with this appeal: “When people steal billions of dollars from the Medicare program, that is theft from you, and it’s also theft from the people who use the Medicare program to pay their bills.”

What Vance really meant is: Theft is what we say it is, and only counts when we ascribe it to our political enemies. Recall that this is the public official who proclaimed that he’s willing to “create stories” to advance the broader MAGA ideological project. That’s why his task force is suspending Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota—not because the alleged scourge of Medicaid fraud is greater there, but because both of these blue states are in the vanguard of opposition to ICE’s gestapo raids. In this same bleak register, we should recall Todd Blanche’s preeminent qualification to establish and direct the $1.8 billion Trump slush fund: As Trump declared at a recent White House event, Blanche is the man “who kept me out of jail for years.” As John Mitchell declared to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein at the height of the paper’s Watergate investigations, “You fellows have got a great ball game going.… We’re going to do a story on all of you.” That could well be the motto for the Anti-Weaponization Fund, but here’s a more cogent variation: It’s the impunity, stupid.