There Is No Bottom to Trump’s Corruption
Trump has turned the Justice Department and IRS into his personal ATM
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – As you probably know, acting attorney general Todd Blanche announced a “settlement” between the Justice Department and his own boss, Donald Trump, concluding the president’s ludicrously corrupt $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, which he controls, and which is represented by the Justice Department.
Put another way: in a lawsuit against the IRS which he controls, Donald ordered the attorney general to create a fund that Donald will puppeteer and which could pay out millions if not billions of dollars to him through his businesses.
If it sounds incestuous and creepy, that’s because it is.
And there’s more.
The settlement is bizarre. Partly because it’s not a settlement. I’ll come back to that.
Instead of paying Donald, the attorney general and the president agreed to create a five member panel of commissioners who the president can fire any time he wants. This panel will hand out checks to whoever makes a strong enough case that the U.S. government unfairly investigated or prosecuted them. Applicants and the approved recipients will be completely secret.
This means everyone from convicted January 6 insurrectionists to entities controlled by Donald Trump can collect. Knowing all this, what comes next probably won’t surprise you.
When the idea was floated to the news media, it was accompanied by a dollar amount constituting the total dollar amount from which these payments would be withdrawn – $1.776 billion.
This week, two documents were released. One was a dismissal ruling by the presiding judge, and the other was the so-called settlement.
The dismissal explicitly stated “there is no settlement of record.” Weird. In other words, it appears as if this was a side deal created outside of the federal court in the southern district of Florida.
The settlement document, meanwhile, outlined the parameters of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”, the panel of five commissioners, and confirmation that Donald and his sons won’t receive any direct payout from the government. Everything from the early press reports was there. Except for the $1.776 billion amount.
The Trump regime and multiple news outlets say it’s $1.776 billion, but the publicly posted settlement filing does not itself include that dollar figure. In other words, at this stage, the fund could be exactly this number, which ought to piss off every American taxpayer and raise immense concerns over who’s going to be collecting from it, or the fund could be much, much more.
The amount of the fund could be anything Donald demands, and both the panel of commissioners and the attorney general will obviouslyl do whatever Donald wants or else be fired and publicly targeted for retribution.
So we need to stop pretending there’s a cap on the fund.
We should also stop pretending Donald won’t get a chunk of the payouts. He totally will. And he’ll get a lot. There’s nothing in either document that forbids Donald’s many corporate entities from “applying” (stealing). As we all know, the government considers corporations to be separate “persons” from the people who own them. The Trump Organization and its many subsidiaries aren’t legally “Donald”. But the president can make a case that his businesses were damaged by the criminal investigations and indictments.
He could also collect a commission or a straight up kickback from any recipients who might need help getting approved for a payout from the fund. Say, for example, Mike Flynn tried to get a check, but for whatever reason, it looks like the commission might reject his application. So Donald steps in, orders the commissioners to approve Flynn’s request – in exchange for Donald receiving 20 percent of Flynn’s money.
Anyone who thinks this won’t happen is giving the world’s most obvious con-man the benefit of the doubt, which is always a bad, bad idea. Donald doesn’t do anything unless there’s a benefit to him personally. We’ve heard it a gazillion times since the escalator – Donald is transactional. Everything is a quid pro quo. He wouldn’t have agreed to drop a chance at $10 billion unless he knew there was something else in it for him.
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Donald’s entire second term is an unprecedented criminal cash grab. It’s the thread that connects his ballroom project with the Reflecting Pool project with his insider trading scheme with selling pardons in exchange for crypto investments and so on. Even the Iran War is part of it, knowing he’s making a fortune on the rise and fall of oil prices through fossil fuel investments. There’s no way he would walk away from any opportunity to augment his wealth. All previous presidents combined earned a total of $40 million during their presidencies. Donald Trump has made $4 billion in the past year. And now he’s following the business model of his mentor and role model Putin by straight up stealing from American taxpayers.
Don’t bother looking up whether previous presidents pulled a stunt like this panel – you won’t find anything. Donald doesn’t care how many laws he’s breaking or how much power he’s abusing. He knows the chances of a successful prosecution are slim at best given his newly reacquired pardon power and Supreme Court-granted immunity, on top of a separate legal slush fund allowing him to stall any trial indefinitely. But I believe there’s a chance that Donald could be prosecuted for any crime not directly linked to his role as president. We need to at least try or the rule of law is truly dead.
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Bob, fair question:
Am I missing some actual evidentiary link here?
Because reading through this, I see several different categories being blended together as though they are equivalent:
Reported events
Legal inferences
Predictions about future conduct
Assumptions about motive
Conclusions of criminality
For example:
"Trump could benefit" becomes "Trump will benefit."
"Trump could theoretically collect" becomes "Trump totally will."
Questions about market activity become "his insider trading scheme."
And hypothetical scenarios become evidence for future criminal behavior.
I'm not defending Trump here. If direct evidence exists — trading instructions, communications, financial transfers, coordinated activity, documented profit trails — then put it on the table and let's examine it.
But if we're calling something an insider-trading scheme, shouldn't we first establish the scheme?
Because otherwise we're moving from:
possibility → certainty
without stopping at evidence.
I genuinely ask this because I’m trying to separate allegations, documented facts, and predictions about what someone might do. Those categories matter if we're trying to understand reality rather than simply reinforce conclusions we already hold.