Trump admin plans $1.7 billion slush fund for secret payouts to Trump's criminal allies

I keep reminding people that the current Republican administration and Congress are the most corrupt versions in this nation's history, and I want to make it perfectly clear, once again, that this is not hyperbole. Quite literally: This is the most corrupt presidency and Congress in our history. It dwarfs Teapot Dome, it makes Watergate look like a children's game. The. Most. Corrupt. In. History.

Here's the latest go at it: ABC News just broke the story that President Mob Guy plans to give up his $10 billion lawsuit against his own government—supposedly, for leaking his tax returns, which according to him caused him so much embarrassment that the government must now double or triple his net worth—in exchange for the government setting up a $1.7 billion dollar fund to "compensate" all of the Trump allies who found themselves indicted for crimes they did on his behalf.

No, really. A special government fund that will focus solely on paying out cash to Trump's inner circle, associated crooks, and the violent militia freaks who attempted to overthrow our government.

The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration's "weaponization" of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself.

While the settlement is expected to be agreed upon in the coming days, sources caution that the final terms will not be set until they are officially announced.

A special ten-figure government fund dedicated to handing cash to any Trump allies who found themselves the subject of law enforcement scrutiny for That Shit They Did is the stuff of dystopian fiction. It's also a close mirror to the government-as-organized-crime approach of Russia's Vladimir Putin and other autocrats. The rule of law still exists, in theory, but if you just happen to break a law in order to best support your mob boss president, you can expect to see a quick pardon and maybe a little spending money, courtesy that same Dear Leader.

There's really not been much attempt made to paper over the obvious corruption here. Who will get the money? The people who Trump says should get it. Who will those people be? It'll be kept secret, because reasons.

The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight. Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars, the sources said.

The commission would:

issue monetary awards based on a majority vote, and the process for awarding money and the identities of the recipient could be kept private, according to sources.

It makes Brandon Carr's McCarthyesque FCC attacks on free speech and public figures look picayune. Trump gets to pick the commission members himself, gets to tell them who they ought to be giving money to, gets to fire them if they don't hand out the money according to his instructions, and the commission will keep the records of who's getting paid off secret so as to avoid any pesky public scrutiny.

Its failed state nonsense is what it is. Donald could decide that his dear son Barron has been injured by the government to the tune of $1.6 billion, order the commission to hand over the cash, and the rest of us will be expected to suck rocks.

In practice, that is not likely to be how it goes. The obvious implications here are that the money will go to Jan 6 seditionists, including those that attacked law enforcement. Rudy Giuliani will probably get a wheelbarrow full, as will all of Trump's past lawyers and allies who have been disbarred or indicted for the effort to substitute in fake electoral slates for Congress to certify that day.

In theory, Trump's 1,600 indicted rioters could walk away with $1 million each as their reward for attacking lawmakers at Trump's behest. Would Trump's commission hand over that much money? It's not immediately clear. On one hand, that would mean less money for Trump's inner circle. On the other hand, if Trump is trying to build up a violent militia willing to help keep him in power by any means necessary, handing out $1 million checks to everyone involved with that first try would likely be very, very successful in recruiting future rioters to the cause. There are plenty of far-right militias out there who have been looking to overthrow the government for decades; dangling a massive cash payout to anyone willing to try will result in plenty of takers.

See, this is what I keep saying. It's not enough to note every piecemeal crooked thing Trump does and mutter about what a scandal it would be for any previous president or party. The whole of it is corruption. All of it, from Kash Patel's snorkeling funtime at the USS Arizona memorial to transportation secretary Sean Duffy's "reality show" road trip funded by the very corporations he has been tasked with regulating to you name it, the whole of the Trump cabinet is devoted to petty grifting and grand crookery as their primary concerns.

Who's responsible for key diplomatic initiatives? It's not Marco Rubio, but presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who gets his income from the Saudi royal family. Who's responsible for major overhauls of U.S. military policy? Whoever can get in front of Trump's face with plans for the most ostentatious Trump-branded battleship. Does Kid Rock want a special-boy reward for sticking by a rapidly disintegrating Dear Leader? Give him his very own ride on a military attack helicopter.

And it is all happening not solely because Donald Trump is a lifelong swindler and crook interested only in self-promotion and self-enrichment, but because House Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus are the first Congress in all of U.S. history to see all of it happening and approve of it. It takes quite a lot to take the most corrupt house speaker title from Republican Dennis Hastert, but the mouselike Johnson managed it in short order.

I think we all understand how the Republican Party gets away with this looting of the country, up to and including the full dismantling of the Justice Department and its reconstruction as crime-backing saboteurs of justice. It is because they are doing it openly, rather than through subterfuge, thanks to Trump's perhaps-unwitting discovery that this nation's political press corps are entirely without morals.

I mean that. Most of journalism is premised on a basic sense of ethics. A report of a pollution-caused cancer cluster in an American town is premised on that being a bad thing, something worthy of exposure. A report of a sports figure gambling on games they'll be playing in is premised on the notion that athletes possibly rigging games for the sake of extra cash is something the nation ought to discourage. The exposure of an oversees sweatshop; an examination of apparent business book-cooking; journalism is, at heart, the notion of oversight; oversight itself is premised on there being ethical and legal boundaries that should not be crossed.

There is none of that in national political journalism. Donald Trump could shoot a child in the middle of the street, and among the White House press corps there would be no moral revulsion to the act. It would be couched in "critics say," and be evasively referenced as an unprecedented expansion of presidential power, but there would be no White House-based reporters on your television screens expression open revulsion for the obvious crime. National political journalists pride themselves on objectivity, when faced with obvious acts of corruption; objectivity is defined as having no opinion as to whether brazenly criminal acts should be considered good things or bad things.

That this intentional faux-dimwitted approach happens to allow journalists to maintain the best possible access to the political figures responsible for the corruption—surely, that is only coincidence.

A great many Americans are beside themselves watching news stories like "administration continues summary execution of foreign fishermen, refuses to release any evidence of crimes" or "administration kills another peaceful protester in white supremacist paramilitary operation targeting major American city," baffled by the continued non-response of supposed political leaders. Democratic opposition remains sluggish; while there are a great many sternly worded statements, what Americans aren't seeing is the deep moral revulsion that the Trump administration's most blatantly corrupt acts would seem to require.

There is a political opportunity in expressing that revulsion. Even if political leaders genuinely can't muster a sense of moral disgust here, even displaying a pretended-at version would be better than the status quo. The Democratic Party has long abandoned any fights to reclaim morality; the term has instead been all but captured by a certain far-right, sex-obsessed, prosperity-preaching American religious rump that asserts their own cruelty and perversions to be truly moral while everyone else's basic sense of right and wrong is, apparently, flawed beyond repair.

But it isn't so. It is proper, in society, to feel revulsion over being cheated or lied to. It is proper, in a civilized nation, to respond to acts of crookery with public contempt; all of society hinges on the public exile of those who prove themselves unable to abide by that society's most basic laws and norms.

Not responding with visible disgust when a powerful figure attempts to cheat all of the rest of us is the uncanny valley response that makes onlookers question your own ethics and morality. Not responding with visible anger to large-scale wrongdoing by leaders breeds distrust; observers are right to take it as evidence of your own sociopathy.

When Democrats continue to treat the gaudily corrupt Trump cabinet as momentary mischief-makers, and continue to treat their Republican counterparts not as accessories to the corruption but as wayward troubled souls who can surely be redeemed after the mischief is over, it is taken as evidence that both parties truly are alike. If they weren't, why is the opposition being so damn cordial to the ones doing the crimes?

So that's my observation-slash-entreaty for the day. The Trump administration's corruption has no match anywhere else in the nation's history. They are now, quite literally, setting up a slush fund to reward those who have committed violent and/or criminal acts on Trump's behalf.

Treating these people with open contempt is a societal necessity. There is only one message the opposition to Trumpism needs to rally around: These people are crooks. They are bleeding the country dry. They are hurting the people around you solely because they want to.

This isn't about tax rates or gas prices or even "democracy." This is about a large-scale, government-wide effort to reward criminals and cheat everyone else. Every other problem we face is just a facet of that cartoonish corruption.