By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, May 21, 2026
For a Never Trumper, watching the insurrection play out
on January 6 was confusing. I was surprised by what was happening—and surprised
that I was surprised.
The essence of the confusion was this: I did not
expect to be this right.
Many other Dispatch conservatives doubtless felt
the same. You knew a Donald Trump presidency would be a calamity, but surely
not on the order of fascist goons hunting the vice president inside the Capitol
during an unfolding coup plot.
I feel the same confusion about the slush
fund the president has cooked up to remunerate those goons. We knew Trump
2.0 would be a civic catastrophe, much worse than Trump 1.0 was.
But I did not expect that we would be this right.
One might assume that a taxpayer-funded payday for
criminals wouldn’t look worse as details emerged, the concept already being as
rotten as rotten gets. One would be wrong. For instance, did you know that the
part of the settlement that bars the IRS from proceeding with any pending
audits of the president’s tax returns might be worth more than $100 million to him?
Trump, a billionaire, paid a total of $750 in income tax in 2016 and $750 again
in 2017. The taxman will henceforth take no notice of that fact.
Did you also know that, under federal law, the only
official empowered to ask the IRS to terminate an audit is the attorney
general? That was a problem for Trump in this case, per Andy McCarthy: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche used to
be the president’s personal defense lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to recuse
themselves in cases pitting their current client against a former one.
Blanche had an obvious conflict of interest. He ignored
it and nuked Trump’s tax audits anyway.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the Justice Department
didn’t bother to define the term “weaponization of government” in the instrument that created the fund, never mind that
that’s the criterion for eligibility to receive money from it. Among the many miscreants now claiming to be a victim for its
purposes are Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy related to the
insurrection and sentenced to 22 years before Trump sprung him from prison.
He’s hoping to be compensated for that “weaponization” to
the tune of somewhere between $2 million and $5 million. “I’m not greedy,” he
assured Reuters, “but my life was all f—ed up because of
this."
Another likely applicant is the cable news outlet One America News Network, which settled multiple defamation suits stemming from its 2020 “rigged election” propaganda
on the president’s behalf. It’s not clear how the federal government was
“weaponized” against OAN, but that’s the beauty of the DOJ declining to explain
itself. “Weaponization” can mean whatever Trump wants it to mean to justify
letting MAGA stooges put their hands in the taxpayer cookie jar.
Again, I did not expect that we would be this right.
I also did not expect to feel a dark sense of justice in
this obscene national humiliation, something that was absent on January 6.
Without meaning to, the president has become an agent of moral retribution
against the many Americans who’ve enabled him.
An alternate morality.
The thing about the slush fund is that it’s
unapologetically indefensible, more so than anything Trump has done in his
second term, I think.
His other major sins can be rationalized without
resorting to blatant immorality. Fighting an unauthorized war with Iran? The
regime was moving toward nuclear weapons. Starting a trade war with the
whole planet? We urgently need to rebuild American industry. Goonish ICE
tactics and National Guard deployments in blue cities? Someone needs to
crack down on crime. Rampant personal corruption? No one’s being harmed
by it. Everyone peddles influence in Washington.
There’s no way to rationalize using taxpayer money to
make criminals rich.
The only way to do so is irrational. Only if you
believe that the voices in the president’s head telling him that the 2020
election was rigged are correct might you conclude that the people who stormed
the Capitol to try to unrig it did nothing immoral. But even that’s tricky. Letting
them out of prison wasn’t enough? They deserve to be millionaires, too?
Including the ones who beat cops?
When CNN put that question to Todd Blanche, the best he
could do was whimper, “Just to be clear, people that hurt police get
money all the time.”
There’s simply no spinning it. The closest thing I’ve
seen to a defense of the fund that doesn’t amount to “yay, insurrection” comes
from the DOJ itself—namely, that a similar settlement fund for Native American
farmers was created during the Obama administration. But as Ed
Whelan explained, that wasn’t analogous: The class of applicants was
clearly defined, the settlement was approved by a court, and the beneficiaries didn’t
abet the president in a plot to overthrow the duly elected incoming government.
What makes the slush fund so difficult to defend is that
it proves in an unusually stark way that Trumpism isn’t so much a political
program as it is an alternate morality.
I’ve made
that point before repeatedly. Many Americans have come to the same
conclusion, I suspect, which may explain why the United States is now the only
major country where a majority of the people rate the morals and ethics of
their countrymen as bad. Late-stage Trumpism has virtually no ideological
content beyond the president’s momentary whims, as Iran doves would eagerly
tell you. The true essence of his political program is captured in this
paragraph from the New York Times’ new editorial about the fund (aptly titled “There Has Never
Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This”):
It is worth
pausing to put the fund into the larger context of Mr. Trump’s political
project: He is destroying pillars of American democracy to empower himself. He
claims elections are legitimate only if he wins. He uses federal law
enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his
party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and
civil society as traitors and enemies. He incentivizes his supporters to break
the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do. He directs his allies to
change election rules to keep his party in power.
For most of my life, the scourge of conservatism—in
particular its Christian adherents—was moral relativism. Trump is moral relativism personified. Whether an action is right or
wrong, good or evil, depends entirely on whether one benefits from it or not.
The slush fund is the ne plus ultra of that
belief. A group of paranoid cretins bent on installing a right-wing
dictatorship committed crimes, and they’re going to be rewarded for it with the
American people’s money. It’s simple theft designed to induce support for
future fascist assaults on the social contract. You can’t defend the fund
without endorsing that as a morally just outcome, and you can’t endorse that as
a morally just outcome without ridding yourself of conventional morality.
After four years of hard lessons, “respectable”
Republicans had every reason to know what they were enabling when they chose to
return Trump to office in 2024. Now he’s force-feeding them an immense sh-t
sandwich in the form of looting the Treasury to reward his nastiest henchmen,
behavior beneath the dignity of even a banana republic, and they don’t know
what to say.
How can any decent person not relish watching them choke
on it?
When bad things happen to bad people.
As I said earlier, all of this has created a strange (and
ironic) dynamic in which the president is acting unwittingly as an instrument
of retribution against his own political accomplices.
“Retribution” has been one of his favorite words since he
introduced the term at CPAC in 2023 as the unofficial theme
of his next presidential campaign. MAGA flunky Steve Bannon was so enamored of
it that he took to referring to the address as Trump’s “Come Retribution” speech, repurposing a coded
phrase used by Confederates in a plot to kill Abraham Lincoln.
The president doesn’t actually care about retribution,
though. He cares about revenge.
“Retribution” is an element of justice, the idea that the
guilty must pay—but only what they owe. It’s typically used in relation to
offenses against society writ large, i.e. crimes; the punishment is assessed
dispassionately and must be proportionate to be just. “Revenge” doesn’t care
about proportionality, though, and it sure ain’t dispassionate. It’s an
emotionally cathartic act of reprisal against some personal wrong.
You tell me: Which word better describes Trump’s campaign
to imprison hated enemy James Comey for posting a
photo of seashells or to hunt down the perpetrators of a grand election-rigged
conspiracy at his expense that exists only in his own imagination?
Trump likes the term “retribution” because it carries a
moral legitimacy that “revenge,” the thing he’s actually obsessed with,
doesn’t. But that’s precisely why it’s the proper word to describe what his
slush fund is visiting upon the various right-wingers who made it possible,
especially those in the federal government. They deserve to suffer through this
travesty, and they are.
The creeps at the mafia law firm we call “the Justice
Department” deserve the humiliation of having to defend the fund. The thought
of Blanche spending the next two and a half years answering questions at every
press conference about insurrectionists buying Porsches with American tax
dollars is delightful.
John Roberts and the conservative majority on the Supreme
Court deserve the anguish of watching Trump’s crime spree play out unchecked, knowing that they
encouraged it. Their 2024 decision that presidents are immune from prosecution
for actions taken while executing their core powers was destined to incentivize
a sociopath to behave with a sense of impunity, as was obvious even at the
time. “Instead of taking heart from this ruling that he can carry out his
duties vigorously and conscientiously without fear of being assailed by dubious
prosecutions,” I predicted,
a newly reelected Trump would “take heart from it that he can behave as
reprehensibly as he likes without fear of being assailed by meritorious prosecutions.”
And so he has.
Republicans in Congress deserve the political dilemma of
whether to oppose the slush fund or not.
It speaks volumes about how loathsome the fund is that
even the pitiful slumbering consciences of the Senate GOP have reportedly been roused by it. But they made this bed: More so than
even the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, their cowardly paralysis since
January 20 of last year convinced the president that he had a blank check for
corruption from the legislature that his party controls. They gave him every
reason to believe that he could, if he liked, open the vault at Fort Knox and
send in the Capitol rioters to load up with as many gold bars as their
wheelbarrows could carry.
And, essentially, that’s what he did.
If congressional Republicans end up looking the other way
at that, they’ll enrage swing voters in an already terrible campaign
environment. If they take action against it, they’ll enrage Trump and his
pro-crime base. My guess is that they’ll try to split the baby, absurdly
attempting to impose “restrictions” on the fund instead of repealing it
outright. The proper response to a presidential plot to knock over Fort Knox,
you see, is to declare that only some insurrectionists should be allowed
to cart off some of the gold.
The punch line is that Trump will end up ignoring
Congress anyway, misappropriating money to pay out whatever he likes from the
fund and justifying it with thoughtful arguments like “something something
unitary executive.” Republicans won’t do a thing in response.
Retribution, as I’ve said, is the idea that the guilty
must pay and that their punishment should fit the crime. The intense disgrace
that this slush fund is inflicting upon every Republican who conspired to make
it possible—all of whom ignored endless warnings from the president’s critics
that his second term would be a civic Chernobyl—is a fitting penalty. For once,
Trump is Never Trumpers’ retribution.
Retribution against America?
It would be nice to be able to argue that the fund is
also a form of retribution against the MAGA rank-and-file, but that’s a hard
case to make. In what way are they being punished here, exactly?
“Shame”? Please. If they end up taking any issue with
handing out bags of cash to insurrectionists, it will be that the payouts
weren’t big enough.
If grassroots populists suffer any retribution from this,
it will be having to watch their party lose by a bigger margin than expected in
November. The slush fund is one of those scandals that’s so breathtakingly
morally offensive that it might plausibly break containment among political
junkies and reach the general public. People who are paying $4.50 a gallon for
gas will not like seeing their tax dollars used to compensate George Santos and Rod Blagojevich for the government having
so rudely insisted upon prosecuting them for their crimes.
But let’s not give the general American public too much
moral credit. If gas were at $2.50 and the economy were roaring along, with no
standoff in the Strait of Hormuz to slow it down, how much outrage would there
be about the slush fund? How anxious would congressional Republicans be to show
that they won’t stand for it?
One would like to think that the fund is so
searing a humiliation for the United States that it would galvanize a civic
backlash even in good times, but we already ran that experiment in 2024.
Americans will elect a president who’s given every indication that he’ll damage
the country terribly once in power, it turns out, if he makes it worth their
while financially.
If the slush fund ends up hurting Republicans at the
polls in November, that will be why. It’s not that it’s grotesquely corrupt,
it’s that voters expected something in return for ignoring his corruption.
They’re okay with the president, his cronies, and even his insurrectionist
soldiers making out like bandits. But only if they’re making out like bandits,
too.
The fact that they’ve gotten nothing but inflation,
tariffs, and spiraling gas prices for their trouble is another form of
unwitting presidential retribution. Let the punishment fit the crime.
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