By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, May 22, 2026
To recap: Donald Trump has sued the Donald Trump
administration over alleged wrongdoing by the Donald Trump administration, and
an out-of-court settlement between Donald Trump and the Donald Trump
administration will have Donald Trump’s DOJ ponying up the better part of $2
billion to be put into a fund controlled by Donald Trump and used for the
benefit of—let’s check in here with dead-eyed White House trash panda J.D. Vance—“people who voted for Donald Trump and
participated in the January 6th protests.”
We are going to need a whole brigade of additional
tally-men to tally the bananas in this bananas republic.
One group of Trump sycophants negotiating with another
group of Trump sycophants for the benefit of Trump sycophants and Trump
himself: surely the toughest negotiation since Harry S.
Stamper told the powers that be that none of his crew wanted to pay taxes again—“EVER”—in
Armageddon. Trump did not demand immunity from taxes—only immunity from
being investigated or prosecuted for not paying his taxes, for tax fraud, or
for other tax-related shenanigans: immunity for himself, for his business
associates, for Uday and Qusay and the rest of his ghastly cretinous spawn.
We are so used to hearing the words “billion” and
“trillion” thrown around when talking about Washington spending that the sum in
question—$1.776 billion, a number chosen for imbecilic marketing purposes—might
seem measly. But that’s a good-sized squadron of high-end fighter jets, about
20 F-35s. It is more than the National Science Foundation will spend in a decade on its “X-Labs” program to
support research into transformative technologies in fields such as quantum
computing. The money is not the main complaint here—comically transparent graft
is a bad policy at any price—but it is worth understanding that the sum in
question is not trivial. And who is to say that Trump will not exceed that
$1.776 billion budget for enriching his political allies? It is not as though
the administration is waiting around for Congress to appropriate the funds.
Speaking of which: Congress, as usual, is doing approximately squat. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota
has announced that he is “not a big fan” of the presidential
slush fund, but, so far, he has taken no action to put a stop to this nonsense.
Someone should introduce Sen. Thune to somebody in a position of real influence
in Washington—say, the Senate majority leader or someone like that. Surely, a
figure as powerful as the Senate majority leader would not just sit around like
some useless putz and piss and moan about it all—that guy would do something,
right?
J.D. Vance, the coprophagic charlatan who once compared
Trump to Adolf Hitler before becoming the full-time monkey-butler serving the
totally-nothing-like-Hitler administration, thinks the January 6 rioters—the
dimwitted brownshirts in Trump’s failed 2021 coup d’état—just need a
little more love and understanding, saying, in defense of the slush fund
gambit:
You know who
never, ever gets an ounce of sympathy when it comes to that disproportionate
sentencing is people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January
6th protests.
And guess who is lining up with their hands out? The pillow
guy, of course. Who else? The ONAN guys. [Not a typo. Not really, all things
considered.] Proud Boys gruppenführer Enrique Tarrio. Registered sex
offender Andrew Taake, who got a six-year sentence for assaulting police
officers on January 6, was pardoned by Trump with a bonus get-out-of-jail-free
card on a separate child-sex charge, and complains that he grew bazongas in prison because doctors had him
injected with estrogen during his stay.
Which is to say: the biggest parade of schmucks,
chiselers, lunatics, conspiracy kooks, and criminals since Trump’s last Cabinet
meeting.
I already have heard from a few of my remaining
conservative friends, out there in their bunkers: “Surely, this will be the
thing that finally breaks the spell!”
No, it isn’t.
Trump’s slavering loyalists already have forgiven him for
trying to overthrow the government—you think they’re going to get big mad over
his stealing a little money? Especially when they think they—or someone they
know from Twitter!—might get a few bucks out of the deal? Trump was right about
his being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any political
support—and his implied contempt for his voters is entirely justified.
The United States is a country that loves a slogan: E
pluribus unum. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “All men are
created equal.” But there is one that we need to translate into Latin and
engrave in marble on some prominent site in the capital city:
“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”
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