Let’s acknowledge this up front: It’s good to see that Senate Republicans have—for the time being, anyway—forced Donald Trump to back off plans for a $1.8 billion slush fund for allies and insurrectionists. Trump suspended the idea after Republicans made it clear that they won’t pass funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement without legislative language starkly limiting the fund or effectively nixing it entirely.
So, yep: Shockingly, it turns out that some level of Trumpian corruption is too much for Republicans to stomach. That’s particularly so with Trump’s approval mired in the 30s and one corrupt imperial scheme after another—from the ballroom to the triumphal arch—polling horribly as the midterms approach.
Yet we may be getting scammed here in another way, folks. That’s because Trump and Republicans have offered zero clarity about the future of the other part of his slush-fund scheme: the grant of immunity from IRS scrutiny for Trump, his businesses, and his family members. Incredibly, this would “forever” bar IRS audits of past tax claims by the Trump clan or the Trump Organization. Democrats can try to make Republicans vote on that towering act of corruption, which might prove politically even worse.
As you’ll recall, both these moves—the slush fund and the IRS immunity caper—were included in a “settlement” that the Justice Department reached in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the first-term leaking of his tax returns. The settlement itself is bogus: Donald Trump’s DOJ is “settling” by agreeing to allow Donald Trump’s government to hand a massively corrupt package of gifts to Donald Trump. That absurdity was enough to persuade Republicans to oppose the slush fund.
But what about the IRS immunity piece? Well, we don’t know what’s going to happen with that. Which gives Democrats an opportunity.
Democrats tell me they’re moving to force votes in Congress that would effectively nullify the IRS immunity piece, as well. That provision is potentially an incredibly lucrative giveaway for Trump: It could benefit him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. So one approach would be for Democrats to use “reconciliation”—the process that Republicans are using to pass the ICE funding, which enables Senate passage by simple majority—to push amendments that would nix Trump’s IRS immunity scam.
“We will do whatever we can to force a vote during the budget reconciliation process on this monarchical outrage and further plunder of the people,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, emails me. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that Democrats are set to push an amendment that will “revoke” Trump’s and his family’s “free rein to commit tax fraud.”
Here a complication arises. Now that Trump seems to have put his slush fund on hold, Senate Republicans may drop any effort to nix it via legislation from the reconciliation process entirely. If so, that could procedurally preclude Democrats offering any amendments involving the IRS settlement—including one nixing Trump’s IRS immunity scam.
But Democrats can still move to legislate against that in the future, and Raskin tells me this is in the works. To be clear, many legal experts think this part of Trump’s settlement is already illegal, as federal law bars a president from interfering in the audit process (presumably including audits involving himself). And as Anna Bower and Eric Columbus note, a future administration might not be bound to respect this exemption of Trump and his associates from audits.
But Democrats can still act. One way to do this, Raskin suggests, is by beefing up current law barring presidential interference into audits and broadening it to include many other government investigations, which Raskin says Democrats will pass next year if they win the House.
“We will strengthen and expand this law to include any presidential effort to target or immunize any citizen from federal criminal, civil or administrative investigation of any kind,” Raskin tells me. A Democratic leadership aide tells me that Senate Democrats will try to force floor votes killing the IRS immunity caper this year too.
With this whole fiasco, Trump is basically screwing Republicans by demanding a level of self-abasement on his behalf that even they appear to be balking at. Trump’s slush fund is too toxic for Republicans to support, in part because it would likely be used to reward the January 6 insurrectionists for trying to steal an election on his behalf.
But the IRS immunity caper should be even more toxic.
After all, Trump’s unique fusion of corruption and megalomania is already a massive liability for the GOP. A recent Washington Post poll found that 56 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s act of tearing down the White House East Wing to build a ballroom. Fifty-two percent oppose his plan for a triumphal arch. And 68 percent oppose his plan to put his signature on paper money—and that was before we learned of the scheme to put his face on a $250 bill. Among independents, those numbers are even more eye-popping: 61 percent oppose the ballroom, 57 percent oppose the arch, and 72 percent oppose his signature on paper money.
Ned Resnikoff suggests that Trump’s rule can be called “hyperfascist,” in that Trump is offering something like a “dramatic reenactment” of fascist domination. I think one can see this in all these corrupt public efforts by Trump to stamp his face all over the seat of federal power in Washington, D.C. Americans are being subjected to a veritable parade of efforts to supplant republican government with the trappings of imperial, personalist, even totalitarian rule, all undertaken—and here’s the important part—in a deliberately visible and risible way. And Americans are recoiling.
Now imagine if the public broadly understood that Trump has ordered his Justice Department to reach a deal exempting himself—and his businesses and family members—from a good deal of IRS examination. This could personally and directly benefit Trump by saving him enormous sums of money while quite consciously placing him and his cronies above laws that the rest of us must live under.
That’s another level of self-dealing entirely. And Trump is flaunting it with great relish. OK, then: Democrats should do everything they possibly can to ensure that vulnerable Republican incumbents own every last little bit of it.
