The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Trump’s $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” slush fund for MAGA martyrs is (temporarily) dead because even Senate Republicans flinched at openly cutting checks to January 6 convicts. But while everyone was gawking at the flaming pile of that idea, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche – who just happens to be Trump’s former personal lawyer – quietly handed his old client something much more valuable: a one-page deal that bars the IRS from continuing audits of Trump, his family, and their “affiliates.” Translation: the president of the United States just arranged retroactive tax immunity for himself, potentially worth more than $100m.

The path there is peak Trump. He literally sued the U.S. government he runs for $10bn over the leak of his tax returns, making himself both plaintiff and boss of the defendant. The Trump-controlled DOJ then “settled” by trying to create a taxpayer-funded MAGA restitution pool and, more quietly, by ordering the IRS to stop looking at his old returns and those of his family businesses. This is the presidential equivalent of robbing a bank, appointing your lawyer as sheriff, and having him issue a memo that says, actually, the money is yours now.

The fun doesn’t stop with Trump. The vague immunity covers Trump, his kids, and “related or affiliated individuals” and entities – which could conveniently sweep in the Trump Organization’s foreign-deal bonanza and Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, currently hoovering up billions from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE while he moonlights as an unofficial peace envoy. Post-Watergate laws explicitly bar presidents and their aides from meddling in IRS audits, with criminal penalties for IRS officials who cave to White House pressure. Blanche signed the immunity order anyway and buried it on DOJ’s website like a used NDA. Future administrations get to decide whether this was just wildly corrupt or also a crime. Trump, meanwhile, has achieved the dream of every tax cheat: he made himself too politically powerful to audit.

The Trump DOJ has discovered a bold new interpretation of the Clean Water Act: if you’re a loyal Trump ally drowning Appalachia in coal sludge, it’s more of a vibe than a law. Career prosecutors and EPA investigators built what they believed was a strong criminal case against Sen. Jim Justice’s Southern Coal — a company with tens of thousands of alleged Clean Water Act violations and a long, greasy history of ignoring environmental rules. The probe had even been greenlit by Trump’s own U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia.

Then the political appointees noticed they were accidentally doing law enforcement on a Republican senator, and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General swooped in and ordered everyone to go "pencils down." Todd Blanche’s shop shut the whole thing off while Justice’s lawyers were busy fighting subpoenas in court — and, miraculously, also convincing DOJ that there was "no evidence" for criminal charges. As a bonus, DOJ spokeswoman Emily Covington explained that any career prosecutor who thought the case was strong was just a "deep state" Biden stooge, which is an interesting way to describe people enforcing the law under a Trump administration.

This fits neatly into Trump’s second-term pattern: hammer enemies, protect friends, and treat environmental crimes like parking tickets in a lawless strip mall. Environmental enforcement has cratered, environmental attorneys were reassigned to work on Trump’s immigration crackdown, and Blanche personally told prosecutors to stand down on diesel emissions cheating cases. Meanwhile, Justice’s companies keep racking up violations, blowing off court hearings, and allegedly undercounting assets to dodge environmental penalties, but sure, the real problem is rogue prosecutors.

So to recap: a coal baron senator who switched to the GOP at a Trump rally, helped secure Trump a Senate majority, and runs what officials call a "routine bad actor" operation gets his potential criminal case killed from on high because it doesn’t match "Trump administration priorities." The priority, as always, appears to be: laws for the poor, deregulation for the rich, and a nice tall glass of arsenic-laced water for everyone downstream.

Donald Trump, currently marketing himself as the nation’s top fraud-buster in "Democrat-run" states, quietly spent his week doing what he actually does best: rewarding Republican white-collar crime. The White House dropped a late Friday pardon for former Indiana GOP congressman and lobbyist Stephen Buyer, who was convicted of insider trading, sentenced to 22 months, ordered to cough up more than $350,000 in illegal gains, and then told by the supreme court to go touch grass. Trump instead gave him a "full, complete, and unconditional" absolution, like a mob boss signing off on one of the family’s better earners.

The official justification reads like a Hallmark card written by a defense contractor: Buyer’s military service, his "distinguished and highly productive" time in Congress, and, crucially, his work as a House prosecutor during Bill Clinton’s impeachment and on Trump’s own 2016 transition team. A chorus of more than 40 former Republicans in Congress claimed he was "targeted by the deep state" and a victim of "lawfare" by the Biden administration, apparently hoping everyone forgot that juries, evidence, and securities laws still technically exist. Buyer, convicted over insider trades tied to the T‑Mobile/Sprint merger and a consulting firm acquisition, now insists the pardon "corrects" a politically motivated prosecution — which is a very poetic way of saying that if you stay loyal to Trump long enough, crime really does pay.

So while Trump rants about law and order and a war on corruption, he’s using the pardon power like a VIP punch card for Republican crooks who made the mistake of getting caught. Crackdowns are for blue states; absolution is for guys who helped impeach Clinton and shepherd Trump’s rise. The constitution calls it a pardon. The rest of us might go with "presidential rewards program for financial crime enthusiasts."

America has finally discovered the boomer version of Antifa: 35 retired federal judges who are so "infuriated" with Trump’s latest stunt that they’ve taken off the kid gloves and put on their reading glasses. These former judges filed a motion calling out a supposed $1.8 billion “settlement” the Trump administration cooked up — a fund apparently designed to shower his allies with cash while conveniently shielding Trump from pesky little things like tax audits and legal liability.

A federal judge in Florida, rather than laughing this off as the world’s saddest legal GoFundMe, actually took it seriously and ordered President Trump to respond. The retirees accused the administration of collusion and fraud, which is exactly what everyone else has been saying for months, but this time it’s coming from people who spent decades in robes instead of on cable news. As they gently reminded the court, they “have dedicated their professional lives to the administration of justice,” which is a polite, judicial way of saying: we know what corruption looks like, and this is it.

Conservative critics are already clutching pearls about retired judges “trading on their prestige,” as if the real scandal here is decorum, not the sitting president allegedly using the federal courts as an ATM for friends and a shield for his own finances. Trump gets a bespoke $1.8 billion legal force field, and the outrage brigade is mad that the people calling it out used the wrong fork at dinner. The judiciary, long treated by this administration as a suggestion box, is starting to push back — and it’s not a great sign for your presidency when the people who usually write footnotes are now writing amicus briefs calling you a fraud.

Democratic lawmakers are politely asking why the White House appears to be running the Pentagon like a family hedge fund, after ProPublica revealed that Peter Navarro personally leaned on the Department of Defense to fast-track a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth startup conveniently backed by Donald Trump Jr. The loan request, uniquely initiated by a top White House aide, was treated with an "unusually rapid" pace because, as one official put it, "The call came from the White House: We have to get this done"—which is always what you want to hear about national security spending: hurry up, Junior needs a liquidity event.

The lawmakers’ letter to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles describes a "staggering level of corruption and influence peddling" that enriched the president’s son at the expense of taxpayers and national security. They ask basic questions like: Did Navarro do this on his own or at someone’s direction? Did Trump know? Who else in the White House is moonlighting as a venture capitalist with Pentagon money? In response, Navarro dismissed it all as "fake news on steroids," which is an interesting way to describe documented emails, loan approvals, and a company valuation that exploded tenfold right after the government backed it.

The White House insists it’s all in "the best interest of the American people" and that everything is happening at "Trump Speed"—a phrase that here appears to mean from prison buddy to $620 million in public cash in under a year. Trump Jr.’s camp swears he never discussed Vulcan with Navarro and had "no knowledge" of how the deal came together, a remarkable coincidence given that Navarro is a close friend, prison pen pal, book beneficiary, and recent guest on Junior’s show hyping his latest grift. Meanwhile, the Pentagon deadpans that "no company receives preferential treatment" and that political connections play "absolutely no role" in funding decisions, which is technically true if you close your eyes and scream loudly enough.

Other Trump-linked businesses have already feasted on government contracts and crypto-adjacent goodies, but this is the first time a federal contract has been directly traced back to White House intervention. Sen. Raphael Warnock helpfully summarized the situation as "They are looting this country. Dismantling it, selling it for parts, and lining their own pockets," while Sen. Patty Murray called it "nonstop corruption" and demanded an investigation. Republicans, having long ago accepted their role as background extras in the Trump family enrichment saga, continue to perfect the ancient Senate art of staring at their shoes.

Doug Burgum went on CNN to explain that the Trump administration’s big, totally nonpartisan Freedom 250 concert is absolutely not political — except for the part where Donald Trump keeps publicly calling it a MAGA rally and threatening to replace the musicians with a campaign speech about how he’s bigger than Elvis. Apparently the real problem isn’t that the White House tried to turn a national 250th birthday celebration into a taxpayer-adjacent campaign event; it’s that some musicians “segmented their audiences” by not wanting to be props in a cult rally.

Pressed on who’s actually funding this patriotic karaoke night, Burgum bravely took a stand against transparency, saying donor disclosure isn’t important and we should focus on “celebrating the 250th anniversary.” Translation: the public gets the flag bunting, the undisclosed donors get the access, and everyone pretends this is just a neutral love-fest for America while the president screams MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN in all caps on Truth Social.

As artists flee the lineup after realizing they were misled about the event being apolitical, Trump has responded by calling them “third rate” and suggesting he’ll grace the stage himself, because nothing honors the founding more than a self-described “Number One Attraction” ranting about crowd sizes and how only “Happy, Smart, Successful People” are invited. Meanwhile, Burgum also defended the no-bid, high-profit contracts for sprucing up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — because if you’re going to wrap a partisan rally in the American flag, you might as well overpay your friends to polish the scenery.

Just to round out the civic vandalism, Burgum floated appealing a judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. So the administration is: hiding donors, funneling money through no-bid contracts, converting a national celebration into a campaign rally, and trying to slap Trump’s name back on a major cultural institution. Truly a fitting tribute to 250 years of a republic that was absolutely not founded to worship a single guy in a red hat.

The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital was supposedly created to reduce America’s dependence on China for critical minerals. Under Trump, it’s apparently been repurposed to reduce Donald Trump Jr.’s dependence on having marketable skills. ProPublica reports that a $620 million Defense Department loan — the biggest in the program’s history — went to Vulcan Elements, a tiny North Carolina rare-earth startup whose valuation magically exploded right after the deal. Also magically: Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in Vulcan about three months before the loan was announced. Pure coincidence, we’re told, by everyone with a financial interest in you believing that.

The key detail: of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering, Vulcan was the only one whose deal was personally initiated by a top White House aide — Peter Navarro, now Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing and, importantly, a close buddy of Trump Jr. Navarro, fresh off a stint in prison for defying a Jan. 6 subpoena, phoned in from his redemption tour to tell Pentagon staff this one had to be done, and fast. Officials were ordered to sprint through a weeks-long approval process at “Trump Speed,” which apparently means federal due diligence now works like a late-night infomercial: act now, supplies (of ethics) are limited.

Everyone involved is loudly insisting there was absolutely no favoritism. Trump Jr. swears he never discussed Vulcan with federal officials and has "no knowledge" of how the deal came together, a fascinating claim given his equity stake and his prison-visiting bromance with the guy who made the ask. The White House insists it’s all being done in “the best interest of the American people,” because nothing says public service like funneling hundreds of millions in taxpayer-backed loans to companies your family owns pieces of. The Pentagon helpfully adds that “outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role” in its funding decisions — a statement so aggressively unbelievable it should come with a laugh track.

Former Bush ethics lawyer Richard Painter calls this what it is: corruption the public is forced to bankroll. The Trump team calls it national security and slaps a flag on it. The Office of Strategic Capital was designed to methodically vet companies through an open process; the Trump administration supersized its authority from $1 billion to $200 billion and then treated it like a private-equity slush fund with missile decals. And lurking in the background? Another Trump Jr.–linked company — a drone parts manufacturer — also under Pentagon loan review. At this rate, the only real “strategic capital” being secured is the Trump family’s.

NPR sat down with Brennan Center for Justice president Michael Waldman, who politely described the Trump administration’s latest antics as "epic corruption in plain sight," which is a very lawyerly way of saying, "they’re looting the place with the lights on and the doors open." When the Brennan Center — the group that usually writes dense reports on campaign finance and voting rights — starts sounding like they’re live-tweeting a smash-and-grab, you know the situation has achieved advanced banana republic status.

Mary Louise Kelly asked the obvious question: what can be done about it? The depressing answer, as always, is some combo of "stronger laws," "independent institutions," and "voters giving a damn" — all of which Trump and his cronies have been methodically stripping for parts like a stolen Honda. The White House keeps testing how much open, unapologetic corruption the system can absorb, while the rule of law responds by scheduling another panel discussion on norms. Waldman is basically standing on the roof with a megaphone yelling "the house is on fire," while half of Washington debates whether it would be partisan to call the fire department.