POTUS v. US Government: The Most Efficient Grift Ever

You have to give Donald Trump some credit. He was making plenty of money selling pardons, ripping off Venezuela’s oil and selling seats on his “Board of Peace,” but all of these required something resembling work. In the case of Venezuelan oil, he even had to invade a country and kill 80 people. 

But Trump’s latest grift is far simpler. He just sues the government and then orders Attorney General Pam Bondi to give him the money. He already did this several months back when he filed a $230 million suit because the government tried to prosecute him for the crimes he committed.

As a practical matter, Trump’s lawsuit was a total joke. Since he almost certainly would have been found guilty if he had allowed the prosecution to continue, there is not even the beginning of a case. Imagine Jeffrey Epstein, if he were still alive, suing the government for prosecuting him. I doubt the Justice Department would be handing over $230 million.

But the Trump case was even worse. Even when acquitted, a defendant can only under extraordinary circumstances, like when a prosecution is racially motivated, even get through the door with a suit against the government. And in such cases, the defendant’s attorney fees would be the bulk of the damages. 

That might get Trump into the single-digit millions even if the facts had been completely different and he was totally innocent. That might come to 2% or 3% of the taxpayer dollars he told Bondi to give to him.

But now Trump has decided he needs more money, so he’s demanding more than 40 times as much, suing the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion for releasing information from his tax returns. One of the ironies of this story is that the leak took place in Trump’s first term — so ostensibly, as president, he is responsible for the harm for which he is suing the government. No matter, this is Donald Trump’s America.

I often point out that the sums the right yells about are relatively trivial when put in any sort of context. Trump’s theft is moving into the not altogether trivial category even in the context of the federal budget. 

For some comparisons, the annual appropriation to support public broadcasting was around $550 million. Donald Trump is demanding almost 20 times as much because of his hurt feelings over some of his tax returns being made public. 

The Africa AIDS program that Elon Musk nixed with his little chainsaw got $4.5 billion a year. This program has saved tens of millions of lives. Donald Trump wants taxpayers to give him more than twice as much because the IRS embarrassed him by releasing his tax returns, something every president has done for decades.

The enhanced subsidies in the Obamacare health insurance exchanges that the Republicans let expire at the start of this year would cost about $30 billion a year to extend. These subsidies would benefit around 22 million people. This means that Donald Trump is asking taxpayers to hand him one-third of the money needed to make health care affordable to 22 million people.

Here’s the picture. 

As bad as it is to steal $10 billion from the taxpayers, the worst part is that Trump now realizes that the federal Treasury is an open piggy bank for him. He can file a lawsuit about literally anything, no matter how crazy, for any amount, and then tell Attorney General Bondi or the relevant agency head to hand him the cash.  

Who knows, maybe he’ll direct some lackey to misspell his name on the Trump Gold Visa or any of the other crazy things he puts his name on. Then he can sue for $50 billion for emotional harm. Maybe he’ll tell Bondi to drive a hard bargain and only settle for $40 billion. 

This is a patently absurd clown show, but that is where we are as a country. Trump can steal as much as he wants from the taxpayers and the Republicans in Congress will do some mixture of “I don’t know anything about it” and “Trump deserves it.” 

The majority in the country are clearly disgusted by Trump’s corruption, his incompetence, his contempt for democracy and his vicious attacks on American cities. The real question is whether we still have enough of a democracy that the majority opinion matters.