This morning, amid the ongoing negotiating stalemate in Iran, Donald Trump made a sudden public concession: He was no longer calling, he said, for Iran to permanently abandon its nuclear ambitions, but rather to accept a twenty-year moratorium. “Twenty years is enough, but the level of guarantee from them is not enough,” the president said aboard Air Force One while returning home from China. “In other words, it’s got to be a real twenty years.” Happy Friday.

The Worst Grift Yet?

by Andrew Egger

I have to admit: Amid the daily carousel of Trump outrages, I’d sort of lost track of his absurd $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for failing to prevent the years-ago leaking of his tax returns. It wasn’t that I thought Trump’s lickspittle Treasury Department wouldn’t be willing to settle with him on his terms, or that I thought he’d be ashamed to take the money. There was just something about the ludicrousness of the story—the size and scope of the shameless attempted robbery of taxpayer money—that made it tough to get my brain around it. The corruption literally boggled the mind.

Well, I’d better start getting my brain around it quick. Multiple outlets reported this week that Trump and the IRS are close to finalizing a settlement in the case. And according to ABC News, that settlement is expected to hinge upon the funding of a truly insane new pot of government money: “a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.”

ABC News’s sources cautioned that the deal wasn’t yet finalized. But the fund under discussion would be the next step in the evolution of Trump’s unimaginable presidential graft. The members of the commission overseeing disbursements would serve at Trump’s pleasure, and he’d be able to remove them without cause at any time. The commission would have no obligation to disclose its decision-making process for how to disburse the money. And while Trump himself would be barred from directly receiving payments, “entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”

This story is one that piles intolerable outrage on intolerable outrage. There’s the baseline obscenity of the lawsuit in the first place. Even if Trump hadn’t been reelected president, $10 billion was always a ludicrous ask in damages for the leak of his tax returns—a leak perpetrated by an outside contractor, not one countenanced in any way by the IRS. (That contractor, Charles Littlejohn, was caught and is serving a five-year prison sentence.)

There’s the obvious conflict of interest. The IRS has fought other lawsuits brought on the basis of Littlejohn’s leaks, arguing it isn’t liable for the misdeeds of a contractor. But the idea that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s IRS would fight as hard to keep money out of the hands of Bessent’s boss was laughable from the start.

Then there are the extraordinary steps the White House and IRS have taken to prevent the federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, from weighing in on that obvious conflict of interest. Williams, who has been scrutinizing the question of whether the two parties are in fact on opposite sides in the matter, gave the parties a May 20 deadline to submit briefs explaining in what sense they actually are in conflict. If the government were really interested in defending its own interests, this imminent prospect of a judge throwing out the case on procedural grounds would strengthen its resolve to fight.

Instead, the New York Times reports, it is treating that date as a settlement deadline: “White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline.” Far from straining to protect public funds in an adversarial legal process—the government’s responsibility even if the lawsuit were completely just—the defendants appear to be bending over backwards to avoid anyone coming to those funds’ defense, even the judge.

And then, of course, there’s the unbearable rottenness of the purported settlement fund itself: the shamelessness of Trump keeping a backdoor way to profit from it personally, the utter absence of any oversight controls that would even allow him to plausibly argue that the money will be spent justly, and the completely topsy-turvy travesty of creating a slush fund for January 6ers and other MAGA villains in the first place. The whole thing reeks to high heaven. Should it come to fruition, it would be not merely a miscarriage of justice but a sacrilege against it.

What’s to be done? The terms of the deal, ABC notes, are not yet totally set. In theory, there is time yet for America to spit this obscenity out of its mouth. Every member of Congress that retains a modicum of self-respect and love for the country should be shrieking from the rooftops about this. And not merely shrieking, but threatening action. If this sort of looting of the public coffers at the president’s behest and for his personal gain and that of his allies isn’t an impeachable offense, then the term has truly lost all meaning.

It’s a mark of how bad things have gotten that I’m not holding my breath. But I grimly console myself that he is not going to get away with this shit forever. America has had enough of this guy, and everyone is starting to see it. His scrambling efforts to line his pockets more and more, to pillage everything that isn’t nailed down, before he’s sent packing once and for all—happily, this can only sharpen the rage of the electoral vengeance that’s coming for him.