As if the past 16 months weren’t enough, this week I reached my breaking point.
A large image of President Donald Trump hangs from the the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, DC.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” newscaster Howard Beale hollers, as he spirals into an environment-induced madness, on air, in the classic 1976 movie Network. Speaking to a TV camera, he urges his audience to open their windows and scream out that they are also mad as hell. From coast to coast, as Americans respond to Beale’s primal scream, those windows open and those screams of rage and of fury at being betrayed by their own government are heard. It’s perhaps the most breathtaking four minutes of cinema ever made.
Right about now, I’m tempted to open my windows and scream the same crie de coeur out into the ether. For more than 16 months, the Trump regime has done one outrageous or cruel or corrupt or unconstitutional thing after another, but this week I reached my breaking point.
I refer to the extraordinary agreement between Trump, the Trumpified Department of Justice, and the Trumpified Treasury Department to settle the president’s outrageous $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service by both granting Trump and his hoodlum family immunity from investigations into potential tax fraud, and also creating a $1.776-billion slush fund to be disbursed at will to January 6th insurrectionists and others who claim to have been “victims” of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. The kicker: it would be funded using tax money from you, me, and everyone else in this country.
To be 100 percent clear here: unlike the men, women, and children who have simply been disappeared into makeshift concentration camps by Trump’s regime, those “victims” actually received jury trials, were found guilty by their peers, and were sentenced not for being Trump fans but for battering Capitol police officers, for hunting Congressional members with the intent of killing them, for vandalizing the citadel of American democracy, and for trying to subvert the will of the people by preventing the peaceful transfer of power. Now, members of this ragtag band of traitors, fools, hucksters, and brass-knuckle men stand to gain wealth, possibly millions, through the transfer of your and my hard-earned tax dollars into their bank accounts. Six dollars from every man, woman, and child in this country; that’s about what this slush fund for fascists will end up costing if the courts don’t stop it—a number of Capitol police officers have already sued—or if Congress doesn’t muster the decency to intervene.
One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is that the ruler regards the nation’s treasury as their personal piggy bank—to be raided at will, with its contents parceled out to friends, family, regime loyalists, and enforcers. That is exactly what “Acting Attorney General” Todd Blanche has signed off on in agreeing to this odious deal with Trump. Blanche, who is surely the most loathsome, pathetic, and spineless creature ever to have sat in the AG’s office (and yes, the comparison list includes Pam Bondi), has given the DOJ’s imprimatur to a mafia-quality shakedown operation. It is the quintessence of public corruption.
“One of the most basic problems with this Anti-Weaponization Fund is there are no objective criteria for determining who would be eligible for compensation,” Jonathan Rusch, director of the Anti-Corruption Law Program at the American University Law School, told me. Rusch—who spent 26 years as a federal prosecutor working on high-profile public corruption cases, some of them involving members of Congress, and who teaches a summer course on tackling corruption that is popular not just amongst law students but also international officials looking to root out malfeasance in their own political institutions—believes the fund has been established to give maximum discretion to DOJ officials as to how and to whom they distribute the money. The formal document creating the fund “doesn’t say what the actual, articulated purpose is. This is a further effort to provide for people out to disrupt the congressional process for their service in Trump’s interest.”
Shortly after the announcement of the settlement agreement, Brian Morrissey, the Treasury department’s top lawyer, abruptly resigned. While he has not made a public statement, the timing suggests that he was deeply uncomfortable with what was unfolding. Rusch guesses that he concluded it was contrary both to the law and to sound public policy, and that, in the long run, it would expose those who signed off on it to significant legal risks.
What are those risks? The effort to shield Trump, his children, and the family business from all IRS scrutiny could all-too-easily be seen as obstruction of justice, Rusch notes. The financial rewarding of Trump’s political allies, through the use of taxpayer dollars, could be interpreted as being part of a conspiracy to defraud the United States. And federal laws prohibiting the misappropriation of public property could also kick in if it can be proven that the fund involves a fraudulent appropriation of property. “This is a handout scheme to buy the affections of people who are your supporters,” Rusch explained to me. “Including the Proud Boys and other white supremacist groups. This is all about financial handouts to supporters.”
As for his thoughts on Blanche? “The Acting AG is completely supportive of and prepared to carry out every wish and demand the president makes with regards to retaliation. It is a derogation of principled constitutional government.”
That, I suspect, is lawyer-speak for saying that Blanche is now using the full force of the DOJ not only to prosecute Trump’s political opponents but to smooth the way for some of the most shady uses of public dollars in American history in the service of a deeply autocratic and anti-constitutional new power elite. He has become American fascism’s most visible consigliere.
Howard Beale, who found absolute clarity of vision in his frenzied madness, would have simply added it to the list of heinous woes confronting society. The ICE death squads. The senseless wars. The assassinations of fishermen in the Pacific and Caribbean. The insulting of allies. The dismissal of Americans’ economic pain. The use of tariffs to reward Trump’s friends and punish his foes. The tearing apart of USAID. The shameful evisceration of the country’s refugee resettlement program. The dismissal of climate change as a hoax. The firing of top public health experts. The attacks on the First Amendment rights of academics and journalists. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the Southern stampede to neutralize Black political representation. And now, the billion-dollar plundering of the public treasury to further exonerate those who attempted to launch a putsch to keep Trump in power in 2021.
Then Beale would have looked into the camera and, his righteous fury in full flowering, told his audience to open their windows and scream at the top of their lungs that they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore.
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