“Corruption” no longer adequately describes what is happening in Washington. The Trump administration is asserting a principle—a modern day version of “l’état, c’est moi”—in which the president claims the right to dispense public money, immunity and favors like a mob boss handing out envelopes. The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” reveals the essential of the Trump regime: fusion of a gangster-oligarchy and the apparatus of the state.
The fund—approved by the Trump White House and the Trump Justice Department in negotiations conducted between Trump and his former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General—is an act of presidential usurpation of congressional authority without precedent in American history.
Trump agreed to drop his bogus $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for supposed negligence in the leak of his tax returns to the New York Times. In exchange, Blanche—who takes his orders from Trump and hopes to remove the “acting” from his title—agreed to set aside $1.776 billion in US government funds to pay compensation to individuals claiming to have been unfairly investigated or prosecuted by the administration of Democrat Joe Biden.
The establishment of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” through the actions of the executive branch alone is a direct and brazen violation of the US Constitution. Article I, establishing Congress as the primary branch of government, declares: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” thus vesting the spending power in Congress, not the president.
A second feature of the Trump-Blanche deal is a one-page addendum, released by the Justice Department Wednesday, which, in the all-caps style favored by Trump in his incessant social media posts, “RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons and his business entities from claims that “have been or could have been asserted” by federal defendants or “other agencies or departments.” This would include suppressing all ongoing reviews of their tax returns, which have become a byword for deception and fraud.
This addendum comes just short of two years since the US Supreme Court, in its notorious decision in Trump v. United States, held that Trump—and by extension any president—was immune from prosecution for any action he took, no matter how criminal, in the course of exercising his powers as chief of the executive branch.
In effect, Trump has now been immunized both for his public actions and his private actions.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her 2024 dissent, “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
To echo the dissenting justice: Falsifies his tax returns? Immune. Enriches his sons with fat government contracts? Immune. Rewards fascist thugs for their violent attack on the US Capitol? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Trump has been declared above the law, first by his hand-picked justices on the Supreme Court, now by his hand-picked acting Attorney General and a Department of Justice that is a nest of fascist conspirators.
Many of the January 6 attackers pled guilty in return for reduced sentences. All of them have since been pardoned by Trump or had their sentences commuted. None are now in prison, except those who have since been arrested for other crimes, ranging from assault to child molestation. Now they are expected to flood the Department of Justice with requests for six-figure and even seven-figure compensation.
The fund’s governance structure makes its corrupt purpose transparent. It is administered by a five-member committee appointed by Trump’s attorney general, with all members removable by Trump. A quorum of just three—meaning decisions can be made by two Trump-appointed loyalists—can authorize disbursements. There is no public rulemaking, no defined class of eligible claimants, no judicial review and no right of appeal. The fund is auditable only “at the Attorney General’s direction”—i.e., if Trump says so.
Media coverage of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” has focused almost entirely on the ever-growing list of Republican political operatives, lawyers and elected officials who sought to disrupt and then overturn the 2020 election and who may now claim payoffs for services rendered.
The media fixation on the prospective “payoffs” for Republican operatives and lawyers deliberately evades the underlying social reality: The naked gangsterism of the Trump regime expresses the social physiognomy of the capitalist oligarchy itself. This is a ruling layer that has accumulated staggering wealth, not through productive labor, but through speculation and parasitism enforced by state power at home and imperialist violence abroad.
It is also inextricably connected to the conspiracy for dictatorship. Trump is using government money to reward and finance his most devoted fascist followers, who have already demonstrated their willingness to use violence in his service. He is providing them with the resources to recruit and build up a fascist militia, the American equivalent of Hitler’s brownshirts, to use against his political opponents.
Such forces will be deployed against the working class and youth, against the hundreds of thousands of workers already engaged in strike action to defend their jobs and living standards, against the millions who have marched in “No Kings” protests, against opponents of the war in Iran, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the rampage by Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs against immigrant families living in America.
There are mounting signs that such attacks will come sooner rather than later. Trump is relentlessly purging all opposition from within the Republican Party so that he can use its present narrow majority in Congress to push through policies widely opposed by the American people: military aggression overseas, slashing social benefits, attacks on immigrants and the rigging or outright suppression of the midterm elections.
The deeper issue is that Trump acts with the confidence of someone who knows that every institution has been compromised. The presidency claims unlimited power; Congress has been reduced to a spectacle of impotence; the Supreme Court has issued doctrines of immunity that place the executive above the law. Trump feels he can do anything because the state itself has been hollowed out by decades of oligarchic domination and is now being openly transformed into an instrument of personal dictatorship.
The Democratic Party will take no serious action against this assault on the remnants of American democracy. Leading Senate and House Democrats, appearing at a press conference on Thursday, criticized the slush fund purely as a matter of corruption, while avoiding any suggestion that the American population should be mobilized against the would-be dictator-president. Instead, they repeated the tired claim that a Democratic victory in the midterm elections would give them the power to hold Trump accountable.
This is political fraud. Measured against what is now taking place, the matters for which Nixon was forced from office appear almost trivial. And yet the Democrats will not move against Trump, not because they lack facts, but because they fear the consequences of mobilizing popular opposition more than they fear dictatorship itself.
The Democrats pretend to criticize Trump over the economic impact of his policies on “affordability,” a buzzword for the devastating decline in working-class living standards. But they propose no alternative, because they represent the class of billionaire oligarchs, CEOs and bankers. Their real opposition to Trump centers on foreign policy, accusing him of neglecting the global interests of American imperialism by abandoning the war against Russia in Ukraine, or squandering US military assets in the Middle East that should be used instead against China.
The removal of Trump is not a question of restoring “norms” or appealing to institutions that have already been corrupted and subordinated to oligarchic rule. It is a political necessity posed by the objective incompatibility of dictatorship with the interests of the working class and the survival of democratic rights. The only force capable of stopping the plunge of American capitalism into war, mass immiseration and dictatorship is the working class, mobilized independently against the entire political system and the capitalist oligarchy it serves.