That Trump is a brazen grifter goes without saying. He has also used the justice department as his own personal law firm, using them to attack his enemies and reward his friends. But he may have outdone himself with his latest attempt to get money from the government to fund his grifts.

What happened was that Trump sued the government for $10 billion, charging that his rights had been violated when a private contractor leaked his tax returns back in 2019 and 2020. The idea of a president suing his own government was ridiculous enough and would likely have been thrown out. But he had appointed his own former personal lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general and before the case went to trial, the ‘two sides’ (which are actually just one side) announced that a settlement had been reached in which the government would create a slush fund of $1.776 billion (how patriotic!) to compensate those people who had been charged in the January 6th insurrection and then pardoned by Trump. We do not know whether this was the original plan or a fall back position after the outrage that emerged at the thought of such blatant chicanery by Trump to enrich himself. If this was allowed to stand, then there was no end to how much a president could get out of the government to do with as he wished simply by suing and settling.

But this was too much for some judges and they have called for an investigation into what they see as the abuse of the judicial system.

A federal judge is demanding answers to allegations that President Donald Trump defrauded her court by filing a lawsuit against the IRS as a pretext to reach a settlement that resulted in a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to make payouts to his political allies.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams launched the inquiry Friday, after closing the lawsuit on her docket last week. The Miami-based Obama appointee cited a request by 35 former federal judges who urged her to reopen the case to determine whether Trump’s effort amounted to “serious misconduct” and an abuse of the court system.
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In her four-page order Friday, Williams indicated that she’s considering reopening the case. She also noted the former judges’ suggestion that Trump’s attorneys knew from the start that their lawsuit had no merit and filed it solely to justify a purported settlement that the administration wanted to announce.

The judge added that a federal court rule requires attorneys to ensure that court filings are “not presented for any improper purpose.”

“A party’s decision to file a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement may qualify as such an improper purpose,” Williams said.

The judge also noted that the former judges argued that Trump’s suit appeared “clearly untimely” because it was filed well after the expiration of a two-year statute of limitations on claims of unlawful disclosure of tax information.

Although the settlement appears to have been hashed out between Trump’s private attorneys and lawyers at the Justice Department and IRS, Williams’ order Friday is directed at Trump, his sons and his company, and does not request any response from the government. She noted in her order that the government never submitted any filings in response to the lawsuit.

The judge noted, however, that the settlement appeared to run afoul of DOJ policies that require any settlements to be “specifically limited to the immediate subject matter of the claim.” Williams also pointed out that a settlement addendum that waives all tax claims the U.S. may currently have against Trump, his two eldest sons, and his businesses and trusts was signed only by Blanche.

So not only does the ‘settlement’ create a slush fund for Trump’s use, it also ends any and all tax claims against Trump and his cronies.

That Trump has not been impeached for his corruption shows how craven Republicans are. But at least some Republicans in Congress are willing to kill the slush fund.

Henry Giroux describes the extraordinary nature of the corruption in the Trump administration.

Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. Some of the most notorious scandals stretch from the cronyism of Warren G. Harding to the abuses of power exposed during the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. Yet many historians argue that what distinguishes Donald Trump from earlier corrupt presidencies is that corruption no longer operates behind closed doors, shielded by the liberal rituals of institutional legitimacy and the euphemisms of political decorum. Under Trump, corruption is performed openly as spectacle, celebrated as a sign of strength, wealth, vengeance, and personal loyalty.

Trump’s ever-expanding regime of corruption is no longer simply hidden financial misconduct but a public display of sociopathic avarice designed to normalize greed, lawlessness, unconstrained power, and the collapse of civic accountability. It reflects a politics of moral nihilism in which fascism no longer appears as a distant threat, but as the future already taking shape.

As a badge of honor, Trump embraces corruption not simply as a mode of governance, but as a spectacle designed to legitimate greed, cruelty, and unchecked power. It functions as what Dominic Wetzel has called the “pornification of the American dream,” a culture in which excess, lawlessness, and predation are celebrated as signs of success and strength. In Trump’s America, corruption metastasizes into a theater of cruelty and violence, saturating political life with the values of fear, spectacle, and disposability. It feeds a broader architecture of domination rooted in toxic hierarchies of race, class, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism, while turning lawlessness and untethered aggression into forms of political entertainment.

What defines the Trump regime, then, is not merely corruption in the conventional sense of bribery or financial misconduct. Rather, it is the systemic fusion of authoritarian power, organized greed, spectacle, state-sponsored cruelty, and impunity, a fusion that transforms corruption into a governing principle and a cultural ideal. The display of greed and the ensuing scandals are staggering in scope: the use of Trump hotels and resorts as political cash machines for lobbyists, foreign governments, and Republican operatives seeking influence; the funneling of taxpayer money into Trump-owned properties through Secret Service and government expenditures; the diversion of inauguration funds into private enrichment schemes; the use of cryptocurrency ventures and opaque political action committees as modern slush funds; the acceptance of lavish gifts, luxury travel, and aircraft linked to billionaire benefactors and foreign interests; and the open monetization of political access itself.

Added to this are Jared Kushner’s multibillion-dollar Saudi investment connections following his White House role, Ivanka Trump’s trademark deals and business expansions during the administration, and the nepotistic appointment of family members to positions of immense political influence. What emerges is a scale of self-dealing and lawlessness unprecedented in modern American politics. But these scandals are not isolated abuses of office. They point to a deeper transformation in which corruption becomes institutionalized as a governing logic, a mode of public pedagogy, and a defining feature of authoritarian power.

It is a sick society that puts people like Trump into power and then allows him to exploit the people for his own personal gain.