The $1.776 Billion Anti-Weaponization Fund
If you’re going to steal...
$1.8 billion...
from the American taxpayer...
you have to call it something.
And I have to hand it to these people...
“The Anti-Weaponization Fund”...
is inspired.
That’s not a name.
That’s a force field.
Because now...
anyone who questions where the money goes...
is automatically...
pro-weaponization.
Which, by the way...
is not a great position to run on...
in the midterms.
Here’s what actually happened...
in case the news cycle buried it under the White House demolition footage...
and the latest thing Trump said about moats.
The president sued the IRS.
His IRS.
The agency he controls.
For $10 billion.
Over the leak of his tax returns...
the ones he spent four years refusing to release...
which is a little like suing someone for reading your diary...
that you left open on the subway.
The federal judge assigned to the case...
brought in outside lawyers...
to answer a question...
that should never have to be asked...
in an American courtroom:
Can a sitting president sue himself?
The answer...
as any second-grader could tell you...
is no.
You cannot be both the plaintiff...
and the defendant.
That’s not a lawsuit.
That’s a monologue.
So before the judge could rule...
Trump dropped the case.
And in exchange...
his Justice Department...
also his...
created a $1.776 billion fund.
Managed by a commission...
the president can dismantle at will.
With no public disclosure...
on who gets paid.
And no congressional vote.
They named it after 1776.
The founding.
The patriots.
I want you to think about the audacity of that.
Using the birth year of a nation built on the idea...
that no man is above the law...
to brand a fund that exists precisely because...
one man has decided he’s above the law.
That’s not irony.
That’s trolling...
with a $1.8 billion budget.
Now the red team is going to tell me...
the Biden DOJ was weaponized...
and this is justice.
And the blue team is going to fire up...
the democracy-is-ending machine...
which, at this point...
has been running so long...
it’s basically a timeshare.
I get postcards from it.
But here’s what neither team wants to talk about.
The mechanism.
Because whatever you think about the cause...
the mechanism...
is the threat.
Once a president proves...
you can manufacture litigation...
drop it before judicial review...
and funnel Treasury money...
into an executive-controlled fund...
that’s not a Trump thing anymore.
That’s a Tuesday.
That’s just how presidents do it now.
The next one will use this.
And the one after that.
The dangerous precedents in history...
never arrive looking dangerous.
They arrive wrapped in a flag...
and a press release...
and a name that makes you sound crazy...
for questioning it.
And look...
I know we’ve all become somewhat numb to this.
We’ve watched Wall Street blow up the economy...
and get bailed out.
We watched Congress pass insider trading laws...
its own members openly ignore.
We watched the pharmaceutical industry...
manufacture an opioid epidemic...
and pay fines they’d already budgeted for.
The people running the institutions...
that were supposed to catch all this?
They’re on cable news now.
Writing books.
Sitting on boards.
Doing great.
So I understand why millions of Americans...
look at a $1.8 billion presidential slush fund...
and just...
shrug.
That’s not apathy.
That’s pattern recognition.
The trust was gone before this.
This is just the part where the corruption...
stopped being embarrassed about itself.
We used to have to squint at it.
Hunt for it in footnotes...
and appropriations riders...
and the third paragraph of a press release...
issued at 4:55 on a Friday.
Now it just walks in the front door...
orders the most expensive thing on the menu...
and hands you the bill.
Which...
if you pay taxes...
is literally what just happened.
And here’s the part that should bother you...
regardless of your jersey color:
This isn’t about Donald Trump.
Trump will be gone eventually.
The playbook stays.
Every future president now knows...
that the Judgment Fund can be accessed...
through litigation you control.
That you can build a compensation machine...
without a congressional vote.
That you can call it whatever you want...
as long as the name sounds righteous enough...
that questioning it makes you look like the bad guy.
Richard Nixon...
in 1973...
stood in front of four hundred newspaper editors...
and said...
and I’m paraphrasing...
“People have a right to know whether their president is a crook.”
He was lying about the second part.
But notice the first part.
He still felt obligated to say it.
The premise that accountability...
is the price of the office...
that was still alive in 1973.
Even in a crook.
That premise...
is what’s dead now.
The current position isn’t:
“I’m not a crook.”
It’s:
“So what if I am?”
And somewhere...
Nixon is looking up from wherever Nixon ended up...
watching all of this...
and thinking:
“I got impeached for what?”
The fund is called...
The Anti-Weaponization Fund.
The lawsuit...
was the delivery system.
The branding...
is the argument.
And the American taxpayer...
is holding the bill.
- Rxan Smith | Uncomfortable.
rxansmith.substack.com
