Do you know who doesn’t pay taxes? Dictators
Trump reached a deal with the IRS that protects him (and his family) from prosecution forever.
Donald Trump reached an agreement with the IRS that “forever” prevents the federal government from “prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims against the president, his family members, and his companies.
Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, signed the document and appointed a five-member board to manage payments from a $1.776 billion fund to beneficiaries whose identities will remain secret. Blanche publicly stated that Trump and his family are ineligible for these payments, but he has not ruled out payments to the president’s donors and allies.
In other words, Trump sued his own government, demanding that he not be prosecuted for his well-known tax fraud, that he be compensated with billions of dollars, and that he be protected forever from any further scrutiny of his tax returns.
Trump filed the lawsuit over the leak to the press of some of his tax return documents that exposed the tax fraud his organization and family have committed for decades. It’s no wonder he has refused for so long to voluntarily hand over his tax returns.
Now, the fund approved by his own government can literally go to anyone. Some claim it could go to the January 6 insurrectionists. Others will most likely remain anonymous. For his part, Trump can remove the commissioners from the attorney general’s board, and, as The Guardian explained, reports on the attorney general’s administration must be confidential under the agreement.
This Is the Dictator’s Playbook
And as perverse as the ploy sounds, it is not new. In fact, it is, once again, part of the dictator’s playbook.
Even if Vladimir Putin releases his tax returns, we can trust those figures about as much as we can trust the results of his “democratic” elections. His own regime (and Russia’s historical structure since the Bolshevik Revolution) has been, as autocracies tend to be, opaque.
However, in most autocracies, there is a national tax administration process. The economic system of dictatorships eliminates the middle class, dividing the population between the 1% and the rest. Often, the former are members of the government or direct beneficiaries of it. And the president? Well, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone that someone like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez Frías ever paid taxes.
“The deal that Trump extracted from the government he leads is really a spectacular demonstration of the fact that there really are two sets of tax rules, one for those at the top, and another for the rest of us,” according to Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan tax policy group.
“Trump and his officials view themselves as untethered from the tax laws that apply to ordinary Americans,” he told The Independent.
America’s Constitutional Guardrails (In Theory)
However, the United States is not (yet) a dictatorship. In fact, its constitutional structure was designed to be bulletproof, preventing what we are seeing unfold in real time. That is why the Trump vs. IRS scheme appears, at first glance, to be just another tantrum by the celebrity-turned-president. What it really is, on the contrary, is the cementing of a regime that puts in writing that “no one criticizes me.”
“Trump’s dirty deal has crossed the line into illegality,” according to Robert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert, co-presidents of the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
“If Acting AG Todd Blanche tries to effectuate this settlement by directing the IRS to end audits underway or not to conduct audits it would normally undertake, both he and Donald Trump will be violating the law and putting IRS officers at risk,” they said.
Who Else Gets the Money?
In Trump’s rhetoric, convoluted by his team to confuse the public, the money will go to his supporters, “persecuted” by Democratic administrations.
Trump said the victims of “weaponization” under the Obama and Biden administrations — an apparent reference to his allies who were investigated in connection with his 2016 and 2020 campaigns and the attack on the Capitol — were “destroyed, they went to jail, their families were ruined, they committed suicide.”
“We’re reimbursing those people for their legal fees and for their costs, and for anybody involved,” he said. “It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen in politics.”
Blanche has not ruled out millions of taxpayer dollars going to people who assaulted law enforcement officers during the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. The first lawsuit against the “weaponization” fund came from two law enforcement officers who were beaten and bloodied by a mob of Trump’s supporters that day.
The 14th Amendment Problem
Trump’s IRS lawsuit was a “Potemkin lawsuit, a sham brought about only so that it could be settled,” according to the complaint filed by Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges.
The administration is also accused of violating the 14th Amendment’s clause prohibiting the government from paying debts and other obligations “incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States” by effectively creating a roundabout payment system for aggrieved rioters.
“The fund’s mere existence sends a clear and chilling message: those who enact violence in President Trump’s name will not just avoid punishment,” according to the lawsuit, “they will be rewarded with riches.”
Meanwhile? The president can continue to pocket money, directly or indirectly, through illegal means, without anyone being able to hold him accountable.
1934? Is that you?