On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it was creating a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund to compensate Trump supporters who have been “mistreated” by previous Democratic administrations. The fund is clearly an effort to offer a financial reward to January 6 insurrectionists—who have already been pardoned by Trump. 

The program amounts to a white grievance fund paid for with money stolen from the public. 

The fund was announced as part of a “deal” Trump made to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump had accused the IRS of illegally leaking his tax returns. The Trump administration seems to want people to report these two events as if they are linked—the DOJ has framed the slush fund as a way to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare”—but, in reality, they are connected only by the fact that they are both ways for Trump to try to steal money from the government. 

The IRS lawsuit would have been thrown out of court if Trump had not dismissed the case. Trump controls the IRS and the Treasury Department. To the extent the IRS did anything wrong (and the IRS didn’t do anything wrong), Trump’s case against them should have been moot as he now oversees the agency. There cannot be a “case or controversy” for the courts to adjudicate when one party controls both sides of the litigation. “Trump v. Trump” is not a case. Trump was just trying to extort the government he now runs for $10 billion.

As for the DOJ slush fund, one way to look at it is that Trump is effectively setting up a mechanism where taxpayers have to pay for him to funnel money to his own private army. The people who participated in the January 6 insurrection are literal criminals who acted on Trump’s behalf and were then pardoned by him—only to now be offered taxpayers dollars for their violent efforts. It’s… insane. 

Trump socket puppet and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says that the purpose of the fund is to “make right the wrongs that were previously done” because of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department under previous administrations. First of all: it is not “weaponization” of the DOJ to prosecute the criminals who attacked the Capitol; it is the application of criminal laws. I will stipulate that the white people who attacked the Capitol perhaps did not think that laws should be applied to them, but their expectation of privilege doesn’t change the character of what the Justice Department did when prosecuting their offenses. 

Moreover, the Justice Department has never been in the business of handing out free money to “make right” the wrongs of the past. If they suddenly are, boy do I have some claims to make on behalf of the descendants of enslaved Americans. 

Because that’s what this fund is: it’s a reparations fund, but only for white people. It is precisely what the reparations movement has been asking for, only the Trump administration wants to extend monetary apologies to white people who did violence on behalf of Trump. 

Taking taxpayer dollars to do this—dollars that include taxes paid by Black people living in this country—well, it all reminds me of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. This law, which predated the Emancipation Proclamation, freed all slaves held in Washington, D.C., but it did not compensate them—it compensated the slave-holders who “lost” their slaves. Slaveholders who remained loyal to the Union were paid $300 per emancipated person by the federal government. 

Obviously, there are many other historical examples of white people demanding government money for their grievances (see: France demanding Haiti pay an “independence debt” for winning its freedom). Even the Supreme Court’s decision knocking down Trump’s tariffs, which I support, hinges on the idea that (largely white) business owners who paid Trump’s illegal tariffs should be compensated while the multiracial consumers who have been paying the price of those tariffs at the checkout counter will get nothing. The through line is that when the government does something “bad” to powerful white people, those white people expect to be compensated by the government in real money for their troubles.