On May 19, 2026, the Department of Justice announced the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — $1.776 billion drawn from an existing Treasury account, administered by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, open to anyone who believes the government treated them unjustly. The number was not accidental: 1776, America’s founding year, written into the dollar amount of a fund that critics immediately called the most nakedly corrupt act of the Trump presidency. To understand why that charge has stuck — and why even some Republicans are searching for distance — three Times columnists spent an hour on The Opinions dissecting not the politics first, but the legal architecture. What they found was a structure so unusual that David French, a constitutional litigator, called it “the most purely monarchical thing” Trump has done yet in what he described as an already monarchical presidency.
The lawsuit he filed against himself
Before there was a fund, there was a lawsuit. Understanding what the lawsuit was — and what it wasn’t — is the key to understanding why the fund that replaced it has no legal precedent.
In 2021, an IRS contractor leaked confidential tax return data belonging to Donald Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization. The leak was real, prosecuted, and resulted in a guilty plea. Trump responded with a $10 billion lawsuit filed in federal court in Miami. That is where the story, in most tellings, begins. French’s contribution on the podcast was to slow it down and look at what the lawsuit actually was.
He is suing an agency he controls — the IRS that he controls — for alleged misconduct that occurred when he controlled the IRS in his first term. So he’s suing an entity he controls for alleged misconduct that occurred under his watch. And then the defending agency — the Department of Justice — is also under his control. You have one side suing itself.
Federal courts require what lawyers call an adversarial process: two genuinely opposing parties with genuinely opposing interests. The judge handling the case, Kathleen Williams, dismissed it after the settlement was announced — and, notably, admonished the Justice Department for failing to be transparent about what had been agreed to. What replaced the case was not a judgment from any court. It was a unilateral agreement between the Trump administration and itself.
French’s “sue and settle” analogy is worth understanding precisely. Presidents of both parties have used the practice — allowing friendly advocacy groups to file suits, then settling on terms favorable to the group’s goals. French said he didn’t always like those settlements. But this is different in a way that matters legally: those settlements involved genuinely independent third parties. What Trump did was file a case, let it proceed briefly, and then drop it in exchange for his own administration creating a fund his own administration would control. The adversarial process never existed. The settlement has no judicial oversight. The commission dispensing the money will be appointed by an Attorney General who was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer before taking the job.
What's inside the settlement
The Anti-Weaponization Fund is only one part of what the settlement created. A second part, added quietly a day later via a hyperlink to an existing press release, may prove more consequential for Trump personally.
The DOJ addendum posted on May 19 stated that the federal government is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from pursuing examinations or claims related to tax returns filed by Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, and related trusts before the date of the settlement. The language is explicit. Pending IRS audits are halted. Past returns are shielded from future enforcement. This is not subject to court review; it was written into the settlement agreement between two entities Trump controls.
French’s framing on the podcast was that this constitutes something close to a civil pardon — extraordinary because the presidential pardon power applies only to criminal matters. A president can pardon himself from criminal prosecution but remains theoretically exposed to civil suits for conduct in office. The anti-weaponization settlement adds, through a different mechanism, a layer of civil immunity for tax enforcement matters that the pardon power alone could not have provided.
The fund itself has additional features. Commission members overseeing disbursements are permitted, under the settlement terms, to reimburse themselves from the fund for their own expenses. The five-member commission includes one member selected in consultation with congressional leadership, four appointed unilaterally by the AG. Claims processing runs until December 1, 2028. Whatever money remains reverts to the government.
Enrique Tarrio — former Proud Boys chairman, convicted of seditious conspiracy, sentenced to 22 years before Trump pardoned him in January 2025 — told multiple outlets this week that he expects to seek “tens of millions” from the fund. Tarrio was not at the Capitol on January 6; a judge had barred him from Washington due to a prior conviction. He directed the operation from a hotel room in Baltimore. Acting AG Todd Blanche, when asked directly whether people convicted of assaulting police officers during January 6 would be eligible, declined to rule it out. He also suggested, with apparent seriousness, that Hunter Biden could apply.
Reparations for rioters
Bouie’s sharpest contribution was not a legal argument but a structural comparison: two hypothetical Americans facing government misconduct, one of whom has a viable path to compensation and one who does not.
The podcast’s most memorable passage came when French extended Bouie’s reasoning into a concrete scenario. Call the first man MAGA Mike: he used a flagpole to assault a Capitol Police officer, was convicted, served time, and was then pardoned. Under the Anti-Weaponization Fund’s stated logic — that anyone who experienced “lawfare and weaponization” is eligible — Mike could file a claim based on alleged mistreatment in prison, or alleged procedural irregularities in his trial. The commission’s criteria remain loosely defined. He might receive a substantial sum.
With the stroke of a pen, we now have reparations for rioters.
— Jamelle Bouie, The Opinions
Call the second man Blue Bob: he was protesting an ICE operation in Minneapolis. An officer used force against him without justification — pepper spray, a taser, or worse. Bob tries to seek compensation through the normal legal channel for federal civil rights violations: a Bivens claim against the federal officer. He will encounter a body of Supreme Court jurisprudence that has steadily narrowed Bivens liability since the 1970s, multiple layers of qualified immunity doctrine, and a DOJ that is not inclined to facilitate claims against ICE officers. The Anti-Weaponization Fund is technically open to anyone — acting AG Blanche said “anybody can apply” — but the commission making decisions is appointed by the same AG who declined to exclude assault convictions from eligibility.
The asymmetry maps onto a political observation Bouie has made before: the administration governs for a constituency, not for a country. The fund is less a corruption scandal in the abstract and more a symbol of where presidential priorities sit — at a moment when, as Bouie noted, Trump told a reporter that Americans’ financial difficulties motivate him “not even a little bit” in his Iran negotiations.
The reparations framing is deliberately pointed. Proposals to compensate descendants of slavery or victims of Jim Crow-era violence have been dismissed for decades as radical, expensive, or constitutionally dubious. With the Anti-Weaponization Fund, the administration created, by executive action alone, a compensation mechanism for people convicted by juries of crimes in connection with an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power. The irony is too pointed to be accidental.
Who has standing
Two Capitol Police officers have already sued to block the fund. Whether their case can survive the threshold legal analysis is the central question, and French was careful not to oversell the odds.
Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer, and Daniel Hodges, an active Metropolitan Police officer who was crushed in a doorway by the crowd on January 6, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington on May 20. Their complaint calls the fund “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century” and argues that no federal statute authorizes its creation. The merits, French said, are clearly in their favor. The harder question is whether they can get to the merits at all.
Dunn and Hodges have a plausible theory: as officers who defended the Capitol against the people the fund would compensate, they have a concrete interest in whether those same people receive taxpayer-funded restitution that, in effect, characterizes their prosecution as government misconduct. Whether a court accepts that theory is genuinely uncertain. French noted a second complication: timing. The fund has no claimants yet. The commission is not yet constituted. There are no procedures to challenge, no decisions to appeal, no individual awards to contest. Courts are reluctant to rule on the legality of a scheme before it has produced concrete harm to a concrete person.
This is part of what makes the structure legally durable. A scheme that is not ripe for challenge today may, by the time it is ripe, have disbursed significant funds and created reliance interests that complicate unwinding it. The delay is not incidental. It is how the thing survives long enough to become a fact.
A party hostage to November
The slush fund arrived in the same week Trump was celebrating primary victories against Republican incumbents who had defied him. Bouie and French disagree on emphasis but agree on direction: the party is in a box it built for itself.
The May primaries told a specific story. Thomas Massie, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky congressman who had frequently defied Trump procedurally, lost his primary after the president campaigned against him. Five Indiana state senators who blocked a Trump-backed redistricting effort were defeated. Senator Bill Cassidy, one of the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after January 6, is now a lame duck. On the same day Massie fell, Trump endorsed Ken Paxton — multiply investigated, party-impeached, scandal-layered — in the Texas Senate race, over objections from Republican senators who regard Paxton as a liability against Democrat James Talarico.
French’s analysis of the Paxton endorsement pointed to the larger primary playbook: the campaign will not be “look what we did for you.” It will be “woke, woke, woke Democrats.” That has worked before. The question is whether it works when the economic environment is hostile and the electorate has already priced in Trump’s unpopularity. A NYT/Siena poll taken this month put Democrats ahead on the generic congressional ballot by eleven points. The gerrymandering that was supposed to protect the House majority — what Bouie called “dummy-manders” for reducing the margin for error without adding safe seats — performs well in neutral national environments. It does not save a majority when the environment is structurally adverse.
Bouie’s reference point for the fall was the autumn of 2008: an unpopular Republican president, an economic crisis he had not caused but could not contain, and a Democratic wave that gave Barack Obama a working majority in both chambers. The structural similarities, he argued, are closer than Republicans are willing to acknowledge in public — and that unwillingness is itself part of the problem. An administration organized to filter out contradictory information cannot respond to political conditions it refuses to perceive.
The NPC analysis — Bouie’s term for the MAGA conviction that political opponents are not real agents exercising real judgment, but rather non-player characters running scripted routines — is the mechanism that connects the legal and the political halves of the podcast. If your opponents are NPCs, you cannot be surprised when they vote, organize, sue, or win. The fund, the immunity, the vengeance primaries: all of them make sense if you believe your opponents are not genuinely there. They make rather less sense once you accept that they are.
The legal challenge to the Anti-Weaponization Fund will take months to resolve, if it resolves at all. The standing problem is real. The ripeness problem is real. The Supreme Court that has been narrowing both doctrines for years will ultimately decide whether a president can use an existing Treasury account to fund, without judicial oversight, compensation to his political allies — and immunize his family from tax enforcement in the same transaction.
What is not in dispute: the fund exists. The $1.776 billion has been designated. The IRS audit protection is written into a signed agreement. Tarrio is preparing his claim. The commission will be constituted by an AG who is Trump’s former personal lawyer. The judge who handled the underlying case admonished the government for concealing what it had agreed to.
The Gilded Age comparison French reached for is apt. What the Gilded Age figures had that this administration has improved upon is brazenness. They at least maintained the fiction of independent courts, independent agencies, and adversarial litigation. The Anti-Weaponization Fund dispenses with the fiction. One side sued itself, settled with itself, and called it justice.