Donald Trump is a skilled extortionist. Since winning the 2024 presidential election, he has secured $16 million from Paramount to settle a baseless lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris; pocketed another $16 million from ABC after suing the company for defamation; and scooped up almost $60 million combined from the tech giants Meta, Alphabet, and X to resolve lawsuits over his social-media bans following the insurrection on January 6, 2021. Now he is extorting a new target: the federal government itself.
The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump has filed paperwork claiming that the Justice Department owes him roughly $230 million in taxpayer funds—damages that he claims are due to him in compensation for the federal investigations into his conduct related to the January 6 insurrection and his improper hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The corruption is so obvious that even the president himself seemed to acknowledge it when questioned by journalists about the Times’s reporting. “I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk,” Trump said, “and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”
[Casey Michel: America has never seen corruption like this]
Trump is not, in the immediate instance, “the one that makes the decision.” That will be up to Justice Department leadership—specifically, under DOJ’s procedures, the department’s No. 2 or No. 3, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche or Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward. Blanche led Trump’s criminal defense against the prosecutions for which Trump is now demanding payment. Woodward has represented a number of Trump aides, including Trump’s co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago case, Walt Nauta, and the current FBI director, Kash Patel.
Trump’s apparent confidence that he will be able to secure the money speaks to the degree of control he has secured over the Justice Department. He is, fundamentally, instructing his subordinates to place an enormous chunk of public funds into his own bank account. Technically, perhaps Blanche or Woodward could recuse themselves from the proceedings or even decline to hand over the cash; in practice, it is hard to imagine this happening without Trump firing them. This direct command by the president over the Justice Department is bolstered by a vision of presidential power known as the “unitary executive,” under which all executive power flows from the president himself. The notion that Trump could simply tell the Justice Department to pay up, and that the department would have to do so, seems bizarre—but it shares an outlandish through line with the administration’s expansive view of consolidated presidential authority over the executive branch.
The corruption of the situation is so gaudy that an ethics expert quoted by the Times more or less said that expert commentary wasn’t even necessary. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it,” Bennett L. Gershman, a law professor, told the Times.
To make matters even more absurd, Trump appeared to suggest yesterday that he would use the Justice Department money to fund pet projects. “If I get money from our country, I’ll do something nice with it,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office, “like give it to charity, or give it to the White House where we restore the White House.” He then went on to discuss his current effort to construct a White House ballroom, a project that has already resulted in the demolition of a significant portion of the East Wing without having gone through standard approval processes for White House construction. Trump’s ballroom is reportedly funded by private donors, including settlement money from his lawsuit against Alphabet—a scheme that certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the executive from spending money without congressional approval.
If Trump were to push the Justice Department into handing over money for his private use, and then turn around and pour that money into building a ballroom for which Congress has not appropriated funds, this would essentially constitute a looting of public funds as a means of evading the separation of powers—and all so that he could rebuild parts of the White House according to his specifications. It is, in that sense, consistent with his monarchical self-image. Although his control over the Justice Department is enabled in part by theories of a unitary executive, his selfishness splinters this vision of unity by pitting the desires of the man against the office’s responsibilities to the public. Reflecting on his demand for money in front of reporters, Trump sounded almost philosophical: “I’m suing myself.”
[Lev Menand: The Supreme Court made a bad bet]
“Usually when dictators loot the treasury, they have the wisdom to do it quietly,” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote on social media after the New York Times story broke. Here, though, the extravagance of Trump’s attempted theft may itself be part of the point. The goal is not just dictatorial power, but the ostentatious performance of dictatorial power as a middle finger to critics. Trump’s particular brand of authoritarianism feeds on outrage, like a naughty child gleeful over just how much he can get away with.
The catch, as Beauchamp has written, is that contemporary authoritarians tend to be more successful when they erode democracy more subtly, before anyone has a chance to notice. Trump’s flaunting of his corruption undercuts that strategy. As of now, the public still has the means to reject this campaign of theft. The midterm elections, after all, are only a year away.
