Caffeinated Politics

Though the particulars and specifics were not known in 2024, a presidential election year, countless voices across the political landscape, including mine, stated that a primary motive for Donald Trump to gain the Oval Office was to grift and make a lot of money. The irony was clear for all to see. His conservative supporters were pining for lower egg prices and a better economic deal (in reality, the economy was strong and healthy), as their candidate calculated the riches he would reap if elected. Over the past 16 months, we have ample evidence to support what we said about his grifting being true. We know that Donald Trump Jr. has indicated a goal for the Trump family is to become the “richest on the planet” by the end of his father’s term in the Oval Office.  

The Trump administration is considering the establishment of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate the president’s allies and others investigated by the Justice Department. The plan is an ethical and political minefield for Republicans and the department’s leadership. The unusual plan is a vast political slush fund financed by taxpayers and controlled by Trump.

While there are many ways to rightly attack this bizarre idea, I want to write about the Constitution and our laws in relation to the slush fund. In other words, a foreign topic to the Trump White House.

The American constitutional system is built on one simple, stubborn idea. Congress controls the money. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution gives the legislative branch, not the president, the sole authority to appropriate federal funds. That’s the guardrail that prevents any president from turning the Treasury into a personal or partisan ATM.

And yet here we are, watching Trump attempt to conjure a $1.7 billion political slush fund out of thin air, using the Treasury’s Judgment Fund as a workaround to avoid congressional approval. This isn’t just bad governance. It’s a direct challenge to the constitutional architecture that keeps executive power in check. Another topic foreign to this White House.

Congressman Jamie Raskin put it bluntly this morning on ABC News when speaking to George Stephanopoulos.

“Only Congress has the power to appropriate money, and Congress never voted on creating this $1.7 billion political slush fund.”

The president cannot simply decide that billions of taxpayer dollars should be redirected to compensate political allies or settle grievances of his perpetually angry base of white males. The Judgment Fund exists to pay legitimate court judgments, not to bankroll a president’s preferred beneficiaries. Using it as a political rewards program is a distortion of its legal purpose.

For a quick background, the Judgment Fund is a permanent, indefinite appropriation—a “deep pocket” in the U.S. Treasury—used to pay court judgments and DOJ-compromise settlements against the federal government when agencies cannot pay from their own funds. Established in 1956, it serves to pay claims promptly without requiring specific congressional approval for every award.

The Framers feared several things as they worked with various components that would form a central government. One scenario they tried to avoid was the president using public funds to build a loyalist network. Today, Raskin warned that Trump is “systematically converting neutral government mechanisms into a presidential slush fund to build his army of political dependents.”

The very thing the Founding Fathers feared.

That’s not hyperbole on Raskin’s part or mine. What is being threatened right now is a blow to the structure of our Constitution. If a president can unilaterally create billion‑dollar pools of money to reward partisan allies, Congress takes another step under the Trump Administration in becoming ornamental.

Then there is another fact that Trump and his roving insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, try to forget. Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits federal funds from being used to compensate or support insurrectionists. Raskin noted today that if the fund is used to pay out claims from pardoned January 6 rioters, it would be flatly unconstitutional. The Founders had read history and were rooted in examples of bad governance, and that is why they crafted the Constitution that anticipated the danger of rewarding rebellion. What they could not know, even fathom, they did not anticipate a president trying to aid insurrectionists with taxpayer money!

This partisan political maneuver involves Trump dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, which was heading south under the weight of its glaring absurdity, in exchange for the creation of this ludicrous slush fund. He is using government agencies to negotiate among themselves to pay his partisan allies and himself. That’s grifting and self‑dealing at the most wicked level.

Congress needs to find its cojones and reassert itself as the first branch of government, the one the Framers trusted most with the nation’s finances. If Congress allows Trump to invent billion‑dollar funds without authorization, it forfeits the very power that defines it.

Raskin said it clearly Sunday morning.

“We are the Article I branch.”

If Congress doesn’t act, it won’t be for long.