Donald Trump has never been one to apologize. His mentor Roy Cohn taught him early that admitting wrongdoing is a sign of weakness. Yet occasionally something resembles a moment of self-awareness, like when Trump considered suing the government for $230 million in compensation for federal investigations and paused: "It sort of looks bad, I'm suing myself, right?"
Those hesitations have largely vanished. What started as careful stagecraft around conflicts of interest has become brazen pillaging in full view of the public.
The recent IRS deal stands as perhaps the starkest example. Trump sued the agency for $10 billion, claiming negligence in protecting his tax records from being leaked to the press. He then dropped the lawsuit in exchange for a $1.776 billion fund ostensibly to repay associates for criminal penalties they suffered. The structure itself signals Trump's calculation: a memo from acting attorney general Todd Blanche waives all pending liabilities against Trump and his companies, including $100 million in potential tax penalties, and bars the IRS from pursuing any future actions.
Legal experts at Lawfare warn the implications extend far beyond this transaction. Combined with the Supreme Court's 2024 grant of presumptive immunity for presidential actions, the agreement could effectively shield Trump from accountability forever.
The challenges to blocking the fund are formidable. Standing requirements are steep. Legal precedents don't exist. Congressional Republicans have shown little appetite to stop it. By the time a future Congress might act, the $1.776 billion could be largely distributed to recipients whose names may never surface publicly.
But the money grab is only part of the problem. The real weapon isn't theft itself. It's the expectation of getting away with it.
Impunity breeds a particular kind of public paralysis. When corruption happens in broad daylight with no consequences, cynicism spreads like a contagion. People stop believing the law means anything. They stop believing their voices matter. They stop imagining alternatives to the current order.
This is exactly how autocracies function. The autocrat doesn't just break rules; he renders them meaningless. Citizens can't follow the law when they don't know what the law even is anymore. The governed adjust. In Syria you pay a bribe to cross a border. In Russia a gratuity turns felony charges into misdemeanors. Here, the press calls unprecedented acts "highly unusual" or "unprecedented" in the same breath, normalizing the abnormal.
Trump has moved past needing love or votes or party loyalty to hold power. As his approval ratings drop, his demands on public resources accelerate. A planned triumphal arch in Washington will cost $1.776 billion, and Trump's logic for building it without congressional authorization is as dismissive as it is absurd: Congress approved an arch in 1925, so why not now?
The corrosive effect isn't despair exactly. It's something worse: the inability to imagine that things could be different. Exhaustion of the imagination becomes literal exhaustion. For people already worn down by political gridlock, economic precarity, and information chaos, resistance feels impossible. Work. Too much work.
But cynicism isn't inevitable surrender. It's the enemy, yes, but not an unbeatable one. Fighting autocracy-enabling cynicism doesn't require naive optimism. It requires what some philosophers call "hard-won pessimism," a clear-eyed assessment of the scale of the problem paired with the refusal to give up. It means identifying which battles are winnable and celebrating those victories.
The first step is refusing to normalize. The Russian emigre Masha Gessen, writing after Trump's first election, urged one simple rule for surviving autocracy: "Be outraged." In the face of the impulse to accept the unacceptable, maintaining the capacity for genuine shock is essential.
Author James Rodriguez: "The $1.776 billion slush fund isn't about money, it's about training Americans to accept that rules don't apply to the powerful, and that's a far more dangerous theft than anything Trump could take from the Treasury."
Comments