It was already a pretty weird week, what with Tulsi Gabbard—the official in charge of gathering foreign intelligence—showing up at a Georgia election office for an FBI raid. But then, on Thursday, the president of the United States filed a lawsuit that is an obvious shakedown of the government he runs. Donald Trump, his two older sons, and their business are suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion for allowing a government contractor to gain access to their tax filings (the contractor later leaked the files to the press). It reads like a transparent attempt to steal a few billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury while he can get away with it.

It’s an interesting twist of fate that the Gabbard raid and this lawsuit both dropped in the same week, because they actually go together quite well in the Venn diagram of Trumpian iniquity. Both developments prove a core point about our system that everybody had better learn and be prepared to act on after Trump leaves office (assuming that happy day comes): namely, that Trump has shown that a conscienceless and corrupt person can pollute the system in endless ways because previous generations never anticipated that someone this comprehensively conscienceless and corrupt could win high office. There simply aren’t laws that prohibit much of what he does because it never occurred to anyone that a holder of high public trust would ever even try such stuff.

Let’s look first at this IRS suit, beginning with a little historical background. First of all, as The New York Times reported when it got the leaked documents, Trump paid no federal taxes in 10 of 15 years from 2004 to 2019. We don’t know that that was a crime; maybe it was just fancy accountants. But one way or the other, it sure isn’t right.

But OK, they got leaked. That’s against the law. Of course, one could argue that the only reason they had to be leaked was that Trump refused to release his tax returns publicly, making him the first presidential candidate since Richard Nixon not to do so. Had he complied with that honorable custom—one that requires that people adhere not to a law but to a democratic norm of behavior—there would have been no leak.

But fine. They were leaked. That’s illegal. And guess what? The guy who did it is in prison! He started serving a five-year sentence in May 2024. We can debate whether, in breaking that law, Charles Littlejohn in fact performed a public service (historical fact of note: Nixon’s returns also were leaked, and for that crime, no one was ever indicted). But Littlejohn broke a law, and he was convicted. The system, on paper, worked.

For normal human beings, that would have been enough. Justice was served. But not for the Trumps. The slightest whiff of an opportunity to scam someone or someones—in this case, the taxpayers he was elected to serve—gets them salivating like hyenas over a springbok carcass. So now we have the unprecedented and frankly insane circumstance of the sitting president of the United States suing the government of the United States, over which he himself presides, trying to use his office to line his pockets. They’ll pick that carcass to the bone if they can.

Now you might ask: Shouldn’t there be some kind of law preventing the president of the United States from suing the federal government, at least while he’s in office? I’m not a lawyer, so maybe there is some such law from 1856 or whatever, and someone will discover it. But assuming there’s not, I can tell you why there’s not: It never occurred to people that a president could be so petty and venal as to do something like this!

Now let us turn to Gabbard. She has been sidelined for some time, ever since she made the error, fatal in Trumpworld, of saying something true to the factual record—that U.S. intelligence services saw no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said at the time, “I think they were very close to having one.” More recently, she was frozen out of the action on Venezuela.

So, needing a way to get back in Dear Leader’s good graces, she boned up on a topic that she knew would demonstrate her value: the “fraudulent” 2020 election. How can she possibly claim jurisdiction over this obviously domestic matter, many have been asking since this week’s raid? Well, she can’t, on real Earth. But on Trump Earth, you might recall that back in 2020, there were some wild conspiracy theories that involved foreign governments and intelligence agencies.

Remember “Italygate”? I thought you might not. It never really gained traction among us flat-earthers. But it was a QAnon favorite for a while there, and it held that an Italian aerospace company and an Italian Army general worked with the American Embassy in Rome to use Italian satellites to remotely switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Yes, that is what they believed.

Then there’s the China angle, which Trump was touting on social media just the other day. In case the Italygate story isn’t ominous enough for you, Trump tossed China into the mix. “China reportedly coordinated the whole operation,” he posted. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet.” This is the stuff of mad dogs and March hares, to put it mildly. But if you’re Tulsi Gabbard, it’s ample reason to claim that a conspiracy this immense not only allows for the nation’s chief intelligence officer to be involved, it veritably demands it!

So now we are about to launch—at the expense of the same taxpayers whose pockets la famiglia Trumpa is trying to pick in the IRS suit—into an investigation into “crimes” that are more than five years old (and thus likely beyond the statute of limitations) and were never committed anyway. But Trump wants people to go to jail, and Gabbard and Pam Bondi—who meanwhile is 41 days late delivering the Epstein files and thus in clear violation of federal law—will move heaven and earth to make sure someone does. (Note: Bondi released more than 3 million Epstein-related documents today, just a couple hours after I wrote this.)

Again, we might ask: Why is there no law preventing a president from using his government to pursue such obviously baseless revenge lawsuits? Because no one imagined a president would behave so sleazily. Or they thought that, if one did, surely Congress, regardless of party loyalty, would step up and assert its constitutional authority and make an unequivocal statement about what is right and wrong in a democratic society. Yeah. Right.

So this is where we stand, as we begin this second year of the second Trump presidency. Three more years of this. It’s getting harder and harder to see how we survive it, but if we do, Congress is going to have to pass a bunch of laws that were never thought necessary until we elected a gangster as president.

Most of the obvious reactions to Jack Smith’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday have already been delivered, and I agree with them. It’s hard to imagine what on earth Chairman Jim Jordan—and hearing his whiny, tinny, angry, lying voice awoke involuntary physiological reactions I’d spent years trying to vanquish—and the Republicans thought they were accomplishing. To any non-Kool-Aid-drinking American, they looked ridiculous. Smith was calm. The Republicans were jumping out of their skins competing to get their sound bite featured on Fox News. All they managed to do was to remind people that Donald Trump is a criminal and that in a sane world, the Senate would have convicted him on the second impeachment (the January 6 one) and barred him from holding federal office for life.

I want to focus on one matter I’d forgotten all about. I’m thinking maybe you had too. That’s the question of this second volume of Smith’s report on Trump’s crimes, which focuses not on January 6 but on Trump’s theft of those classified documents he took down to Mar-a-Lago. It was written by Smith and his team back when the investigation was active. It is generally presumed to contain details about the matter that are heretofore unknown. Its release to the public was blocked by—speaking of memories I’d successfully repressed—Florida Judge Aileen Cannon.

I trust you remember her track record here. She tossed the classified documents case in July 2024, ruling that Smith had been improperly appointed to his position as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland. From the moment the case landed on her docket, Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, barely concealed her obvious partisanship in her actions, which brought her some jaw-dropping reprimands from the Eleventh Circuit Court, which employs her. She was a judicial joke.

But she didn’t stop during the campaign. No! Once Trump was safely back in the White House, she ordered, on the second day of Trump’s second presidency, that the Department of Justice could not release the second volume of the Smith report (the first part had been released by Garland’s Justice Department the week before, in the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency).

A couple of nonprofit legal outfits sued. Cannon dragged her feet. She spent 2025 ignoring petitions from the two nonprofits that were seeking to get the volume released. Finally, last November, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit—which, by the way, included one Trump appointee—chastised Cannon’s delays and gave her 60 days to do something.

The 60 days came and went at the beginning of this month, and—shocker—nothing happened. Then, as fate would have it, just this Monday, three days before Smith’s public testimony, the matter of the second volume vaulted back into the news as a lawyer for Trump filed a motion asking Cannon to permanently block the Justice Department, “as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees” (note well: future officers!), from making the second volume public.

Two points here. First, we have the rather odd spectacle of Trump, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney put it on Bluesky, “litigating in his personal capacity against the Justice Department he runs.” But of course the key word in the motion, as noted above, is “future.” If Cannon grants this motion and a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, even that future attorney general won’t be allowed to release Volume II.

Second—about Trump’s lawyer. We’ve seen the basket of deplorables Trump has hired to defend either him or his government in court: Alina Habba, illegally installed as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, who resigned after a court disqualified her; Todd Blanche, still the number two at Justice, famous for his softball interview with Ghislaine Maxwell and for defending moving her to a cushier prison; Emil Bove, who while at Justice ordered the sleazy dropping of all charges against then–New York Mayor Eric Adams, which led to nearly a dozen resignations.

Now we must add to that sorry menagerie a certain Kendra Wharton, who filed this week’s motion to Cannon. Who is Wharton? She was a white-collar criminal defense attorney in 2023 when Blanche announced that she and Bove would be joining Trump’s legal team to defend him against Smith’s charges. Later, when Trump took office the second time, he tapped Wharton to serve as the Justice Department’s senior ethics official. The prior one resigned after he was reassigned to a unit charged with cracking down on sanctuary cities. “Trump ethics official,” one suspects, is all we need to know about her.

So let’s take a step back. Trump took thousands of documents, more than 300 marked classified, with him to Mar-a-Lago in 2021. For months, he rebuffed polite requests by the FBI to cooperate with an inquiry. Finally, they raided the place. Naturally, Trump turned this into a deep-state persecution, and his willing propagandists complied in pushing that lie.

Then the roulette wheel of fate gave the case to the hackiest federal judge imaginable. She tossed the case. And she has spent her time since then making sure that the public never learns any more details about what Trump did. Next up, she’ll surely agree to the motion filed by a lawyer who played a willing role in helping Trump and Pam Bondi wreck the Justice Department.

And even if somehow Cannon denies the motion and Volume II somehow gets released? Well, it’s Bondi who’ll decide how much of it we get to see!

The Epstein files were supposed to be released in full on December 19. Bondi has done nothing. Volume II by rights should have been released some time last year. But Cannon did nothing. This is banana republic democracy, hiding corruption from public view while the president they’re all protecting seeks to destroy NATO and boost Vladimir Putin, and as he sends a quasi-gestapo force of ill-trained goons out into the streets of our cities to shoot people. And doing all they can to play along, as they showed us Thursday, are House Republicans, who’ll never stop debasing themselves in the race to prove to Trump which among them can be most servile.

Next up for the very fine people of Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Maine. President Donald Trump, in his speech in Detroit Wednesday, signaled that the Pine Tree State was in his sights. Why? Well, no doubt partly because he’s never won the state in three tries (although he has carried the rural 2nd district each time, and Maine is one of two states that awards electoral votes by congressional district). But mainly because Maine has something notable in common with Minnesota. Can you guess? Yep: a sizeable Somali population.

“They’re scammers,” Trump said, just putting the plain old racism out there for all to see. “They always will be, and we’re getting them out. In Maine, it’s really crooked as hell, too.” In response, Democratic Governor (and Senate candidate) Janet Mills released a video in which she made her position plain: “To the federal government, I say this: If your plan is to come here to be provocative and to undermine the civil rights of Maine residents, do not be confused. Those tactics are not welcome here.” The key word there, of course, is “residents” (as opposed to “citizens”).

The several thousand Somalis who have settled in Maine since the 1990s are based chiefly in Portland and Lewiston. They’ve been on alert since at least mid-December, when Trump referred to Somalis as “garbage.” Hundreds of Mainers gathered at a December 15 rally in Lewiston to support the Somali population—who were notably absent from the rally because, in the words of one Somali resident, “people were afraid of, ‘OK, what if somebody shoots us, or something happens?’”

As Americans, our minds are trained by involuntary habit to assume, when we see excess and violence, that the government will step in and bring order. Things get a little crazy at a protest, the cops break it up. Yes, there have been times when it’s the cops themselves who incite violence, like in Chicago in 1968. But when that has happened, the state has usually seemed at least a little sorry afterward.

Certainly, there were and always are reactionary forces working to throttle such examinations, and sometimes they succeed. But at least the impulse to investigate has generally been there. Indeed, a government commission appointed after the ’68 confrontations between cops and protesters during that year’s Democratic convention had a staff of 200 conducting thousands of interviews; in its report, it actually used the phrase “police riot.” That’s how things work in the United States—there exists a shared assumption that violence of that sort is undesirable, and that when it happens, some gesture toward accountability is what a democratic society requires.

Well, there existed such assumptions. All that’s out the window now. Now the federal government is the unapologetic bringer of violence. And it’s further important to understand: No amount of criticism, no amount of forensic or video evidence, no poll expressing mass public disapproval will change this. In fact, precisely the opposite. Any and all criticism will just be taken by Trump and MAGA world as further proof that they are right. Evidence will be dismissed and countered with fake “evidence,” like the video Vice President JD Vance trumpeted that purported to show that Renee Nicole Good had it coming. Bad-news polls will be dismissed as fake. The Trumpian state will dig in its heels. The only question Stephen Miller will ask himself will be: How can we turn up the heat?

This is what makes what’s happening in this country today different. The state is the perp. The government is beyond the law. The United States is now closer to Bashar Al Assad’s Syria, or perhaps even today’s Iran, than to anything we recognize as fitting within the understood norms of American history. That’s a pretty big statement, I realize, but it........

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