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Trump’s Slush Fund Shows Off This Administration’s Shameless Impunity

Nixon and his henchmen went to great lengths to conceal their slush-money crimes. Trump and his MAGA coterie don’t have to worry about that.

Watergate analogies, together with the cursed “-gate” suffix, are often the most glib and least useful analytic devices in assessing the scale of government corruption. Still, hear me out: The Trump administration’s extralegal establishment of a free-floating slush fund for aggrieved (and overwhelmingly white) sufferers of Biden persecution complexes stands out in stark relief, by virtue of both its bald self-dealing and its fundamental abuses of power, against the scandals that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

All of the gravest trespasses of the Watergate scandal were brewed up and executed at the behest of the keepers of the Nixon White House’s vast network of covert slush funds. The Committee to Re-Elect the President, chaired by the administration’s fathomlessly corrupt attorney general John Mitchell, was the chief sluicegate for the White House’s dirty-tricks fund—but it wasn’t the White House’s only, or even most notable, foray into mob-style governance. Four months before the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, a separate slush fund steered $400,000 in corporate dosh to the 1972 Republican National Convention in order to secure a favorable antitrust ruling from the White House. A year prior to that, a group of dairy cooperatives arranged a $2 million donation to the GOP in exchange for the White House agreeing to lift price controls on milk—which worked out to a nifty $100 million return on investment for the nation’s milk producers.

As it later would with Watergate, the Nixon White House sought to suppress and downplay critical reporting on the slush-fund scandals, but to no avail—these casual mob-style shakedowns harmed the administration’s reputation, fueled the greater lawlessness of the administration, and metastasized into what White House Counsel John Dean aptly called “a cancer” on Nixon’s presidency.

Now just review the basic background of the Trump January 6 slush fund. It is, to begin with, a complete legal fabrication—a preemptive make-believe “settlement” in a $10 billion lawsuit that Trump brought against his own Internal Revenue Service after an independent contractor leaked past Trump tax returns to the news outlet ProPublica. Trump’s suit was clearly modeled on the successful, though meritless, claims he’d lodged against CBS and ABC for editing and airing material adverse to his political interests; in all these cases, the objective was not to secure any sort of binding legal precedent but to engineer payouts that would serve to browbeat critics and intimidate dissenters. (Lost in most of the mainstream coverage of the Trump IRS suit was the critical point that the underlying harm alleged in the case—the public release of a president’s financial records—was in fact something that all modern candidates for the presidency prior to Trump had........

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