The Most Corrupt Presidential Act in U.S. History

Citizens in revolutionary France guillotined their nobility for less than what Trump did this week.

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Trump does something impeachable every day, but this week was different. Citizens in revolutionary France guillotined their nobility for less. Let’s talk about it.

The Most Impeachable Thing a President Has Ever Done

Every previous entry on the list of great American presidential scandals involved someone trying to hide what they were doing. Trump did this in a DOJ press release.

In January, Trump sued the IRS (which he controls) for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns during his first term. The Justice Department (which he controls) was theoretically supposed to defend the government against this lawsuit. Instead, the DOJ lawyers tasked with defending the IRS never made an appearance or filing. Trump withdrew the suit before the judge could rule on its merits.

He sued himself, settled with himself, and won. What did he win? Two things: a permanent tax shield, and nearly two billion dollars in F-you money.

The settlement declares the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization for tax matters. Then there’s the creation of a $1,776,000,000 “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a number chosen to invoke the year of the American Revolution.

But here’s what the headlines keep burying: the $1.776 billion figure is not based on anything real. The settlement itself states that the fund’s value does not represent the value of Trump’s claims, but is instead based on the “projected valuation of future claimants’ claims.” In other words, they made up a number.

There is no cap.

The five-member commission deciding who gets paid is handpicked entirely by Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was previously Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, which itself should be a scandal. Almost anyone alleging “weaponization” can apply, and Blanche has refused to say that people convicted of assaulting Capitol Police officers on January 6 would be excluded.

The money comes from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, a permanent appropriation designed for paying government settlements. Congress has not approved a penny of it. The Constitution says explicitly that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury except through congressional appropriation.

In a functioning democracy, this alone would be a felony.

Now compare this to what came before. Teapot Dome, the great scandal of the 1920s, involved a Cabinet secretary secretly leasing federal oil reserves to private companies in exchange for bribes. It was corrupt, but it was one official acting outside his authority, who was eventually prosecuted and imprisoned.

Nixon used the IRS to harass political enemies. Reagan’s administration sold weapons to Iran and funneled the money to Nicaraguan rebels in defiance of Congress. These were serious abuses of power. But none of them involved the president engineering his own permanent legal immunity while creating a billion-dollar reward fund for his political allies.

Trump has already been impeached twice. Once for pressuring Ukraine, and once for January 6. Neither resulted in conviction. His actions this week make both of those look like parking tickets.

The founders were worried about a lot of things: a standing army, a state religion, taxation without representation. They did not anticipate a president who would sue his own Treasury Department, win, and use the proceeds to bankroll his friends. Not because they lacked imagination, but because they assumed the people watching would do something about it.

Luckily for us, the next president won’t have to — because Trump’s slush fund expires right before he leaves office.

White Supremacist Teens Shot Up a Mosque and the White House Shrugged

Two teenage gunmen opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego on Monday, killing three people before dying from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

Investigators found a manifesto filled with anti-Islamic, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ material that described the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque massacre as a “hero.” Hate speech was scrawled on one of the weapons. A suicide note contained writings about racial pride.

One of the suspects, 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez, had been flagged by the FBI in 2025, had a firearms restraining order against him, and walked out of a mental health facility the morning before the attack. The other suspect’s mother called police that same morning to report her son had left home with guns. Both were in the system. Both killed three people anyway.

Security guard Amin Abdullah, a father of eight who had worked at the mosque for over a decade, engaged the shooters in a gun battle and triggered a lockdown with one of his final breaths, almost certainly saving the lives of up to 140 children inside.

The White House released its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy this month. It formally designates left-wing political groups as terrorism priorities while omitting far-right extremism entirely, and cites a CSIS report selectively by leaving out its finding that right-wing attacks over the past decade killed 112 people compared to 13 from left-wing attacks.

The document identifies “violent left-wing extremists,” drug cartels, and “legacy Islamist terrorists” as the three primary threats facing America. Two white teenagers with a white supremacist manifesto and a stolen arsenal don’t fit any of those categories.

Trump Officials Are Hiding How Bad the Iran War Actually Is

The Trump administration has spent eighteen months telling you the media is the enemy of the people. This week, it proved it means that literally.

The U.S. government has been restricting information about the conflict through voluntary satellite imagery blackouts, seized web domains, and direct threats to media outlets, according to reports from multiple outlets. The reason appears straightforward: Iran has caused significantly more damage to American military bases than the public has been told.

The administration calls it operational security. That’s the phrase governments use when they mean “we’d rather you didn’t know.”

This isn’t a distant or abstract press freedom concern. There are American service members whose families may not have a full picture of what they’re walking into. There are voters being asked to support a war on the basis of a casualty count that experts believe is incomplete. And there are reporters trying to close that gap who now have to wonder what happens to their sources if they do.

AlterNet America does not have a web domain the DOJ can seize and label a disinformation campaign. We are not publicly traded. There is no advertiser to call in the morning asking us to cool it on the body count.

What we have is readers, and that is the only reason we can write this without anyone running it through legal first.

Independent journalism doesn’t survive government information blackouts on principle. It survives on subscriptions. If you’ve been reading for free, this is a good week to change that. Become a paid subscriber.

We’ll keep reporting. The government can’t seize what we’ve already published.

—Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America