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Leadership Matters · May 21, 2026

Trump v. Trump

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George A. Polisner · Leadership Matters

Trump settles lawsuit against Trump for $1.8 billion of taxpayer dollars as acting AG “Toad” Blanche looks on.

This week Trump’s Justice Department settled a lawsuit on behalf of the President of the United States, against the United States. Trump had sued the IRS for $10 billion over the 2020 leak of his tax returns, the leak that showed he paid $750 in federal income tax the year he won the White House, and nothing at all in many of the years before it. He dropped the suit. In its place, his own Justice Department agreed to create a fund of roughly $1.8 billion to compensate people it deems victims of government “weaponization,” a pool widely expected to flow to his allies. Trump takes no direct check. What the convicted felon takes instead is better than a check.

Judge Kathleen Williams

And reality is worse than it already looks. The suit was going nowhere. Judge Kathleen Williams, who was hearing it, had openly doubted whether it was even a real case, since Trump was suing agencies that answer to him, which is about as adversarial as arguing with a mirror. The government's own lawyers had already won on sovereign immunity in related litigation, had argued the claimed damages were not traceable to any crime, and the leak was old enough that the statute of limitations had very likely run out. Williams gave both sides a deadline to justify letting the case go forward. Two days before it arrived, Trump dropped the suit before a skeptical judge could rule on it, and on his way out the door his own Justice Department handed him our money and the lifetime IRS audit shield.

Trump directs Trump’s DOJ to issue Addendum

A one-page addendum, signed by his acting Attorney General, declares the federal government “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing tax claims against Trump, his family, or his businesses. The reporting is that this single page most likely erased a long-running audit that could have cost Trump more than $100 million. When reporters asked whether “forever” also covered future returns, a department spokesman said no, only the existing ones. So the written words say forever and the official explanation says not really, which tells you most of what you need to know about how much either one is worth.

Here’s some good news at a time when we could use good news. Trump’s DOJ has put a value on a specific harm: having your confidential tax information exposed. The remedy, as established this week at the highest level, is a compensation fund plus a written guarantee that the IRS will never come for you again.

Trump’s tax returns were released by a contractor. DOGE had unprecedented access to our financial data.

Last year, a team operating under Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire then running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, sought access to the IRS Integrated Data Retrieval System. That is the system that holds the tax records, the Social Security numbers, and the bank details of hundreds of millions of Americans. Two senators warned, in writing, that handing political operatives the keys to that data likely broke the laws meant to protect it, and they asked whether any of it had been moved to outside servers. Your file was in that system. So was mine.

So I would like to file my claim, and I would encourage you to file yours. By the standard the Justice Department set this week, every American whose tax data sat exposed is owed the same consideration the President arranged for himself. Equal compensation from the fund. And a one-page addendum of our own, in the same shouting capital letters, declaring the IRS forever barred and precluded from auditing me and every member of my family. If the language was good enough for the most powerful man in the country, it is good enough for the rest of us. Send the form.

It is worth asking why corruption this brazen is not the only thing anyone is discussing. Look at recent news. The continuing attacks on boats in international waters ordered by Hegseth. The attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of their president and first lady. The war alongside Israel against Iran that killed Iranian leadership and has since, by the accounts of the administration’s own allies, failed miserably in mission and objective while costing the lives of American soldiers, Iranian civilians, billions of taxpayer dollars in missiles and bombs, and weakened the global economy. The Trump-Vance Administration is now blockading Cuba, provoking another country into another war.

Trump and best friend, Jeffrey Epstein.

I am not going to claim all of this was planned and performative to bury anything. I do not need to. I only need to point at what flailing on this scale actually does. When a government careens from one improvised crisis to the next, the news cycle never settles long enough to hold any single outrage in focus. A corrupt self-dealing tax settlement competes for newsprint with a war and threats of wars. Questions about DOJ compliance with the Epstein (Trump/Maxwell) Files Transparency Act receive no oxygen and remain in darkness every time a new fire is lit. And who would investigate the insider trading? Trump's SEC? Trump's DOJ? You do not have to believe in a plan to see the result.

Great timing on stock trading from the man who’s bankrupted multiple companies.

Aside from just filling his pockets with taxpayer money, there is the insider trading. In April of last year, with markets reeling from his own tariffs, Trump posted "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" signed "DJT," his initials and his media company's ticker, and hours later announced a tariff pause that set off one of the largest single-day surges since World War II. His own stock jumped nearly 22%, and he later bragged on video that a friend had cleared $2.5 billion. That was one day. Then came the receipts. Earlier this month, his own ethics filing (an oxymoron when applied to this Administration) disclosed more than 3,600 trades in the first three months of 2026, worth somewhere between $220 million and three quarters of a billion dollars, a volume one wealth manager told Bloomberg looked less like a man's portfolio than a hedge fund's. His investments are not held in a blind trust. He bought Nvidia a week before his own Commerce Department cleared Nvidia chip sales to China. Oil futures moved by half a billion dollars just before he announced a pause in the bombing of Iran. The White House says his children manage it all and there is no conflict, and no court has ruled any of it a crime. The man setting the policy is trading the companies the policy moves, in accounts that are not blind, at a pace that stuns professionals, and every time the market lurches on his word, someone close to him seems to be standing in exactly the right place. Call it whatever you are comfortable calling it.

First tariffs then a costly war on Iran. Criminally corrupt President. Complicit GOP. Higher prices, massive debt, and failed economic policies for everyone else.

The war, blockades, attacks, threats, and chaos keep the Epstein/Trump/Maxwell files hidden, Trump’s brazen corruption remains undisturbed in the shadows (rubber-stamped by the GOP in their silence and inaction), and economic policy failures are swept under the rug. One of the most significant issues raised in the 2024 campaign cycle was affordability. Addressing rising prices was a core commitment to Trump’s MAGA base. He ran on it relentlessly. Cheaper eggs and groceries, repeatedly, and after the election he took his victory lap on exactly that, crediting his win to the price of groceries and savoring the word as if he had coined it. Then the prices did not come down. By late 2025 grocery costs were higher than the day he took office, and in one stretch they posted their steepest monthly jump in years.

Trump’s most honest thinking on affordability on May 12, as he left the White House for China. A reporter asked how much the financial pain the Iran war is inflicting on Americans weighed on his push for a deal. "Not even a little bit," Trump said, adding that the only thing that mattered was keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon, and that he does not think about Americans' financial situation, or anyone's. Trump’s own war, launched alongside Netanyahu, has pushed average gasoline prices from around $3 a gallon to more than $4.50 and helped drive inflation to a three-year high. The man who bragged in 2024 that he won on grocery prices now says, on the record, that what it costs your family to fuel your car, truck, or SUV, or fill your refrigerator and kitchen pantry does not cross his mind. Examine that beside the multi billion-dollar fund and the “lifetime” audit shield he arranged for his own family. For enriching himself there is always time for a grift, and a “Justice” Department to help him execute it. For you or your family, he does not want to hear it.

Trump can’t be bothered to remove his “Trump merch” during a dignified transfer of U.S. soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for Trump and Netanyahu

And keep the real war ledger, the one Trump and Hegseth do not brag about. By US Central Command's own count, thirteen American service members have come home in flag-draped cases and at least three hundred and eighty-one have been wounded, some of whom will spend the rest of their lives paying for a red line he says does not weigh on him even a little. That is only the American column. On the war's first morning, a missile struck a girls' elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. The children were in their classrooms. Reported counts of the dead run from one hundred and eight to nearly two hundred, most of them girls between seven and twelve years old. Weapons analysts say the missile appears to have been an American Tomahawk. Washington denies it and an investigation drags on, but forty-six United States senators looked at what happened and called it horrific in writing. When the Pentagon's own count of the American wounded ticked too high, it erased records without a word.

Colbert and Kimmel

So here is the point, said plainly while plain speech is still mostly allowed (except if invoked by Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, or an activist on a college campus). This is a system imposed by Trump, Vance, the GOP, and their billionaire donors working exactly as intended. A government that will write the word “FOREVER” on an agreement to bury one corrupt family's tax records, stand up a nearly two-billion-dollar fund of our money to reward its own violent, extremist friends, watch the president tell the country to buy at the very bottom and then move the markets himself a few hours later, and hand unaccountable operatives the keys to the private financial records of hundreds of millions of citizens, all of it in broad daylight, is not confused about the rules. The rules are for you not for them. The protection is theirs. The exposure is yours. The wall-to-wall noise, the seized foreign president and First Lady, the bombed country, the next outrage crashing in before you have finished being sickened over the last, is not the malfunction. It is the Trump-Vance machine. It is designed to cause us to give up and self-disenfranchise. They are counting on your exhaustion. Remember the next time they tell you that we imagined the looting, they said it while standing over the open Treasury vault.

No more IRS audits ever!

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