Donald Trump is the most corrupt person in human history. Not the most corrupt president. Not the most corrupt politician. The most corrupt person. Ever.

We already knew this before this week’s news.

In his first term, Trump destroyed the precedent of divestment and blind trusts completely. Past presidents sold their businesses. Trump continued to run his from the White House. Past presidents set up organizations to hold their investments in a manner where they could not see what they were invested in.

Before 2017, these were actions each president undertook to assure us their actions would not be done for personal enrichment.

Donald Trump has never done anything for any reason other than personal enrichment and therefore shattered this norm.

His DC hotel, less than a mile from the White House, became a favorite of foreign governments seeking Trump’s favor. Foreign governments were openly spending money at Trump’s businesses - the exact sort of conflict ethical norms were meant to avoid.

Fast forward to his second term and his corruption is now boundless. Trump’s net worth has gone up BILLIONS in this second term. There is no longer a need for foreign actors to spend money at Trump businesses. They can now simply buy his family’s cryptocoin or stock in the companies he operates from the White House. This alone would qualify as the greatest example of corruption in American history.

Trump has traded an unprecedented number of stocks as president this term. Numerous times he has bought or sold a stock before announcing a new policy regarding that company or just openly promoting that company’s stock. Nothing like this has ever happened before. If you total every stock trade in history by a US president, Trump is within a rounding error of owning 100% of them. The total amount he traded in THREE MONTHS last year approaches one billion dollars.

But that’s just the beginning.

Trump keeps telling the public how his ballroom is being constructed via corporate donations. (He is asking Congress for a billion in taxpayer funding for it, but I do not think he will succeed.) There is a reason that spending runs through the legislative branch, even if the source of that spending is private. Imagine if the president wants to spend a few hundred million sending arms to a hostile state. Congress does not approve this expenditure. The president then raises the money from private donors and sends the weapons anyways. See the problem?

According to Donald Trump and his OMB Director Russell Vought, nothing is wrong with such a scenario and it would be perfectly acceptable.

So Trump’s ballroom, which has not been approved by anyone at all, is relying on private funding - from businesses and individuals who seek to curry favor with Donald Trump.

Echoing the idea that private funds for public expenditures are just fine, Transportation Secretary and reality TV star Sean Duffy spent 7 months filming a road trip with his family. Duffy’s defense of this action was that he wasn’t spending taxpayers money, but rather private donations. Those donations have come from Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Royal Caribbean, United Airlines, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and the American Bus Association.

If you haven’t noticed the trend here, Duffy’s road trip promo has been funded by companies that his department oversees and regulates.

Duffy thinks there is no conflict for the Transportation Secretary to take money from the groups he regulates.

And Donald Trump has no problem taking money from massive businesses he oversees for his ballroom project which was never approved by Congress.

Republicans in Congress, as usual, have done nothing at all to address these conflicts.

But this week, Donald Trump has taken an action so egregious, Republicans might have actually found the line at which they stop wholly supporting him.

Trump is the first president since Nixon to not show his tax returns. He has lied constantly about this, saying he can’t release them due to audits. Nothing at all about being audited prevents someone from making their returns public. Nothing.

Congress eventually legally published some of Trump’s returns, but before that, a small portion of some of his returns were leaked to the public by IRS employee Charles Littlejohn. This WAS a criminal act and Littlejohn pleaded guilty to it. The government was right to prosecute Littlejohn and this should have been the end of it.

But shortly after taking office in 2026, Trump filed a civil lawsuit against the IRS seeking TEN BILLION dollars in damages.

The president of the United States was suing a government agency he controlled for an insane amount of money. Trump counted every mention of his taxes in the media as a separate offense which somehow tallied up to personal damages in the billions.

While the leak was illegal, it cost Donald Trump precisely $0.00. There simply was no financial damage done to him.

Aside from the ludicrous dollar amount, his lawsuit had a different problem. In order to have a lawsuit, you must have an adversarial relationship between two parties. More simply, if both sides agree with each other, there isn’t anything to contest and therefore no lawsuit. These situations are EXCEEDINGLY rare but cases have been thrown out after determining the two parties were not adversaries.

The judge in Trump’s IRS lawsuit was in the process of examining that very question. Is there an adversarial relationship between the president and an agency the president controls? As shown by this week’s development, the answer was no.

This suit was likely getting tossed out of court for that reason. If not, however, the IRS wrote a 25 page memo detailing how strong their case was. Had this gone to trial, the IRS would have been victorious against President Trump.

But we won’t ever see that happen.

Donald Trump has dismissed his suit against the IRS because he has worked out a “deal” with the IRS. Did I mention that Trump controls the IRS and therefore announced a deal with himself?

Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, previously Trump’s personal lawyer who was instrumental in his election denials, have said this is a “settlement” and far too many media outlets have echoed that terminology.

There was no settlement. In dismissing the case, the judge overseeing it explicitly stated there was no settlement. Settlements are court approved and happen as part of the process of the courts dismissing a case. In short, the judge would have to approve any settlement and this deal was never presented to the judge.

No, instead of a settlement brokered by negotiation, what happened this week is that Donald Trump has ordered the IRS to give him a slush fund, controlled by him, from which he may reward… anyone he likes.

Enter $1,776,000,000.00.

The Department of Justice is setting up a 1.776 (yes, really, they’re tying this to the country’s 250th anniversary) billion dollar fund to pay out money to those who were unfairly targeted by the government. This is going to largely be the men who attacked the capitol on 1/6/21, now pardoned by Trump for their sedition and assaults.

America has absolutely had people unfairly targeted by the government and funds have been set up in the past to make payments to those people. Trump and Blanche have pointed to these instances to justify this con.

What they don’t mention is those past instances were set up BY CONGRESS and payouts were adjudicated.

Like dozens of other times in the past year, Trump thinks he does not need Congressional approval to spend money. In this case he used a lawsuit to get a slush fund to pay off the numerous people who have been convicted of crimes in service to him and in service to overturning Joe Biden’s election.

We have not experienced corruption like this in history before.

Funds will be dispersed by a committee which Trump controls. Todd Blanche said today he will NOT bar those who were convicted of ATTACKING POLICE OFFICERS from receiving money from this fund.

We have collectively decided to ignore the 1/6/21 attack on the US capitol. Numerous Trump supporters went to the capitol seeking to harm or kill members of the Congress and the Vice President in order to keep Trump in power after he lost the election.

Donald Trump is now attempting to take billions out of the US treasury, with no approval or oversight from Congress, to pay off the men who were seeking to kill in his name.

It gets worse.

Blanche posted a supplemental document to this “agreement” which states that the IRS may never again investigate Trump or any member of his family for any tax crimes.

Trump was already personally convicted of falsifying business records. His company was criminally convicted of tax fraud. His charity was shut down because of massive fraud. His university had to pay out a large settlement - because of fraud.

But now, according to Trump and Blanche, the IRS is barred from investigating Trump’s taxes, or his family’s, ever again. This is a great time to mention Trump may have cheated the government out of $100 million via tax fraud.

If this arrangement stands, the IRS can no longer take any action over that fraud. Or any other tax crimes the Trump family may commit in the future.

Trump views the US government as his personal enforcers. He views the US treasury as his personal bank.

But none of this has actually happened yet. The Democrats are going to be in control of Congress next year and this will obviously end then.

We should not have to wait. We are far past the time that Republicans in Congress did their jobs and actually conducted oversight of the executive branch.

Contact your senators and representatives. Tell them you are alarmed by this corruption and want it ended. The phone app 5 calls and Resistbot, on most social media, make that process incredibly easy. It is time to stop him - to stop him from paying over a billion to the men he views as his personal militia. They need to know we have had enough.

America has had enough.