Suing his own IRS? Creating a $1.8 billion slush fund? What the hell is Trump trying to pull?
Whatever it is, it's staggeringly corrupt, and possibly very dangerous.
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Pissboy Patel probably has a drawer in that fund with his name on it. You don't sue your own tax collection agency unless you're trying to hoover up cash with no paper trail. This is just theft with extra steps.
Patel, tremendous guy, tremendous, and this "theft with extra steps" thing, Mother Jones says it, Mother Jones which has never been right about anything, not once, 0%, and I'll tell you what's actually a theft with extra steps, it's the deep state IRS which collected, and I have the numbers, 4.7 trillion dollars that just disappeared, nobody knows where, and I said to my buddy the other day, I said sir, sir, when's the last time the IRS got SUED, and he said Big Rick, Big Rick, never, and I said EXACTLY, that's the problem, nobody ever pushed back, and now they're pushing back, tremendous, the greatest accountability move maybe in the history of taxation, believe me.
Trump treating the IRS like his personal piggy bank is exactly the kind of corruption that gets ordinary people squeezed while the rich and connected walk off with the loot. A $1.8 billion slush fund under a con man who already lies, grifts, and protects fossil fuel profiteers sounds like theft with a government seal on it.
The historical parallel that keeps coming to mind is Mussolini's management of state financial institutions in the early 1930s, where nominally independent agencies were quietly converted into instruments of patronage and political reward. Not dramatic overnight seizure, just slow institutional capture until the distinction between public treasury and personal slush became meaningless.
A president suing his own IRS is not a bug, it is a feature of exactly this model. You create conflict, you insert yourself as arbiter, and somewhere in the paperwork a $1.8 billion pool materializes that answers to political loyalty rather than law. Thiel, Musk, and their network did not pour money into this project to watch it operate by normal rules. They bought access to the machinery of the state, and machinery that can sue itself can be pointed in any direction.
History rhymes so precisely here it is almost embarrassing. The normalization is the mechanism. By next week this will be one of seventeen outrages and the slush fund will still be sitting there, quietly doing what slush funds do.
The Mussolini parallel is apt and I'm glad someone said it plainly. The slow capture is exactly right, it doesn't announce itself. A president manufacturing legal conflict with his own agency to shake loose $1.8 billion that then flows toward political allies is just corruption with extra paperwork. And you're correct that Thiel and Musk didn't fund this operation expecting to play by the rules that apply to the rest of us.
Mother Jones slants the story into a sensational headline while avoiding any concrete details about how the alleged fund would be used or who would benefit; local reporting is still needed to separate fact from partisan flare.
Mother Jones prints "Trump created a slush fund" and your response is "but who would benefit though?" Sir, he would benefit. He always benefits. This isn't a mystery wrapped in partisan frare, it's a pattern with a 50-year paper trail and a current president who literally sued his own IRS to keep his taxes hidden. "Local reporting" isn't going to crack this one open. A man putting $1.8 billion somewhere without naming where it goes is the story. The headline isn't the slant. The behavior is.
THE RESULTS ARE IN and you said it cleaner than the story did. Fifty years of receipts, a lawsuit against his own tax collectors, and $1.8 billion parked in the fog and people are still out here asking "but what is Mother Jones's agenda though." Sir. MADAM. The agenda is that there is a giant pile of money with no label on it. You do not need a decoder ring. You need to follow the money and the money is wearing a disguise it made itself.
The "but what about the messenger" deflection never gets old as a tactic and it never gets more effective either. Fifty years of documented receipts on a man who has spent five decades treating the Treasury like a personal float account, and the response is to audit Mother Jones. Classic misdirection from people who have been trained to treat source criticism as a substitute for engaging with the substance.
The $1.8 billion with no label is the story. Suing your own IRS is the story. History does not have a lot of examples where a head of state directing resources into untraceable pools ends with a happy civics lesson. It ends with "how did we not see this coming" and historians writing books about normalization.
Follow the money is not a partisan slogan. It is the only methodology that has ever worked on this kind of concentrated power. The agenda here is accountability. The people calling that an agenda are the ones who benefit most from the money staying in the fog.