Imagine a meeting of Democratic consultants, batting around their thoughts about what might be the most self-damaging action Donald Trump could conceivably take. One consultant—let’s call her Jane—suggests that Trump might order the government to simply give him some billions of the dollars that law-abiding Americans have paid in taxes to their government.
The other consultants respond skeptically. “He couldn’t be that stupid,” one says. To which Jane replies, “He could be that self-absorbed.”
He could indeed. Last Thursday, Trump and his two elder sons sued the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion in damages for the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2020, which showed that in two recent years, he had paid just $750 in federal taxes.
It was Charles Littlejohn, a contractor employed by the firm of Booz Allen to assist the IRS, who provided the returns to the Times, for which he was convicted and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence. Taxpayers whose returns are made public can sue the IRS, which billionaire financier Ken Griffin did when Littlejohn leaked his returns to ProPublica. The IRS argued that, since Littlejohn was not its employee, it bore no responsibility for his leaks, then issued an apology and settled the case with Griffin.
Were Trump a private citizen, his suit wouldn’t be blatantly outrageous, though the dollar amount would surely look ridiculous. And were Trump a president in the mold of every one of his presidential predecessors, who understood that they couldn’t turn the federal government into their private piggy bank, at least not in a way that would be visible to all, his idea to sue the government would doubtless be shot down by every one of his counselors.
But Trump has turned the entire executive branch of our government into the instrument of his every whim. Which of his appointees will oppose his suit? In the one year since he again took office, he’s already run through six (6) IRS directors; currently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is serving as acting director. The administration has not provided a plausible explanation for this high-speed revolving door; perhaps Trump has been frustrated in his quest to find a director who wouldn’t oppose his filing this lawsuit. (Last Thursday was the last day before the statute of limitations on filing that suit kicked in.)
Do we really think Bessent, who has championed every even-less-than-half-baked economic policy that Trump has promulgated, will oppose Trump’s suit? Bessent, the Wimp of Wall Street? And how about Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose Justice Department can either oppose the suit or try to reach a settlement? Will she even try to reduce the payout to her boss to a mere $5 billion? Will that be her entry in the annals of due diligence?
May I gently suggest that whenever Bessent and Bondi come before the press in the next few weeks or months, they be questioned by my peers about what they plan to do about this suit? Inquiring minds want to know.
There should be no need for minds to inquire about the power or courage of the White House staff to provide sound counsel to Trump once he’s made up his mind, such as it is. It’s unimaginable that anyone in or around the White House, much less any Republican senator or representative, doesn’t understand that Trump’s bid for a fortune in taxpayers’ money will only make the midterm elections even more of a GOP wipeout. Trump’s counselors were either blindsided by this request, or too scared to point out what a political debacle it would become.
Democrats are quite rightly focusing just now on trying to stop Trump’s war on immigrants and blue states and cities more generally. But as the election draws nearer, they will surely also focus on this lawsuit—a curveball so hanging it’s virtually static.
With each passing day, it becomes clearer that the “No Kings” theme of the anti-Trump protests is less figurative than it is literal. Rulers dipping into the public till to enrich themselves, confident that no mere underling would stand in their way, was the mode of the Bourbon kings, the Hapsburg monarchs, and some of the Hanoverian rulers of the British Empire, against whose rule, some 250 years ago, our national forefathers revolted, providing us with a lesson urgently relevant today.
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