Even by the standards of Trump Season 2, the headlines out of Washington are staggering. This week brought three new horrors, any one of which would have ended any other presidency.
First, the Justice Department has proposed a nearly $2 billion dollar slush fund using taxpayer money to compensate people allegedly persecuted by the Biden administration. It was created without congressional approval, with no mechanism for judicial or other oversight, and no defined standard for what “weaponization” means.
Second, buried in a hyperlink to a Monday DOJ press release, a separate document purports to permanently bar the IRS from investigating Trump, his family or his businesses for any tax returns filed before this week. Call it a get-out-of-audit-free card.
Third, federal ethics disclosures released last week revealed that Trump’s personal brokerage account executed more than 3,600 individual stock trades in the first three months of 2026 alone. That’s roughly 60 trades per day, often in companies he was simultaneously regulating, his family was contracting with, or he was publicly hyping on social media and in speeches.
The corruption can feel overwhelming, and that’s partly the point. There’s so much grift and flouting of norms and the law, spread across so many agencies, legal filings and financial disclosures, that it’s hard to name the scheme clearly enough to attack it. Is it corruption? Insider trading? Self-dealing? A protection racket?
Yes, to all of the above. But to better understand what we’re truly seeing, let’s climb out of the flood zone and get a view from higher ground.
Trump 2.0 isn’t a regime that just grabs whatever comes along. It’s best understood as a slick and corrupt profit machine—one that uses government power to rig the system, shield itself from accountability, enrich and reward allies and loyalists, and actively extract wealth from the public.
Every story this week is a different gear turning in that machine’s engine.
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Rigging the system and shielding the machine
Let’s start with the structure of the proposed settlement, because it is genuinely without precedent.
Trump, as a private citizen, sued the IRS and the Treasury Department in January, alleging that a former contractor had improperly leaked his tax returns—along with hundreds of thousands of others—back in 2020. He then became president again in 2025, taking control of the very agencies he was suing. His Justice Department, now somehow answerable only to him, negotiated a “settlement” with his personal legal team.
The settlement Trump’s own DOJ cut on his behalf established a $1.776 billion fund to compensate alleged victims of government “lawfare.” It also arranged for Trump to drop not only his case against the IRS but also two civil claims related to the Russia investigation and the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.
In other words, Trump surrendered a meritless lawsuit against the IRS and two equally meritless civil claims, and in return received control over $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds.
Then came Tuesday’s addendum, added quietly after acting AG Todd Blanche testified before Congress without mentioning it. Under the settlement’s terms, the IRS is now “FOREVER BARRED” from pursuing any audit or tax examination of Trump, his family members, or any of his affiliated businesses for returns filed before the effective date. A 2024 New York Times/ProPublica report had estimated that a long-running Trump tax audit could result in a bill exceeding $100 million. That bill is now, by executive fiat, permanently void.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted the corrupt arrangement: “He sued the government he runs, had his own DOJ settle the case and pocketed the prize: special IRS protection for the Trump family. That is self-dealing with a government seal.”
Critically, the deal was structured to resolve before court deadlines that would have required the White House to justify whether the lawsuit had merit, given that Trump now controls the very agencies he had sued. A judge never got to ask whether a president can essentially sue himself before the “settlement” took effect.
There may be one complication Trump didn’t fully anticipate. As Joyce Vance noted in her Civil Discourse newsletter, the presiding judge, Obama appointee Kathleen M. Williams, issued an order observing that because Trump’s dismissal notice made no reference to any settlement, there is “no settlement of record.” That’s a “hit pause” moment from a judge who had already appointed outside lawyers to scrutinize the deal and determine whether it was bogus. Whether she acts on it remains to be seen, but the settlement is not yet beyond judicial reach.
Enriching and rewarding Trump loyalists
Think of this new “anti-weaponization fund” as a key new reward mechanism. Its genius, from Trump’s perspective, is that it launders loyalty payments through the language of victimhood. Anyone who believes they were “politically targeted” by a prior administration can apply. There are no defined eligibility standards. The five-member commission that will adjudicate claims has not been named but will be chosen by the Acting AG. And the fund will operate without judicial oversight—a key distinction from the court-supervised Obama-era “tribal fund” Blanche cited as precedent during his testimony.
The amount isn’t arbitrary. As Heather Cox Richardson notes, $1.776 billion is a deliberate signal. 1776 is the same number January 6 rioters were shouting as they stormed the Capitol. The amount is a dog whistle to insurrectionists indicating who the money is really for.
The structure of the deal makes that reading hard to dismiss. The settlement was signed on behalf of the United States not by Blanche, but by Stanley E. Woodward Jr., the U.S. associate attorney general. Woodward was previously the defense attorney for key people in Trump’s orbit: Kash Patel, Peter Navarro, Walt Nauta and multiple January 6 defendants. In short, the lawyer who negotiated the government’s side of a deal against Trump had previously been paid to defend Trump’s allies.
Blanche, in his first congressional testimony since taking over from the fired Pam Bondi, also declined to rule out payouts to people convicted of violence on January 6. Vice President JD Vance even suggested Hunter Biden could apply for funds, framing it as evidence that the fund was not partisan.
No one seriously doubts who the primary beneficiaries will be: the network of pardoned January 6 defendants, Trump-adjacent figures who faced federal charges, and allies who can claim, however tenuously, that Biden’s DOJ looked at them sideways.
Even some Republicans found it hard to defend. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said he was “not a big fan” of the fund, adding “I don’t see a purpose for it.” Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who recently lost his Republican primary and has begun to push back harder on the Trump agenda, called it a “slush fund,” adding: “We are a nation of laws. You can’t just make up things.”
Extracting all it can
With the system rigged and the loyalists bought off, Trump is free to rake in huge sums for himself. Over in the financial markets, something else was happening that made Trump stand apart from all his predecessors.
Ever since then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson helped establish the modern presidential blind trust in 1963, presidents have generally placed personal assets in a trust managed by independent trustees, invested in index funds and Treasuries or in President Jimmy Carter’s case, a peanut farm into a blind trust. No modern president has actively traded individual securities while sitting in the Oval Office.
Trump is doing something categorically different. Financial disclosures filed May 14 with the Office of Government Ethics show 3,642 individual trades executed through an account in his name during the first quarter of 2026. That represents a volume of $220 million to $750 million, across an average of roughly 60 trades per day. The White House says the account is managed by independent financial institutions with no direction from Trump. But the timing of his trades tells a different story.
The account bought Nvidia stock on January 6, a week before the Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China. It bought Nvidia again on February 10, a week before Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta. It accumulated Palantir shares in March, just as the Pentagon and DHS were awarding the company billion-dollar contracts. Then Trump publicly praised Palantir on Truth Social with its ticker symbol in April, and the stock jumped. On April 30, he posted on Truth Social that “Intel stock continues to rise”—and Intel gained 3 percent after hours. The administration holds a 10 percent stake in the company.
Most telling of all: On the morning of March 23, Trump posted an all-caps Truth Social message announcing that the U.S. and Iran had been having “very good and productive conversations” and extending the deadline for a ceasefire deal with Iran by five days. Crude oil plunged nearly 11 percent. Energy stocks sold off sharply. The account in Trump’s name spent that same day buying Phillips 66, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron—along with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, the companies that profit from an ongoing war. The president had both the information that would move those markets and the power to move them himself. His account bought accordingly.
Former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter reviewed the financial history of every preceding chief executive. “I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market,” he told Fortune. The 113-page disclosure, he cautioned, is also only partial; it captures trades in Trump’s personal account, not those of the dozens of LLCs and corporations he controls.
The machine, assembled
Taken together, these three stories—the IRS “settlement,” the weaponization fund for the insurrectionists, and Trump’s stock trades—are not separate scandals. They are the three core functions of a single system. So let’s put the puzzle pieces together.
The IRS “settlement” is the Trump profit machine’s rigging mechanism, tilting the system in its favor and shielding itself from accountability. A sham case produced a sham settlement—one that permanently immunizes Trump and his family from financial scrutiny of the past. This is happening at precisely the moment Trump has disclosed, as he must by law, that he has executed hundreds of millions in trades that might themselves carry substantial tax implications.
The weaponization fund is the reward mechanism. It converts taxpayer dollars to loyalty payments, flowing to Trump’s network of pardoned allies, January 6 defendants and Trump-adjacent figures who form the political base of his power. The fund requires no congressional appropriation, answers to no judge, and operates on eligibility criteria that exist only in the minds of a commission staffed by Trump’s own administration. This will bind more people greedy for payouts to his side.
The stock trades are the extraction mechanism. It uses information available only to a sitting president—regulatory decisions, diplomatic signals, contract awards, his own Truth Social posts—to execute trades that no other market participant could make in the same position. This is not a president who happens to have investments. This is an investor who happens to be president, and who has arranged the two roles to be mutually self-reinforcing.
These are only the stories from this week. They sit alongside the $400 million Qatari jet, the $TRUMP meme coin that has generated hundreds of millions in revenue from foreign investors blatantly purchasing access to the president, and the crypto deregulation that the administration rolled out while Trump’s own digital asset empire was actively expanding. The Center for American Progress “Trump’s Take” tracker estimates his fortune has grown from roughly $2.4 billion at the start of 2024 to $6.3 billion as of April 2026. That represents a near tripling of his wealth, driven overwhelmingly by ventures tied directly to the exercise of his presidential powers.
Can it be unwound?
The natural question is what can be done, and the honest answer is: right now, not much, if the judge allows the settlement to move forward. Still, the weaponization fund will draw lawsuits, and nearly 100 House Democrats have signed onto a brief urging Judge Williams to block it.
The stock trades are generally legal under current law because presidents are not banned from owning or trading individual securities. Trump’s team has a ready answer to the questions of volume and insider trading allegations: independent brokers manage his account.
Accountability requires 2026 voters to pay serious attention. Democrats are already using the stock trade disclosures in midterm messaging. The corruption argument is no longer abstract; it is timestamped and tied to recognizable companies. Every Truth Social post praising a stock Trump holds is another brick that could weigh down his party, which is already drowning ahead of the midterms.
A future administration—with a functioning DOJ and a Congress willing to act—would have substantial material to work with. That includes potential violations of the Domestic Emoluments Clause, the statute prohibiting executive branch interference in IRS audits, and securities laws that, while currently unenforced, do not cease to exist simply because the current president finds them inconvenient. Even the settlement that “FOREVER BARS” IRS enforcement was signed by an acting attorney general who may not be in that job permanently.
For now, the most useful response is not outrage at any individual story but pattern recognition. The machine doesn’t just grift; it rigs and shields, distributes rewards and extracts value. Understanding that it is a whole system, and not just a series of money grabs, is the first step toward eventually shutting the entire machine down.
Earlier this month, a group of high-profile publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, asked a federal court in New York for a 
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