President Donald Trump, who is a billionaire, says that you and I owe him $230 million because he frequently broke the law in various and sundry ways and so was taken to court by the government and found guilty of crimes, or was under investigation by it for wrongdoing, and so had to pay legal fees.
And he asks us to imagine the pickle he is therefore in. Because any cash damages he believes he is owed for being a criminal and being investigated or duly convicted “would have to go across my desk.”
And that’s such a tough one, because “It’s interesting, ’cause I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” Trump had the gall to say at the White House last week, as he pondered taking our money and giving it to himself.
“I’m suing myself,” Trump said last week. As the British newspaper the Guardian noted: “in many ways recognizing the absurdity.”
“I’ll say, ‘Give me X dollars,’ and I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit,” he says. And adds: “and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself .”
Awfully!
Well, we know what he’ll do. That’s why he’s paid the big bucks, to make the big decisions. He’ll make the call to write himself a check. But he’s not gonna pocket the money. No, sir. He says he might donate our tax dollars to some fine cause, such as building the ballroom he’s erecting after he tore down the East Wing of the White House. Such a philanthropist! So generous, with our cash.
The grift the president is seeking this time is compensation under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a law that allows people to seek damages from the federal government.
For most Americans who would get to that point, the chances of such a paycheck are slim at best: “A Guardian review of FTCA claims filed against the federal government that were administratively settled from 2020 to 2024 shows the average settlement amount to be about $51,684. The largest administrative settlement during that time period was for $3.55 million. The 139 administrative settlements the justice department reached last year with victims of Larry Nassar, the doctor who abused Olympic gymnasts and many others, totaled $138.7 million.”
But in Trump’s mind, sexually abused young women are as nothing compared to the price he has had to pay. And there is the small matter of the fact that in some of the cases he didn’t have to pay at all: Trump’s legal costs in the 2022 Mar-a-Lago case, in which purloined classified documents from his first term were found in boxes in a spare bathroom at the Florida resort, were covered by his political action committee, Save America. And those six lawyers Trump retained in the case included Todd Blanche, now his deputy attorney general.
That is, as usual with this president, where the fix is in. In this autocratic president’s Justice Department, there is no even pretending that its theoretically independent lawyers work for anyone but Trump himself. Not for the nation — for the man.
“There’s just nobody that can make this decision, career or political appointee, who’s not going to be chock-full of ethical conundrums here. In this case, there’s nobody to kick it up to,” Joseph Tirrell, the top ethics official at the Justice Department until he was fired earlier this year, told The Guardian.
But our current president, who you would think would have a full plate serving our country, is focused here on the notion that you and I owe him what he calls “a lot of money.”
You know what’s really a lot of money? The Trump family fortune, which keeps increasing during his presidency, in ways that under any other regime in our now outmoded 250 years of at least mildly clean White Houses would have caused outrage.
Forbes magazine says that Trump’s immediate family “is now worth an estimated $10 billion, having nearly doubled its net worth since last year’s election. Trump’s own fortune jumped $3 billion in one year,” which The Hill says is a 70% gain. And yet he wants more, from us. Do you really want to fork it over?
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com