The Grift Republic

Patriotism is the cover the grift wears in America.

This week the United States government opened the largest slush fund in its history.

On Monday, Trump withdrew his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the 2020 leak of his returns to ProPublica. In the same hour his acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, siphoned $1.776 billion from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund into a new account administered by five commissioners Trump had appointed. Claims close December 15, 2028, one month before this term ends. The president sued the agency he runs, settled with the attorney general he hired, and walked away with the money. Blanche, who filed the suit and signed the settlement both, calls the account the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

$1.776 billion. The number was painted on the flags the mob carried up the marble steps of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Once inside, they ransacked the offices, smeared feces along the corridor walls, and carried Pelosi’s lectern through the Rotunda. Outside, on the West Front lawn, they had erected a gallows with a noose meant for the Vice President. That 1776 now stamps the Treasury account opened to pay them.

On Tuesday Blanche, with a single signature on a single page, barred the IRS forever from auditing Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, or any trust or affiliate or subsidiary. The New York Times reported in 2024 that losing the pending audit could cost the family more than $100 million. The audit died Tuesday, signed away as a footnote while every camera in Washington pointed at the $1.776 billion.

On Wednesday two of the Capitol Police officers who held the line that day, Harry Dunn, the Black officer the mob had called the N-word in the Rotunda, and Daniel Hodges, the officer crushed in a tunnel doorframe with a stolen riot shield until he bled from the mouth, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington to block the fund. Their complaint calls it “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.”

The same afternoon Enrique Tarrio, sixteen months out of federal prison, named his price to a Reuters reporter from Miami. The chairman of the Proud Boys on January 6, the white-nationalist gang that marched at Charlottesville beside the men chanting “Jews will not replace us,” sentenced to twenty-two years for seditious conspiracy and pardoned by Trump in January 2025, wants between two and five million. “I’m not greedy,” he told the reporter. “But my life was all fucked up because of this.” To the Miami New Times he called the fund “another promise made, another promise kept.”

At Joint Base Andrews, Trump told reporters $1.776 billion was too small. “You’re talking about peanuts. It destroyed the lives of many, many people.” Blanche, testifying before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday, had refused to rule out paying the people who beat Dunn and Hodges and the officers beside them.

A president sued his own government, settled with himself, paid himself, and opened a $1.776 billion account for the people who attacked the building he now occupies. The grift is older than the office it has captured. The country has three names for what is happening this week.

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Slush

A barrel of rancid pork fat sits on the deck of an American naval frigate in 1836. The ship’s cook has been skimming it for months, ladling the gray fat off the top of his vats of boiled salted pork. The sailors call it slush, after the half-thawed snow on shore. Landlubbers cannot stomach the smell. Men at sea eat it on hardtack when the larder runs out. At port the cook will sell the barrel to a tallow maker and pocket the money, which by an old naval tradition belongs to the crew but never reaches them.

The Army and Navy Chronicle described the practice in March 1836 as “a component part of the crew’s ration” that “in the strictest sense of justice ought to belong to them.” It did not. The money went into an account no officer could audit, and the cook drew from it for his own use. By 1873 the phrase had moved ashore, and The Weekly Caucasian ran editorials against “itch-palmed, slush fund legislators.” The skim had a new venue and the same name.

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Boodle

By the 1880s the cook was ashore in a city hall.

Boodle, from the Dutch boedel meaning property and estate, entered American English in 1858 as the criminal underworld’s word for graft money. In 1884 the Tammany Hall Board of Aldermen of New York accepted roughly $500,000 in cash to grant the Broadway Surface Railroad Company a franchise to run streetcars down Manhattan. The bribe money was the boodle. When the scheme broke, six of the twenty-one aldermen fled to Canada and one went to prison.

Grift

By 1906 the boodler had moved into the carnival.

Grift entered American English that year in carnival slang, naming the long con, the slow extraction of value from someone who believes the man taking it is on his side. The word derives from graft (1865), from the Middle Dutch graft, a ditch, a digging, an extraction from the ground. The grifter digs into what was never his.

This week the country watched a president run the long con from inside the office it built to stand against him.

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What other Americans had to do

There is a class of 9/11 photograph in which the survivor is the disaster: the ash inhabits her, the building’s collapse stays on her hair, her lashes, her open mouth. Marcy Borders, a Bank of America legal assistant who that morning had ridden the elevator to the eighty-first floor of the North Tower, was twenty-eight when Stan Honda caught her on a Manhattan sidewalk wearing the South Tower on her face. She fought stomach cancer for a year before it killed her in 2015. The dust had kept its own time.

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund opened in 2001 for families of the dead and closed in 2003. Reopening it for the living took ten years. By then the firefighters who had worked the pile were dying of cancer. So were the office workers like Borders. None of them existed to the law until Congress passed the Zadroga Act in 2010 over Republican complaints that $7 billion was too much.

The fund expired five years later. Jon Stewart, the comedian, slammed his palm on a folder of dead first responders’ photographs at a Senate hearing. Congress extended it the next month. In fifteen years the fund has paid 56,000 claimants $12.6 billion through a Special Master constrained by statute.

Enslaved Americans hid where they could. In swamps, in attics, in the false bottoms of wagons, in the secret rooms of abolitionist houses. Harriet Jacobs, born in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813, hid in a crawlspace above her grandmother’s storeroom, nine feet long by seven wide by three feet high at the peak. She lived in it for nearly seven years. She drilled holes in the roof with a gimlet so she could watch her children play in the yard without their knowing she watched. In 1842 she escaped to New York and wrote it down.

H.R. 40 asks the country to look at what was done to Harriet Jacobs. To the twelve million Africans who crossed the Atlantic in chains before her, and the four million still enslaved when the war ended. Sherman’s Field Order No. 15 gave 40,000 freed families 400,000 acres of coastal land in January 1865; Andrew Johnson revoked it that fall and returned every acre to the planters who had owned them. Anthony Crawford, lynched in 1916 for haggling over the price of cotton, left a four-hundred-and-twenty-seven-acre farm that passed quietly into white hands. Black families owned sixteen million acres in 1910 and had lost fifteen million by the century’s end. Tulsa burned in 1921. Rosewood in 1923. The redlining maps are still drawing the wealth map today. The bill asks for twenty million dollars to convene a commission to study what is owed, not to pay it.

Representative John Conyers introduced it in 1989 and twenty times after. It has never reached the House floor.

Marcy Borders breathed the dust of the World Trade Center, fought cancer for a year, and her family got a check eighteen years after her death certificate cleared the documentation rules. Harriet Jacobs spent seven years in a crawlspace watching her children through holes she drilled with a gimlet, escaped, wrote it down, and the bill that asks the country to study what was done to her has been blocked from the House floor for thirty-five years. The men who smeared feces on the corridor walls of the Capitol got $1.776 billion in a weekend, administered by five commissioners with no statutory authorization and no judicial oversight.

Four centuries of refusing to say who is owed. These numbers say.

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The barrel

In 1836 it held the cook’s rancid pork fat, sold by the barrel on the dock. In 1884 it held the boodle, twenty-one aldermen passing $500,000 in cash for the right to lay rails down Broadway. This week it holds $1.776 billion christened as patriotic redress. The flag on the side reads 1776.

Patriotism is the cover the grift wears in America.

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Notes & Sources

The Anti-Weaponization Fund

1. DOJ’s formal announcement of the $1.776 billion fund and its 60-day Treasury deposit. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-anti-weaponization-fund

2. ABC News broke the $10 billion dismissal and Judge Williams’s order closing the case. https://abcnews.com/US/trump-court-filings-plans-drop-10b-lawsuit-irs/story?id=133066043

3. NBC News on the broader settlement and the unfiled nine-page agreement. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-voluntarily-drops-10-billion-lawsuit-irs-leaked-tax-records-rcna345193

4. Time on the five-member commission and the December 15, 2028 claims deadline. https://time.com/article/2026/05/18/trump-doj-anti-weaponization-fund-irs-lawsuit-settlement/

5. CBS News on lawyers positioning January 6 clients within hours of the announcement. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-could-benefit-from-trumps-1-7-billion-weaponization-fund/

The audit-immunity addendum

6. CNN first reported the Tuesday addendum quietly added as a hyperlink. https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/19/politics/irs-barred-investigating-trump-new-settlement-term

7. NBC News obtained the one-page addendum signed only by Blanche. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/doj-agrees-not-pursue-tax-claims-trump-part-irs-deal-rcna345973

8. Al Jazeera English on the “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” language and Tuesday’s hearing. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/20/us-president-trump-and-family-given-immunity-from-pending-tax-audits

9. UPI on Senator Reed calling Blanche “the president’s consigliere” at the hearing. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/05/20/blanche-trump-family-business-immunity-IRS/8561779291226/

The officers’ lawsuit and the people who beat them

10. PBS NewsHour on Dunn and Hodges filing to block the fund. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/officers-who-defended-capitol-on-jan-6-sue-to-block-payouts-from-1-8b-anti-weaponization-fund

11. Axios on the 29-page complaint and its “most brazen act” charge. https://www.axios.com/2026/05/20/jan-6-officers-sue-trump-weaponization-fund

12. CNBC on the lawsuit’s Fourteenth Amendment argument. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/trump-fund-lawsuit-capitol-riot-irs.html

13. ADL on the Charlottesville chant and its white-nationalist origin. https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/you-will-not-replace-us

14. SPLC’s extremist files entry on the Proud Boys’ 2018 hate-group designation. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys

Marcy Borders

15. CBS News on Borders’s death from stomach cancer at 42. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/911-dust-lady-marcy-borders-dies-of-cancer

16. NBC News confirmed the 2014 diagnosis and the August 2015 death. https://www.aol.com/news/2015-08-26-marcy-borders-9-11s-iconic-dust-lady-dies-after-cancer-batt-21227608.html

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund

17. Congressional Research Service report on the VCF, including the $12.6 billion paid to 56,000 claimants. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45969

18. Jon Stewart’s June 2019 testimony, covered by C-SPAN. https://www.c-span.org/program/house-committee/september-11-victim-compensation-fund-reauthorization/528063

Harriet Jacobs

19. UNC’s Documenting the American South hosts the full text of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html

20. The DocSouth biographical entry on Jacobs’s life, escape, and writing. https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/bio.html

Sherman’s Field Order No. 15 and the broken promise

21. Georgia Historical Society marker on the January 16, 1865 order and Johnson’s revocation. https://www.georgiahistory.com/ghmi_marker_updated/history-of-emancipation-special-field-orders-no-15/

22. New Georgia Encyclopedia’s scholarly entry on the order and the forced restoration of land. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15/

Anthony Crawford and the theft of Black farmland

23. Equal Justice Initiative on the October 21, 1916 lynching and the seizure of Crawford’s 427-acre farm. https://eji.org/news/eji-dedicates-lynching-marker-anthony-crawford-abbeville-south-carolina/

24. The AP’s “Torn from the Land” investigation of 107 documented cases of stolen Black farmland. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/20011202/torn02/torn-from-the-land-black-americans-farmland-taken-through-cheating-intimidation-even-murder

25. American Bar Association Human Rights journal on the 90 percent loss of Black-owned farmland from 1910 to 1997. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/wealth-disparities-in-civil-rights/the-contemporary-relevance-of-historic-black-land-loss/

Tulsa and Rosewood

26. Smithsonian NMAAHC commemorating the May 31–June 1, 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/news/national-museum-african-american-history-and-culture-commemorates-100th-anniversary

H.R. 40

27. Library of Congress entry on Pressley’s January 2025 reintroduction of the bill. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/40/history

28. Pressley’s official statement on the reintroduction and the bill’s lineage. https://pressley.house.gov/2025/02/12/amid-onslaught-on-dei-pressley-booker-colleagues-reintroduce-historic-reparations-bill-during-black-history-month/

Sheila Jackson Lee

29. Associated Press obituary confirming her June 2024 diagnosis and July 19 death. https://apnews.com/article/sheila-jackson-lee-died-b2de57de41d39053a7648b16438eb009

Etymology

30. Oxford English Dictionary entry tracing slush fund to 1830s American naval usage. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/slush-fund_n

31. Online Etymology Dictionary on boodle, from the Dutch boedel, by 1858. https://www.etymonline.com/word/boodle

32. Online Etymology Dictionary on grift, dating to 1906 American carnival slang. https://www.etymonline.com/word/grift

33. Britannica on Tammany Hall’s 1884 “Boodle Board” and the Broadway franchise scheme. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tammany-Hall

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Suggested Reading

Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (2017). Documents more than 4,400 racial-terror lynchings in the American South between 1877 and 1950. https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997). Traces how the legal architecture of slavery survived emancipation.

Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Belknap Press, 2017). The definitive account of redlining, contract-buying, and credit discrimination.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Press, 2019). On how post-emancipation theft was carried out through law and mob violence.