Trump’s slush fund is gone – but his IRS agreement is a new level of self-dealing | Mohamad Bazzi

The president’s immunity from continuing audits made fewer headlines than the ‘anti-weaponization fund’, but it’s no less egregious Last week, Todd Blanche, the acting US attorney general, told Congress that he was abandoning plans to establish a $1.8bn fund to compensate Donald Trump’s political allies. The administration’s attempt to use taxpayer money to pay people who claimed to have been unfairly prosecuted by the government – possibly including those convicted of violence during the January 6 Capitol riot that Trump incited – was too much for Senate Republicans. But Blanche, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer before joining his administration, made another announcement that got far less attention than scrapping Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund”: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be barred from continuing audits into the president, his family and their “affiliates”. In other words, Trump secured something most Americans can only dream of: immunity from IRS audits of his past tax returns. It’s bewildering to keep up with the potential conflicts that Trump has created in his second term, and all the ways he has used the presidency for perso