Trump $1.7B White Grievance Fund Is Reparations For Loyalists

The Justice Department announced an IRS settlement agreement with Donald Trump that would use a nearly $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded pity pot, a.k.a. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund,” to redress claims from white grievance goblins who believe they were victims of state persecution.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press release: “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again. As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

Not only did the Justice Department wrap Trump’s fund in the language of civil rights and government accountability, it also had the gall to compare it to an Obama-era precedent, the 2010 Keepseagle Settlement. But these two things don’t even belong in the same moral universe. That case addressed systemic discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which had denied Native American farmers and ranchers access to lending programs and technical assistance. 

But it shouldn’t surprise folks that this administration, once again, has stolen from the civil rights playbook and used the language of discrimination, injury, and repair to sanitize its own corruption and grift. 

While Blanche was being grilled by senators on Capitol Hill, mainstream press outlets were busy trying to figure out what to call Trump’s payout scheme. Some politely called it a “compensation fund” or a “redress process,” while the less delicate called it a “slush fund” or “political payout.” But less keep it real . . . even those descriptions don’t capture the stank rising off this MAGA cash grab.

Beneath all that “anti-weaponization” fog is a very old American habit. Find public money for white loyalists who confused prosecution, while telling Black folks that repair for centuries of stolen labor, stolen children and breastmilk, state violence, land theft, medical abuse, lynching and all manner of racial plunder is too complicated, too expensive, too divisive, too long ao, or just too damn much.

But America will always find some coins when white power starts crying victim.  Let the powerful lose an election, face an indictment, get subpoenaed, or find out that “law and order can knock on their doors too, and suddenly the government gets soft, healing-centered, trauma-informed, and generous. This country’s overlords know how to pay people when their dominance gets interrupted. It only forgets how money works when the debt is owed to Black people.

Where would the money come from? Who would qualify? How far back do we go? Wouldn’t that be divisive? What about people who never owned slaves? What about personal responsibility? What about bootstraps? What about the deficit? Yada yada Yada. When Black people ask for redress, this nation demands studies, genealogy charts, fiscal notes, moral defense, and a bipartisan commission that will meet until Black Jesus comes back.

But let a bunch of Trump loyalists experience the consequences of storming the Capitol, lying to investigators, participating in schemes to overturn an election, or aligning themselves with a president who treated democracy like one of his bankrupt casinos, and suddenly the federal government knows how to build a compensation structure.

Now there is money. Now there is a process. Now there is sympathy. Now there is a claims mechanism. Now there is a moral injury. Now there is language about justice and repair.

So apparently, America can do reparations and wrap up the process in two years. It just depends on who is crying. And this is not new. The historical parallel is sitting right there in the nation’s capital.

When slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia in April 1862, the federal government did not begin by compensating the 3,100 enslaved people whose labor had been stolen, whose families had been torn apart, whose bodies had been bought, abused, and sold in the nation’s capital. No, the government compensated 966 white enslavers, $300 each, for a total of 2,981 enslaved people. The government paid out a grand total of $993,406.00. 

By a basic inflation calculation, that $993,406 comes out to about $32.7 million today. But that figure barely captures what the payout meant. In 1862, nearly $1 million in federal money was not symbolic. It was a major government transfer to enslavers, and a public reimbursement for the loss of human beings they never should have owned in the first place. It was also an act of military necessity designed to secure slave owners’ loyalty to the Union as D.C. residents feared a Confederate invasion. An additional $100,000 was allotted to support the deportation of ex-slaves to Haiti, Africa, or some other country.

Let that sink in.

The people held in bondage did not get the check. The people who held them did. That is the American muscle memory. When the system is finally forced to stop doing something monstrous to other human beings, it often compensates the people who benefited from the evil. The enslaver lost “property,” so he got paid. The Black freedman lost generations and was told to be grateful for freedom.

Now here comes Trump, dragging that old logic into the 21st century with a grievance fund. His loyalists lose access to impunity, and suddenly they are victims. A rioter loses the right to smash windows and smear feces and semen on desks without a case number, and suddenly he is traumatized. A political operative gets investigated, and suddenly the federal government is supposed to kiss the boo-boo.

Meanwhile, Black families are still waiting for this country to repair the material, psychological, and generational consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, land theft, medical apartheid, racist policing, housing discrimination, school segregation, mass incarceration, and the long economic afterlife of white supremacy.

That is why “reparations for Trump loyalists” is not hyperbole. America keeps showing us whose suffering it recognizes and whose suffering it audits to death.

And let’s be clear about what “weaponization” means here. For many of these people, it means the law touched them. An investigation happened. A subpoena arrived. The same system that has terrorized Black communities for generations briefly knocked on the doors of people who thought badges, warrants, and handcuffs were only for other people’s neighborhoods.

The Trump movement has spent years mocking actual victims of state violence. They mock Black grief. They mock victims of police brutality. They mock migrants, poor people, student debtors, families who need food assistance, and anybody who dares to say the state harmed them and owes them repair.

But now the same crowd that told everybody else to toughen up wants taxpayer-funded smelling salts.

They do not want justice. They want reimbursement for lost supremacy. They want compensation for interrupted entitlement. They want a government check because accountability gives them hives. And somehow the rest of us are supposed to treat this like ordinary government business.

It is not.

It is a moral obscenity and a political cashback for loyalty paid out in the language of justice to people for whom accountability was so uncomfortable. And the insult is even worse because this is happening in a country that still refuses to repair the people it actually harmed.

Black people have receipts older than this country which is about to turn 250 years old. We’ve got names, ledgers, runaway ads, plantation records, Freedmen’s Bureau documents, census rolls, lynching archives, redlining maps, prison files, medical records, stolen deeds, school funding disparities, wage gaps, maternal mortality data, and generations of testimony. We have evidence stacked to the heavens.

But somehow, our claims are always too complicated, while white grievance is always urgent. This is America. A country that finds money for the powerful whenever they confuse consequences with persecution. A country that tells Black folk to move on from history while cutting checks to people still mad that their coup attempt got bad reviews.

So yeah, call it what it is. Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is not justice. It is reparations for white loyalists. And once again, America is proving that it knows exactly how to find money to repair harm.

It just keeps choosing the wrong damn people.

SEE ALSO:

Trump’s DOJ Sets Up Reparations Fund For Jan 6 Rioters

Trump Tries To Rewrite The History Of Jan. 6

Let’s Call A Thing A Thing: Trump’s $1.8B White Grievance Fund Is Reparations For His Loyalists was originally published on newsone.com