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 personal profit. But this is a new level of self-dealing. Trump sued the US government in January for $10bn over the unauthorized release of his tax returns by a federal contractor, who worked for the IRS and was later prosecuted and sentenced to five years in prison during Joe Biden’s administration.

Trump was famously litigious long before he became president, but it was the first time a US president has sued the government he leads. Trump was effectively on both sides of the lawsuit – a fact pointed out by legal scholars, Democrats in Congress and the federal judge who oversaw the case.

The Trump-controlled justice department ultimately settled his lawsuit by creating the $1.8bn fund to compensate the president’s allies – and barring the IRS from auditing Trump’s past tax returns, and those of his family members and “related companies”. That immunity from ongoing IRS audits could be worth more than $100m to Trump, who was facing at least one tax investigation dating back to 2010. The deal is the equivalent of........

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