We Should All Be Mad as Hell About Trump's $1.8 Billion Slush Fund |
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We Should All Be Mad as Hell About Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund
As if the past 16 months weren’t enough, this week I reached my breaking point.
A large image of President Donald Trump hangs from the the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, DC.
“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” newscaster Howard Beale hollers, as he spirals into an environment-induced madness, on air, in the classic 1976 movie Network. Speaking to a TV camera, he urges his audience to open their windows and scream out that they are also mad as hell. From coast to coast, as Americans respond to Beale’s primal scream, those windows open and those screams of rage and of fury at being betrayed by their own government are heard. It’s perhaps the most breathtaking four minutes of cinema ever made.
Right about now, I’m tempted to open my windows and scream the same crie de coeur out into the ether. For more than 16 months, the Trump regime has done one outrageous or cruel or corrupt or unconstitutional thing after another, but this week I reached my breaking point.
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I refer to the extraordinary agreement between Trump, the Trumpified Department of Justice, and the Trumpified Treasury Department to settle the president’s outrageous $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service by both granting Trump and his hoodlum family immunity from investigations into potential tax fraud, and also creating a $1.776-billion slush fund to be disbursed at will to January 6th insurrectionists and others who claim to have been “victims” of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. The kicker: it would be funded using tax money from you, me, and everyone else in this country.
To be 100 percent clear here: unlike the men, women, and children who have simply been disappeared into makeshift concentration camps by Trump’s regime, those “victims” actually received jury trials, were found guilty by their peers, and were sentenced not for being Trump fans but for battering Capitol police officers, for hunting Congressional members with the intent of killing them, for vandalizing the citadel of American........