We the Victims: Who Pays When the Government Weaponizes Its Power?
If it looks like corruption—and it smells like corruption—there’s a good chance it’s corruption.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”—Donald Trump
One way or another, the American taxpayers always get screwed by politicians eager to spend our hard-earned dollars on programs and projects that do little to improve our lives, safeguard our freedoms, or secure our future.
Donald Trump—the billionaire trust-fund baby/reality TV showman who transformed himself into a populist champion of working-class Americans—has proven to be no different, and in many ways worse, than the politicians who came before him.
Trump has given new meaning to government corruption, graft, grift, profiteering, self-dealing and pay-to-play politics.
From the proposed White House ballroom and its taxpayer-backed security upgrades, to the high-dollar UFC spectacle planned for the White House lawn, to pardons that function less like mercy than loyalty rewards, to government access increasingly conditioned on political obedience, Trump has turned the presidency into a private rewards program for himself, his donors, his allies and his enforcers.
Every new abuse is wrapped in the language of patriotism, security or justice. Every bill lands, sooner or later, on the backs of the American people.
Thus, rather than draining the swamp, Trump has shown himself to be the veritable swamp monster, mired in the muck and determined to keep it that way.
Trump’s latest grift? A taxpayer-funded slush fund, dressed up as justice, purportedly to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the “weaponization” of the Biden Justice Department and Democrats.
As part of the same settlement, the government also reportedly agreed to bar the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, the Trump Organization and related entities over tax filings and claims predating the agreement—a breathtaking act of self-protection disguised as legal closure that helps shield the president and his empire from the very kind of government scrutiny ordinary Americans are expected to endure without complaint.
Taken together, the payout fund and the audit shield expose the real purpose of this so-called anti-weaponization crusade: not to end weaponized government, but to decide who gets protected by it, who gets paid by it, and who gets crushed by it
Read between the lines of the deliberately vague information provided about this “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which will be seeded with $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds, and it starts to look suspiciously like a fund to reimburse those convicted, investigated or politically inconvenienced for crossing legal lines in service to Trump’s agenda.
If it looks like corruption—and it smells like corruption—there’s a good chance it’s corruption.
Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wasn’t mincing words when he described it as “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”
At best, this is an outrageous misuse of taxpayer money. At worst, it is yet another perverted form of Trump’s presidential pardons, which have overwhelmingly benefited political loyalists, donors, grifters, extremists, and individuals either convicted of crimes in pursuit of Trump’s ambitions or useful to advancing those ambitions in the future—or both.
The message is unmistakable: commit crimes that benefit those in power, and those in power will absolve you, reimburse you, excuse you, or reward you.
These are not miscarriages of justice being corrected. They are protection payments, signals to future operatives: do what we need you to do, and we will take care of you.
But who will compensate “we the people” for the damage done when the government weaponizes its powers against us?
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https://thefreethoughtproject.com/government-corruption/we-the-victims-who-pays-when-the-government-weaponizes-its-power