Trump’s Taxpayer-Funded Revenge Plan

Brought to you by Apple Card. Hey, you could be earning 2% daily cash back on that purchase, and that one, and even that one. That's because Apple Card users earn 2% daily cash back on every purchase, including everyday items they buy online or in store when using their Apple Card with Apple Pay. Not an Apple Card customer? You can apply in the Wallet app on iPhone. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at apple.co/benefits. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. In a move that shocked lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. President Trump is dropping his $10,000,000,000 lawsuit against the IRS. The Democrats and others are crying foul over what his administration plans to do instead. Justice department announced an almost $2,000,000,000 fund of taxpayer money to compensate people that the administration claims have been victims of, quote, weaponization and lawfare. Among those who could apply for payouts, the nearly 1,600 rioters charged in connection with the January sixth capital insurrection. This is, reimbursing people that were horribly treated horribly treated. It's anti weaponization they made. Today, my colleague Andy Duran on the story of how this came about, who might get the money, and the bipartisan outrage that has ensued. He's setting up a $1,700,000,000 political slush fund for the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and his other political lieutenants in the hangers on. I think that there are a lot of questions that the administration is going to have to answer. It's Wednesday, May 20. So we have talked a lot on the daily about president Trump's campaign of retribution against his enemies in his second term, how he's wielded the federal government to do that. And this week, it feels like we entered into a new chapter of that story with the creation of this enormous fund. We're gonna talk about how the fund works and who's likely to benefit. But before we get into that, you, Andy, have been covering all of this, and I just wanna start with you explaining where did this fund even come from. So, yeah, this story really starts the first time that president Trump ran for office in 2016. He was unique among presidential candidates at that time, and this was something of a scandal and that he did not release his tax returns. It was standard practice for presidential candidates to put out some of their tax information as a way to understand their finances. And Trump didn't do that, and this was a topic of wide interest throughout his first term. Mhmm. There were various attempts to see his tax returns, and that didn't happen until the New York Times in 2020 published a series of stories describing what Trump had been doing on his taxes and revealing that for many years, Trump had been paying little in federal income taxes. Right. And …