By The Editorial Board..There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This.

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Has there ever been an episode of presidential corruption so blatant and threatening to constitutional order? Certainly not in modern times. President Trump’s Justice Department is using taxpayer money to create a $1.8 billion political slush fund. Ostensibly set up to compensate those who the department claims have “suffered weaponization and lawfare,” it will in fact reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.

The fund manages to combine three of Mr. Trump’s most alarming behaviors. One, it is an obvious form of corruption, coming from a president who has used his office to enrich himself, his family and his allies. Two, the fund continues his pattern of using the Justice Department as an enforcer to punish his perceived opponents and protect his friends and allies. Three, the fund is his latest attempt to rewrite history about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

It is worth pausing to put the fund into the larger context of Mr. Trump’s political project: He is destroying pillars of American democracy to empower himself. He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins. He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies. He incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do. He directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power.

Mr. Trump’s project has not yet succeeded, at least not fully. Many Americans — in the judicial system, in Congress, in state governments and elsewhere — continue to stand up for democracy and oppose his autocratic ambitions. By now, though, nobody should have illusions about what he is attempting to do.

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The fund’s existence is a story of political self-dealing. It is nominally the product of a flimsy personal lawsuit that Mr. Trump filed this year against the Internal Revenue Service, which he oversees, over the leaking of his tax returns during his first term. That lawsuit led to an absurd negotiation, in which the lawyers on one side worked for Mr. Trump the citizen and those on the other side worked for Mr. Trump the president.

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Adding to absurdity, the government lawyers reported to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, who previously worked as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. A federal judge in Miami helping to oversee the case, Kathleen Williams, pointed out that the two sides were not adversaries, which called into question the process. Even Mr. Trump acknowledged the situation shortly after filing the suit by saying, “I am supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

Yet the talks proceeded because Mr. Trump’s Justice Department was in charge. Unsurprisingly, they led to a deal that was extremely favorable to him.

In exchange for the president’s dropping the suit against the I.R.S., both he and his supporters will receive government handouts. For Mr. Trump, the handout comes in the form of permission to have cheated on his taxes. The government has granted him and his family immunity from ongoing audits of his tax payments. He has a long history of using questionable accounting maneuvers, and the audits could have cost him more than $100 million, experts have said. Now they will cost him nothing.

For his supporters, the handouts will come from the slush fund. The Justice Department will tap a permanent stream of revenue that Congress created in 1956, known as the Judgment Fund, to settle lawsuits against the federal government. As Paul Figley, a former Justice Department official, noted, the new fund appears to be both legal and at odds with Congress’s intent. “It’s horrible policy,” Mr. Figley told The Times.

The department has allocated $1.8 billion for what it calls, in an Orwellian flourish, an Anti-Weaponization Fund and invited applications from people who have been targeted for “political, personal or ideological reasons.” Mr. Blanche — who holds his position as acting attorney general largely because of his willingness to use federal power in service of Mr. Trump’s personal whims — will appoint a five-member board, with congressional leaders given input on one of the five. Mr. Trump can fire any of the members at any time.

To understand who is likely to receive payments, look at who has previously received settlements from the Justice Department. Michael Flynn, who was briefly Mr. Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, received $1.25 million, even though he pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents. The family of Ashli Babbitt, who participated in the Jan. 6 riot, and whom federal agents shot as she and others approached the House floor, received nearly $5 million, even though investigators cleared the shooters of wrongdoing. The Trump administration is paying off people who committed violence and crimes, as long as they are Trump allies.

The fund’s timeline is the giveaway of how Mr. Trump plans to use it. The Justice Department said the fund would stop processing claims on Dec. 15, 2028, weeks before the president is to leave office, ensuring the money is distributed while he still holds the power to fire anyone who objects. The window is precisely the window of Mr. Trump’s authority.

Even some of Mr. Trump’s usual defenders are unhappy. Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, meekly said that he was “not a big fan” of the fund. Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s general counsel, resigned within hours of the announcement, seven months after the Senate had confirmed him.

Providing payoffs is only part of the point. Another, according to Mr. Blanche, is “ensuring this never happens again.” What, exactly, is “this”? The evenhanded enforcement of the law.

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The Trump administration has already fired federal agents who did their duties by investigating the president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr. Trump has issued blanket clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters, some of whom may soon receive payments. His Justice Department secured an indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on dubious charges as retribution for his role in the investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s Russia ties. The fund continues the effort to turn law enforcement into a tool of raw political power.

The fund also encourages future lawlessness on Mr. Trump’s behalf. It sends the message that he will use his power not only to shield people who break the law from accountability but also to shower benefits on them. Just as punishment is a deterrent, rewards are an incentive.

After President Richard Nixon’s abuses in the Watergate scandal, Congress and the executive branch built rules and traditions to ensure that federal agencies, especially the Justice Department, operated in the public interest, rather than that of the president. Mr. Trump has tried to break this system. Once he is gone, it will need to be rebuilt, and better than before. He has exposed and exploited its flaws and gaps. Unless they are filled, Mr. Trump’s corruption and perversion of justice risk becoming the norm.

In the meantime, Americans should be cleareyed about what the president is doing. He is taking their money and showering it on criminals.

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According to Trump we are not at war with Iran. A blockade is an act of war. He keeps changing what he calls what is going on with Iran

By Tony Romm and Ana Swanson

Reporting from Washington

May 7, 2026Updated 6:33 p.m. ET

A panel of federal judges on Thursday found President Trump had violated the law when he imposed a 10 percent tariff on most U.S. imports, dealing yet another legal setback to the White House in its efforts to wage a trade war without the express permission of Congress.

In a split ruling, the Court of International Trade found that Mr. Trump had wrongly invoked a decades-old trade law when he applied those duties beginning in February. The president imposed the levies after his previous set of punishing tariffs was struck down by the Supreme Court.

The decision appeared to place, for now, new limits on Mr. Trump’s trade powers, which he has wielded aggressively in hopes of resetting relationships with allies and adversaries, raising new revenue and encouraging more companies to make their products in the United States.

While the court declared Mr. Trump’s tariffs to be illegal, it only explicitly blocked their collection from small businesses and some states that had sued over their legality. It remained unclear how the administration would interpret that order, though it is widely expected to appeal.

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The ruling marked a major setback for Mr. Trump as he prepares to travel to China next week to meet Xi Jinping, its leader, about trade. Tariffs are expected to be a major topic on the agenda, and the court decision could undercut the president’s leverage.

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The decision also raised the likelihood that Mr. Trump might once again have to pay back money collected from the illegal duties. A refund process is already underway for the roughly $166 billion collected under Mr. Trump’s prior set of sweeping tariffs.

The White House and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

From the beginning, the Trump administration envisioned the across-the-board tariff as a temporary solution, one that would buy time for Mr. Trump to craft a more lasting set of higher rates using other legal authorities. That process is now well underway, and could yield rates akin to those that Mr. Trump announced last year using a decades-old economic emergency law.

After the Supreme Court invalidated those tariffs in February, the White House swiftly moved to revive them, employing a never-before-used provision in the Trade Act of 1974, known as Section 122. The power allows the White House to apply tariffs up to 15 percent for a maximum of 150 days in response to “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” and situations that present “fundamental international payments problems.”

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The two intricate concepts reflect lawmakers’ concerns back when the U.S. dollar was pegged to gold, creating economic risks that the president might need to manage using tariffs. But the dollar is no longer pegged to that commodity, prompting a coalition of states and a group of small businesses to sue the Trump administration this spring, arguing that he did not meet the criteria under law to apply his 10 percent tariff.

The two sides clashed at a tense and highly technical three-hour hearing last month, when the judges on the Court of International Trade seemed to struggle at times to interpret lawmakers’ intentions in 1974 — and the extent to which Mr. Trump could wield that power about a half-century later.

In its 53-page ruling, two of the three judges on the trade court ultimately found that the president had failed to meet the threshold established under law to allow the use of Section 122. In doing so, the judges pointed to legislative history, which they said “chronicles a series of efforts to carefully cabin presidential discretion” on trade.

“Section 122 was passed in response to a specific historical crisis that resulted in the United States’ currency and gold reserves being depleted,” said Jeffrey Schwab, the director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center, a legal group that represented small businesses in the case. “That is not the situation here.”

It marked the second major win for the Liberty Justice Center, which had prevailed against the president in the case that reached the Supreme Court. States joined small businesses in that case as well, but on Friday, the trade court found most did not have standing to challenge Mr. Trump over his use of Section 122.

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“So long as President Trump continues to try to illegally tax Oregonians, we’ll continue to go to court to stop him,” Dan Rayfield, the attorney general of Oregon, said in a statement.

Ryan Majerus, a partner at King & Spalding, said the court had “clear concerns with the administration’s expansive reading of Section 122.” He predicted that the refund process, if it occurred, could last until 2027.

The administration is already working on its next plan for tariffs, but those levies can’t be implemented immediately. It has proposed two trade investigations under a legal provision known as Section 301, one related to global laws against trade in goods made with forced labor, and another on other countries’ manufacturing capacity.

Hearings on those measures were held in Washington this and last week. But the administration was counting on the Section 122 tariff to last until July, and those alternate tariffs may not be ready for many weeks.

Timothy C. Brightbill, an attorney at Wiley Rein, said the decision was “a decisive rejection of the president’s use of Section 122 tariffs.”

However, he added, “this decision will surely be appealed by the administration, and there is already a ‘Plan C’ in place: the Section 301 investigations that are already underway, and which will likely conclude with new tariff announcements in July.”