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For years, conservatives loudly complained that government spending was opaque, that their hard-earned dollars were being secretly misused, and that the government definitely did not need all the money it was taking from them.
That was always hyperbole … until now.
These days, your money belongs to Donald Trump, and he does whatever he wants with it. The White House belongs to Trump, and he does whatever he wants with it. That’s what kings do. And that’s as much of a breakdown of democracy as his increasingly authoritarian grip on the country.
Trump started the week by unilaterally deciding to demolish the East Wing of the White House so he could build an enormous $300 million gold-plated ballroom paid for by donations from private companies seeking to curry favor. No, he didn’t get any permits. No, he didn’t go through any public review. No, he did not submit any plans to the National Capital Planning Commission.
And why would he?
Trump doesn’t see the White House as the people’s house. He sees it as his. Sure, he said just a few months ago that the ballroom would be near the White House, but not touch it, and that construction wouldn’t interfere with the existing building. But he changed his mind, and that’s totally cool because, as a White House official explained to NBC News, “the scope and the size of the ballroom project have always been subject to vary as the process develops.”
Oh, got it. No plans, no rules, just vibes. Trump wants to tear out a whole wing of the White House? Great. You’re saying that cost has increased from $200 million to $300 million, even though nothing has been built and no one has seen any actual plans? Seems fine. It was going to hold 650 people, but as of Wednesday, that’s now up to nearly 1,000? Yep, definitely how large-scale government construction works.
Trump has justified this by saying that private donations are covering the cost. Well, he initially said he would pay for it, but why would he do that when so many big corporations hoping for favorable treatment are willing to give him millions of dollars?
Tearing down the White House and replacing it with a facsimile of Mar-a-Lago isn’t any less appalling just because Trump has cajoled companies into paying for it. Indeed, it might be worse. The president funding a pet project — one that involves destroying the White House, no less — via the coercion of private donors creates a closed loop and a complete lack of accountability and transparency.
While the wanton destruction of the White House is by far the most obvious example of Trump’s belief that the government belongs to him personally, there’s so much more.
Stealing from taxpayers
Trump is now insisting that he’s entitled to $230 million from the Department of Justice as “compensation” for past federal investigations into his actions.
Before winning the 2024 election, Trump filed two administrative claims under the Federal Torts Claim Act, which allows individuals who are harmed or suffer property damage due to a wrongful act by a federal employee to seek reimbursement from the government. The government can choose to pay the claim and settle the matter that way, or, if it refuses, the injured person can bring a lawsuit under the FTCA.
Trump wants money for the investigation into his campaign’s connections with Russian interference in the 2016 election. What losses, exactly, did he suffer? He faced no criminal charges, no civil lawsuits, no monetary penalties, and no financial losses. But it made him feel mad and sad, so we, the taxpayers, owe him.
The president also wants $15 million from taxpayers in compensatory damages for the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago — yes, the one that turned up boxes and boxes of classified documents stuffed into a bathroom — and his subsequent prosecution. Oh, and also an additional $100 million in punitive damages. Never mind that courts have said that punitive damages aren’t available under the FTCA, because Trump has the ultimate ace in the hole: the person who can sign off on giving him hundreds of millions of dollars, with no oversight, is the deputy attorney general.
That would be Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s former criminal defense attorneys, who was put in the job by Trump. Blanche can singlehandedly slide nearly a quarter billion in taxpayer dollars over to his former client, no matter how ridiculous the claim.
But it’s ok, see, because Trump says that he isn’t looking for money and would “give it to charity or something.”
Everyone knows Trump will not give a dime to charity, but let’s pretend he would for a moment. His proposal is that his toadies in the DOJ give him taxpayer money, at which point he’d display some largesse and give it away. So Trump wants us, the taxpayers, to pay him so that he can donate our money.
Or how about the recent report that $172 million of your taxpayer dollars just went to buying Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem not one, but two Gulfstream private jets? Noem really, really loves flying around the world, donning various outfits for her real job: content creator. You can’t expect her to do that in some shabby aging private jet, now, can you?
The Coast Guard did include $50 million in its budget to buy Noem one new plane, which the acting commandant talked about in a congressional hearing in May. DHS also put a whiny little “fact check” on its website that same month, and you will note that it mentions only one jet.
$50 million is not $172 million, and one plane is not two planes.
This isn’t merely a tale of government excess, though spending more than triple the amount and getting an extra plane out of the deal is indeed staggering. It’s that, as the New York Times put it, “It was not immediately clear where the funding for the jets came from.”
It’s not just the New York Times that doesn’t know. Congress doesn’t either. Democratic Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Lauren Underwood have written to Noem asking why DHS didn’t update Congress, what operational needs changed so drastically since May, and what funds were used and why.
DeLauro and Underwood no doubt know this is futile, particularly as DHS has already responded via X (because this is how official government statements happen now). DHS is furious that the Times characterized the planes as being for Noem, when really they are for the brave men and women of the Coast Guard. But even if that were not a risible lie, it actually doesn’t address the core issue, which is that tax dollars are not just a slush fund to be used however the administration wishes.
The shutdown has really brought this problem to the forefront, starting with the decision to take $8 billion from military research and development funds and pay the troops instead. This was then expanded to the Coast Guard, with Noem bragging she had found an “innovative solution” that allowed her to pay Coast Guard members. The only explanation of that “innovative solution” is that it is thanks to “one big beautiful bill funding.” It’s the same with the move to pay ICE and Border Patrol agents, for which the only explanation was that DHS would “allocate available funding to ensure full and timely payments.”
There are at least two problems here. The first is that the administration has created two classes of federal employees during the shutdown: those it feels like paying and those it does not. There’s no world where it’s legal during a shutdown to pick and choose who gets paychecks based on how much Trump likes you. Indeed, if that were the case, there would never really be a shutdown, as presidents could just keep their favorite projects going and their favorite people paid no matter whether Congress passed a spending bill or not.
The second problem is that no money has been appropriated for most of this. The whole thing about a government shutdown is that it happens when funding lapses because Congress hasn’t passed a bill to fund the government. There’s no one weird trick where the president can just move money around from one account to another and get around a funding lapse. Again, if that were the case, there would never really be a shutdown. If the president can simply spend whatever he wants on whatever he wants, Congress’s role is pointless.
New frontiers of self-dealing
Much of the conversation around Trump’s usurping of Congress’s power has centered on how Trump spends — or refuses to spend — money that has been allocated by Congress. That’s usually what people are referring to when they talk about the power of the purse.
However, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution also gives Congress “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” Duties, in case you were wondering, are the same as tariffs.
Congress can — and has — delegated some tariff powers to the president. However, Trump’s position is that he has complete and unlimited authority to impose tariffs and to change tariff rates whenever he feels like it, on any country, for any length of time, because he declared that trade deficits are a national emergency.
As much as conservatives strenuously tried to convince people otherwise during the 2024 election, the tariffs Trump is imposing on other countries are paid by us, not those other countries. Trump’s incoherent tariff regime has indeed raked in money to the tune of $195 billion so far, though Trump insists he’s collected trillions in tariff revenue already. No matter the amount, however, that money is being ponied up by American importers, businesses, and taxpayers. It’s a massive tax increase in all but name, with American consumers eating as much as 55 percent of tariff costs.
Just as Trump thinks he can do whatever he wants with tariffs, he thinks he can do whatever he wants with tariff revenue. Maybe he’ll give it to farmers to make sure they don’t flee the GOP over Trump destroying the economy?
“We’re going to take some of that tariff money that we made, we’re going to give it to our farmers, who are, for a little while, going to be hurt until the tariffs kick in to their benefit,” he said last month. “So we’re going to make sure that our farmers are in great shape, because we’re taking in a lot of money.”
Maybe he’ll use it to fund WIC, the federal food aid program, during the shutdown? Or might he give us back a fraction of our own money via stimulus checks of $1,000 or $2,000?
All of these possibilities are cynical and gross. Trump is taking billions of dollars from all US consumers via what is functionally an enormous, arbitrary, and ever-changing tax increase, and then vowing to spend it however he wants. In his mind, it’s his money. He can shower it on people he likes. He can pick and choose what government program he’d like to rescue. He can cut checks if he sees his approval ratings plummet. But at no point will you be able to accurately trace the money coming in and the money going out.
Trump thinks that our money is his alone, our buildings are his alone, our government is his alone. That’s not how democratically elected leaders think. That’s how kings think. But he’s not our ruler, and we’re not his subjects, and we don’t have to put up with this.
That’s it for today
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Excellent piece and thank you!
At the same time, it has always struck me as odd that the leader of a democracy should live in a palace at all. In real democracies: Germany, Switzerland, the Nordics; heads of government mostly live in their own homes or modest residences, pay their own utilities, and commute to work like everyone else.
The White House was already a symbolic exception. Now it’s becoming Versailles.
This isn’t governance. It’s donor-funded monarchy cosplay.
— Johan
Call him King Donald I, if you must. King Trump earns too much gravitas. Donald Tower confers the right ridiculousness upon the gilded vulgarian.