Did Xi Really Trade Iran for Taiwan?

 

Ali Alizadeh: The American readout of the Trump–Xi meeting claims that Xi explicitly agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open, that there must be no tolls, that China opposes the militarisation of the Strait, that China will buy more American oil to reduce its dependence on Hormuz, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. 

The Chinese readout said almost none of this. It said only that the two leaders exchanged views on the Middle East. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping spent his political capital on Taiwan.

So Iranians watching this tonight are asking: did Xi Jinping just trade Iran for Taiwan? Did our most important strategic partner sell us out at the Great Hall of the People while our cities are under blockade? 

What actually happened in Beijing today?

Michael Hudson:  If you have listened to Donald Trump and to the American reports of earlier negotiations with Iran and with other countries, there are always two versions. There is the American version, which always reads the same way: the other side has agreed to total surrender to everything the United States has asked for. Then there is the other side, which says, no, we did not say any of those things.

So we are dealing not only with a translation of languages, but a translation of what the words mean. What does it mean for the Strait of Hormuz to be open? From China’s point of view, it means that there will be continued trade — that all countries, the Arab OPEC countries and Iran, will be able to send their ships through the Strait and onward through the Indian Ocean, eastward to China or wherever they are going in Asia.

That is exactly what has happened in the last few days. Chinese ships have been freely going through the Strait of Hormuz. They have been paying the tolls that Iran has said are an absolute precondition for any agreement, because Iran has been attacked unjustly, in violation of the United Nations Security Council rules of war and the rules of international relations. Iran under these rules is justified in receiving reparations. 

But the United Nations does not have an enforcement system. It does not have any equivalent of a Nuremberg trials commission. It does not have a set of judges who can enforce reparations. So, Iran has worked out a pragmatic way of extracting these reparations, and that is to impose tolls on all ships going through the Strait.

That has been discussed and explained very clearly by Iran, and other countries have agreed to these rules. And the issue is not limited to Hormuz alone. What happens when the ships emerge from the Strait and go into the open seas? The United States has been seizing Iranian ships, or threatening to seize them. Most of the ships that are able to go through Hormuz have been turned back, forced to stop from going further. Iran has said: we will send so many that some will get by, because the United States does not have a large enough navy to prevent them all. But the United States is blocking not only Hormuz; it has blocked the ocean outside Hormuz as well. Iran has been trying to send its ships very close to the Pakistani shore, to stay within Pakistani waters and move that way.

But obviously, from Iran’s point of view, and I believe from China’s point of view, this is opening the Strait of Hormuz. It was Donald Trump who made up his wish list. And his wish list is, of course, that Iran would not charge any tolls. But that is one of Iran’s red lines. I think Iran has learned from looking at Russia’s experience in Ukraine that you do not announce a red line and then fail to enforce it. Russia has announced its red lines for what NATO countries can do in support of Ukraine, again and again and again, and NATO has simply ignored them. Iran has said: we are not going to let the United States, Israel and their allies keep pushing on us with salami tactics, a little bit at a time. A red line is a red line.

So when the conference ends, which I gather will be tomorrow, you will read the Chinese report of what happened. I doubt there can be an agreed joint report — there rarely is in these things. There is always the U.S. report for the U.S. press and for American voters, which says that Trump has won a huge victory and has hurt other countries to the benefit of the United States. And then there is the other side, which says all of this is fantasy and that they have stuck to their guns. So you should wait for the Chinese reports to come out, and for the discussion with Chinese diplomats that is going to follow.

AA: Nonetheless, for some people the very fact that Trump is visiting China, that Xi Jinping is welcoming him, and that — apart from China’s insistence on Taiwan — the Chinese are open to flexibility and say they want a good partnership, is troubling. For many, multipolarity was imagined as another Cold War. You were one of the first people to write about multipolarity. Can you explain how China is different from what the Soviet Union was, and why China insists on de-escalating tensions with America and avoiding military confrontation?

MH: Every country in the world except the United States, Israel, Germany, England and France wants to reduce tensions. So of course the host countries that are not among these belligerent nations are going to say we all want to be partners in world peace. They are trying to talk reason: here is a reasonable way to resolve things.

What they are actually doing when they say “we are partners” is laying down the principles of international trade, international investment, international banking and military spending. If you are part of this partnership — meaning agreement to these principles — that is fine. But if you do not agree to these principles, then we are afraid you are not part of this partnership.

So when China and Russia refer to their enemies as “our partners,” as they have done again and again, they are not posing as if they will fight back in a confrontational way. That is not the Asian way of conducting a negotiation. You do not say: we will fight back, you fight and we fight. That is not the way to find any resolution. Of course you are prepared to fight. But of course you say: why don’t we have a peaceful, logical discussion? Here is the kind of world stability that we are going to create.

The United States does not want stability in the world, because stability means the status quo. The United States has continually lost what used to be the American empire. It has lost its trade and balance-of-payments surplus. It has lost its industrial dominance. It has lost its dollar financial dominance. It is now a big debtor. It has been losing almost everything. That is why the U.S. National Security Strategy said, in effect: we are no longer going to support the kind of unified world of equality, multipolarity, free trade and free investment that we supported back in 1945, when we had all the power, when we had most of the world’s gold, when we had the manufacturing and industrial power to help Europe survive. We do not have that anymore.

The only asset that the United States now has to cope with a changing world dynamic is the ability to hurt other countries. It can say: we can disrupt your trade. Trump can impose tariffs to stop your access to the American market. That, of course, will upset your exporters and cause chaos. But if you agree to America’s version of the world — if you agree not to trade with Russia, not to trade with Iran, not to permit Chinese investment in your country — if you obey us and become our political and economic satellites, then you can have access to the U.S. market. Otherwise we are going to disturb your situation.

Donald Trump has said again and again that if blocking trade from the Arab OPEC countries and from Iran creates a world depression, that will benefit the United States, because the United States, he says, is self-sufficient in oil. And right now the United States is making a killing from the rise in world oil prices. American oil and gas companies are selling low-priced American oil and gas at world prices, not at low U.S. prices. Their profits are going up, their stocks are going up, and they are able to benefit from all of this.

So for Trump, the United States wins when the rest of the world goes into crisis — just as happened in 1998 during the Asian currency crisis, when Asian currencies, apart from Malaysia which had capital controls, all declined, and American and international investors could swoop in and pick up Korean, Japanese and other Asian companies at much lower prices than before. The United States policy, as announced in its own strategy, is to create crisis abroad. And Trump has carried that to the logical extreme. We are pirates in the OPEC trade once it comes out of the Strait of Hormuz. We have grabbed the ship. We have confiscated the oil. We have taken it. We can do that. That is a situation that serves the United States.

Now, how on earth can there be any agreement with China on this? I think that by talking about Taiwan, China is saying: we are not going to try to talk about problems that obviously cannot be solved. If we make the centre of our discussion U.S. relations with Taiwan, then anything we discuss dovetails into that. That is their version of a diplomatic Strait of Hormuz.

Take the issue of rare earth exports. The Americans want China to begin selling rare earth exports again to the United States. China has said: we do not want to sell rare earth exports that can be made into armaments. It would be crazy for us to sell you yttrium, gallium and other elements for your military to make into F-35 airplanes, arms and missiles, to sell to Taiwan to attack China. 

This gets back to what Lenin joked: the capitalists are going to sell us the rope to hang them with. You can imagine what China is saying: we are not going to sell the United States the raw materials it needs to build arms and weapons to sell to its protégés such as Taiwan, to attack us militarily. This is our national defence strategy.

So by saying that Taiwan is the centre of any agreement that comes out of these meetings, China is saying that Taiwan shapes any agreement on international trade, international finance and almost anything else the United States would like to make a topic of discussion.

AA: Today military.com published an article that the Pentagon is rushing to buy 10,000 missiles because Iran has depleted U.S. stockpiles. It is striking that the United States is dependent on China for the manufacture of its weapons. But let me push you on a longer-running debate. I put this question to your colleague Professor Radhika Desai as well: was this war on Iran driven by some rationale of the deep state of the American empire, or of a sector of American capitalism? Or was it forced on America, against American interests, by Israel — was America duped by Netanyahu, as Professor Mearsheimer puts it? As you said, the American stock market has benefited from this war. In your reading, has there been strategising before this war, or is it, as Professor Desai put it, simply a manifestation of America losing its direction and declining rapidly?

MH: Yes, of course there has been strategising. I sat in on such strategising 50 years ago, in 1974, when I worked with Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute. We had repeated meetings with the White House, the State Department, the Treasury and many military officials, and they discussed exactly the strategy against Iran. At that time, I remember Herman Kahn saying: we have got to break Iran into five or more separate sections. The way to begin, he thought, was going to be Balochistan, to break it away. Now the United States is trying to work with the Kurds.

For the last hundred years, the United States has had one paramount umbrella strategy to control the world: to control the world’s oil. I have discussed this in many of the articles I have been writing recently on my website. Every country in the world needs oil and power to run its factories, heat its homes, make chemicals, petrochemicals and plastics, make fertilizer. If we can control the oil trade, then we have the power to hurt any country that does not obey us. We can use that as a lever. We do not have to go to military war with them. We can simply cut off their supply of oil, and that will force them to follow whatever American policy we want.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Project for the New American Century said, in effect, that the way to control oil was to prevent countries from buying oil from any country we do not control. That is why sanctions were imposed on Iran after the overthrow of the Shah and the rejection of America’s 1953 interference in Iranian politics to take control of the oil industry. That is why the United States destroyed Nord Stream and imposed sanctions to prevent people from buying oil from Russia. That is why the United States destroyed Libya, so that countries could not buy oil from Libya. That is precisely why George W. Bush waged the war against Iraq.

There is always a pretense. The pretense was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The fact is that what Iraq had was oil, and America wanted that oil. So it bombed and destroyed the Iraqi economy, and essentially brought in al-Qaeda and Wahhabi terrorists to support its strategy. The Americans then spread the fight to Syria to grab its oil supplies.

But all along, when they were outlining the countries they were going to conquer throughout the Near East and the Middle East to control Middle Eastern oil, the sequence ended with Iran. Iran was always the final objective. The United States realised it could conquer Libya, Iraq, Syria and other countries, and it could enforce support from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and the Arab countries, because all of these countries’ oil proceeds — in their government funds — were invested in the U.S. bond market and U.S. financial markets. So all along the purpose was to control world oil and be able to control the switch: turning off the electricity, the power, the lighting. It all required conquering Iran, recapturing Iran’s oil industry and reinstalling a military dictatorship — this time more vicious and more effective than the old Shah’s. This is a plan that has been 50 years in the making, refinement and elaboration.

AA:  But many analysts believe that even though such an attack on Iran would have been desirable for Washington, previous presidents avoided it because they thought it was impossible. George W. Bush, who was definitely one of the most warmongering presidents in the White House, refused to attack Iran. So did Donald Trump make a mistake, or do you believe he acted according to the rationale of America’s deep state?

MH: You remember that under George H. W. Bush there was the bloody Iraq war against Iran. A million Iranian soldiers died. The Americans provided the Iraqis with chemical warfare and other illegal means. So they already tried in the 1980s to conquer Iran. It did not work. Then George W. Bush and the rest of the deep state followed the plan and said: we cannot fight against Iran until we conquer Iraq and Syria and control the rest of the Middle East, so that we have our forces there. We have military bases in the Emirates, military bases in Saudi Arabia, military bases all around Iran, so that we can be in a position to conquer it.

Obviously some military strategists are more optimistic than others. Trump has around him all of the most optimistic neocons. These are the same neocons who were around Dick Cheney when he was vice president under George W. Bush. The same people have been there all along, and they are still there — the same pro-Israel Zionists who believe that the United States and Israel can make a condominium, where the United States uses Israel as its primary military base in the Near East, and uses the Israeli army as the enforcement force, now supplemented by Jolani’s jihadist al-Qaeda army in Syria, in partnership with Israel, to act as America’s client oligarchy and enforcers.

AA: In the last few weeks, you have had a very different narrative from most analysts. While everyone has been looking at missiles, drones and casualties, you have been telling a different story — and I do not think it has been fully registered, even inside Iran. So with your 50 years of work on the American financial system, can you tell our audience what Iran has actually accomplished? The headlines are all about missiles, ceasefire and casualties. But underneath, Iran has effectively closed the Strait, imposed tolls in Chinese renminbi, collapsed OPEC oil exports, brought Gulf monarchies to Washington asking for swap lines, sent gold flowing out of the United States at record rates, and made foreign central banks hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries for the first time since 1996. This is, in your own framework, the unwinding of the system you described in 1972. What exactly has Iran broken, and what has it achieved in these seven weeks of war?

MH: What Iran has achieved is saying: we will not surrender. It has realised that if it does not fight, the United States is going to do just what it said it would do. It is going to have regime change, as it tried to do when it recently killed Iranian leaders. It is going to take over the government. It is going to put in a client oligarchy, just like the Shah. And Iran is saying: we would rather fight than end up becoming a colony, a client dictatorship and a client oligarchy of the United States, which would take over all of our natural resources and oil for itself.

Iran realised that by itself it cannot defeat the United States and its allies in Europe and its allies in other countries such as Japan in the East. It needs the rest of the world to support it. How can it do this? Iran has said: if we cannot export our oil to Asia and to whatever markets we want, then there is not going to be any oil from the Arab OPEC countries or the Middle Eastern OPEC countries exported either. It is the job of other countries — China, Asian countries, Global South countries, even Europe — if you want free trade and access to the oil of this region, you have to include us as part of that oil region. You have to oppose the United States takeover of the Middle East. You have to support our drive to protect our own national security by driving out all American military bases in the Near East, so that we will no longer be threatened. You have to return the money that your banks have stolen from us illegally. You have to drop the sanctions on us.

If you want oil from us or from other countries, you have to permit us to survive. And if you are saying, well, we want oil, and it is okay if America takes Iran over and controls the oil — even if America is going to use this oil as a weapon against us to enforce our agreement with U.S. policy — then Iran says: if you do not care, you had better care, because the cost of not supporting our defence, our independence and our sovereignty is going to be a world depression as bad as the 1930s. Take your choice.

Iran is upping the ante to force the whole world to ask: do you want to permit America simply to grab Iran, to do to Iran what it has just done to Venezuela? To come in and simply grab the oil, and say that all Venezuelan oil exports are to be put into a bank account in Florida under the personal direction of Donald Trump? Trump has said that he wants to appoint the new leader of Iran after regime change. In other words, the Iranian people would have nothing. Iran is saying: if this is your idea of the world — if the rest of the world economy believes that Donald Trump and America should appoint the leaders of every country, and should be able to grab the oil, the mineral resources, the land, the public utilities and anything else they can grab — then quite frankly, to hell with you...

-CounterPunch

Did Xi Really Trade Iran for Taiwan? - CounterPunch.org

 

True Scale of Trump’s Secret Military Disaster Is Revealed

 

Donald Trump’s war with Iran has left dozens of U.S. airplanes damaged and destroyed, a new congressional report has revealed.  Casualties and equipment loss reports have been few and far between for a war that has cost the U.S. billions, with the Defense Department failing to publish its own comprehensive summary of the damage suffered during the fighting.

Several major incidents, such as the downing of twoF-15E Strike Eagle pilots over Iran, have garnered significant attention, while other incidents have flown more under the radar. Now the Congressional Research Service says the total number of lost or damaged aerial vehicles could be as high as 42.

The group serves as a nonpartisan think tank that provides information to Congress. It used DoD and CENTCOM statements, as well as news reports, to build a picture of the actual losses of military fixed- and rotary-wing, manned and unmanned aircraft.

It covered key incidents such as the downed Strike Eagle, which led to a high-stakes search and rescue mission in early April, as well as three more F-15E Strike Eagles that were shot down in a friendly fire incident over Kuwait.

In 1998, each one cost around $30 million, equivalent to around $65 million now. The U.S. also destroyed a pair of its own $114 million MC-130J Commando II special operations support aircraft while rescuing the pilots. The search also saw an HH-60W Jolly Green II search and rescue helicopter damaged by ground fire as it flew over Iran. They cost north of $40 million each.

A general-purpose F-35A Lightning II stealth fighter, thought to cost around $100 million, has also been damaged, and a $20 million A-10 Thunderbolt II used for close air support was destroyed. The report also includes the loss or damage of seven $70 million KC-135 Stratotankers, used as flying gas stations, and an E-3 Sentry AWACS airborne radar, the replacement of which the Wall Street Journal says will cost $700 million, and of which the U.S. has little more than a dozen.

There have also been losses of 24 $30 million hunter-killer MQ-9 Reaper drones, and one $240 million reconnaissance and surveillance MQ-4C Triton drone. The Triton drones are so expensive that only 20 have been produced for service.

In April, Pentagon officials told Congress that $25 billion had already been spent on the fighting, although Democratic leaders think the real number could be far higher.

On May 12, Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst said that the number had now gone up to $29 billion, saying, “A lot of that increase comes from having a refined estimate on repair or replacement costs for equipment.”

U.S. officials familiar with internal assessments told CBS News that the offensive’s true price tag to date is closer to $50 billion. During his testimony before lawmakers in April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth adopted a combative tone. “The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans,” he said.

As well as losses to aircraft, 13 service members have been killed in the fighting, six of whom were on board one of the Stratotankers which went down over friendly territory. More than 350 Americans are also thought to have been injured, amid a furor about not enough being done to protect troops in combat zones. A strike on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait on March 1 killed six American troops, including Master Sgt. Nicole Amor.

Survivors have questioned whether defenses against drones were sufficient to mitigate the danger, while a new interview with CBS News has also revealed that more medical supplies were requested in the weeks running up to the strike.

“This was a failure,” Maj. Stephen Ramsbottom told the network about Amor’s death. “She could have been saved. She fought the whole way and was trying to stay alive.”

“No plan is ever perfect, but accusations suggesting blatant disregard for the safety of our forces are unfounded and inaccurate,” Capt. Tim Hawkins of U.S. Central Command told the network. Meanwhile, 3,468 people are thought to have been killed in Iran, their ages ranging from eight months to 88 years, Iran’s Ministry of Health has said.

-Harry Thompson

The Daily Beast has contacted the Defense Department and CENTCOM for comment.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

 

When a president settles his own lawsuit to create a fund for allies, fundamental questions about justice arise

 

Thomas Hobbes took a very dim view of rebels and insurrectionists. He believed that insurrectionists relinquish their status as citizens the moment they seek to overthrow the government and should never be rewarded for doing so.

Hobbes, one of the finest political theorists of his time, said this in his great political treatise, “Leviathan,” published in 1651 during a civil war in England and Scotland. Hobbes would likely also take a dim view of a major development announced by the Trump administration on May 20, 2026.

The U.S. Department of Justice has established a US$1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” to be used, the AP reports, to “allow people who believe they were targeted for prosecution for political purposes, including by the Biden administration Justice Department, to apply for payouts.”

The fund, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, offers “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.” Critics immediately charged that it might be used to compensate people involved in – some even convicted for – the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Blanche has not ruled out that possibility.

The establishment of the fund is part of a settlement agreement, in response to which President Donald Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for damages stemming from the leak of his tax returns. Those leaks, the lawsuit alleged, “caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump.”

A DOJ press release indicates the fund will provide “formal apologies and monetary relief” to those who file claims and will cease processing claims “no later than” Dec. 1, 2028. It will be run by a five-person board appointed by the attorney general, and the president will also have the power to remove board members.

Whether or not Jan. 6 participants benefit, some believe that this situation creates an unavoidable appearance of self-dealing and favoritism. As a student of American law and political morality, I think there are important moral and constitutional issues implicated by the president’s suit against the IRS and the creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

Some of them are straightforward; others are less so.

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche testified about the compensation fund during a Senate Committee on May 19, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

An obvious question is: Should taxpayer funds be given to Trump allies, in a settlement reached by the Trump-controlled DOJ as compensation for a Trump family lawsuit?

As far back as ancient Greece, philosophers like Aristotle have worried about what happens when people are called on to make judgments in cases where they are involved. Aristotle thought that the natural instinct for self-preservation meant that they would always favor themselves. From that concern emerged what was then, and remains, an uncontroversial, bedrock moral principle.

In the Roman world, the Latin phrase “Nemo iudex in causa sua” meant “no one should be a judge in their own cause.” It recognized that anyone having a personal interest should not get to decide matters in which they are involved.

In the English-speaking world, Hobbes himself reiterated that phrase as he explained some of the advantages of living in an organized society, which could supply impartial judges to resolve disputes. And in 1787, James Madison wrote, “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.”

Commentators reacting to the Justice Department’s decision to establish an Anti-Weaponization Fund to settle the president’s claims against the IRS have drawn on these longstanding principles to criticize it, including how the DOJ, which is part of the executive branch controlled by Trump, negotiated with him to reach this settlement.

The conservative lawyer and activist Ed Whelan said, “There is a glaring conflict of interest with Trump being on both sides of the claim.” Whelan added, “It is outrageous that he and those answering to him would be deciding how the government responds to these extravagant claims.”

In testimony on May 19, 2026, before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Blanche offered a different view. He said the settlement fund was not unprecedented and likened it to a different fund, established by the Obama administration, to settle discrimination claims brought by Native American and Black farmers.

“It’s not limited to Republicans. It’s not limited to Democrats,” Blanche added. “It’s not limited to January 6th defendants. It’s limited only by the term weaponization.” Blanche promised that payments from the fund will be publicly disclosed.

Negotiating with himself:

In April, Kathleen Williams, the Florida federal judge who was presiding over Trump’s lawsuit, reframed the moral issue of self-dealing as a legal one. She questioned whether the case could go on, noting “President Trump’s own remarks about this matter acknowledge the unique dynamic of this litigation.”

The remarks she referenced occurred when the president talked about the lawsuit and the prospect of negotiating with himself. “And they do say that, you know, it’s never been a case like this. Donald Trump sues the United States of America. Donald Trump becomes president, and now Donald Trump has to settle the suit.”

Williams, the judge, wrote that “it is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy Article III’s case or controversy requirement.” That requirement means that a court can only rule when there is a real dispute before it.

That rule is designed to prevent so-called collusive lawsuits, in which “the parties are not actually in disagreement but are cooperating” to achieve a result. Judge Williams was scheduled to hear arguments on that question on May 20, 2026. But the settlement announcement was made two days before, and, in light of it, she dismissed the case.

Could the new settlement fund’s payments go to rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? 

Back to Hobbes:

Beyond the case and controversy question, the Justice Department’s actions may implicate constitutional issues. One is whether, under the constitutional separation of powers, the executive branch has the authority to create a victim compensation fund, or whether that authority rests with Congress.

Another is whether the fund violates the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prohibits the president from receiving any “Emolument from the United States” other than his salary. While the new fund may not make direct payments to Trump, he may benefit from payments to family members, business associates and others who will claim to have been victimized by the Biden administration, including people prosecuted and convicted of crimes committed on Jan. 6.

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, a former professor of constitutional law, also contends that what the Justice Department has done violates Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, part of which states: “neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Referring to the president, Raskin argues hypothetically, “So, to the extent that he wants to give a million dollars to each of 1,600 pardoned rioters and insurrectionists, we think that that’s an unconstitutional use of money.”

That section of the 14th Amendment was designed to ensure that Confederate rebels would not receive compensation for the value of their emancipated slaves. However, in Perry v. United States, a 1935 case, the Supreme Court stated that Section 4’s “language indicates a broader connotation” beyond its Civil War context.

It seems clear that courts will soon be asked to decide whether Raskin and other legal critics are right in their assertions of a host of legal problems with the Anti-Weaponization Fund. How they will do so remains to be seen. But, in a democracy, deciding whether the creation of the fund violates the moral maxim that no one can be a judge in his or her own cause ultimately will be up to the people.

- Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

-The Conversation

“FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing... Mr. Trump"

 

The Justice Department has granted Donald Trump, his family and businesses immunity from ongoing inquiries into their taxes, a potentially lucrative arrangement that could shield the president from significant financial liability. The provision, quietly inserted on Tuesday as a supplement to a remarkable deal that also created a $1.8 billion fund aimed at benefiting Mr. Trump’s allies, protects the president, his relatives and his businesses from pending audits and tax prosecutions.

The one-page document, signed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Mr. Trump, his family members and businesses.

The provision invited immediate criticism as tax experts raised the possibility that it was illegal. That the addendum to the deal was posted, without fanfare, on the department’s website belied its bare-knuckled audacity. It revealed the determination of Mr. Trump and his appointees to ram through maximalist measures with minimum outside scrutiny at a moment when they still have uncontested control of government.

The provision was the latest in a series of maneuvers this week that blurred the all-but-vanished boundary between official department business and the private interests of a president intent on using his power to extract financial gain from the federal government for himself and his allies.

A day earlier, Mr. Trump agreed to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. in exchange for the establishment of a fund for people he believes were wronged by federal investigations or prosecutions. Justice Department officials had in part defended the creation of the fund by pointing to the fact that Mr. Trump and his family members would not be paid by it.

But protection from audit could be quite financially beneficial for Mr. Trump, who has always said that there was no wrongdoing in his tax filings. In 2024, The New York Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.

It is unclear if that examination has concluded or if Mr. Trump, his family members or affiliated entities are under other audits. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s tax returns annually. Neither the Justice Department nor the I.R.S. responded to requests seeking comment. The top lawyer at the Treasury, Brian Morrissey, resigned on Monday after the Justice Department announced the deal with Mr. Trump.

Federal law prohibits the president, vice president and other executive officers from instructing the I.R.S. to start or stop specific audits. But that broad prohibition appears to include a carve out for the attorney general. Brandon DeBot, a senior attorney adviser at New York University’s Tax Law Center, said in a statement that the audit protection may still be illegal.

“The I.R.S. would need to act to make the release of claims effective, which could raise additional questions about whether there has been unlawful political interference in the audit process,” he said. “The settlement and general release of claims is a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system.”

The disclosure of the provision came as blowback appeared to be mounting over the creation of the fund, including from a few Republican lawmakers typically wary of incurring Mr. Trump’s wrath. Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, offered rare criticism of the president, saying he “was not a big fan” of the fund and adding that he did not see a “purpose” to it.

The Times reported last week that Mr. Trump’s talks with the Justice Department and the I.R.S. had included a measure calling on the I.R.S. to drop any audits of the president, his relatives or businesses. But that provision did not appear in the nine-page agreement laying out the terms to dismiss the lawsuit, which the department released on Monday.

In January, Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns during the president’s first term. The Trumps argued that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

Even as the original nine-page agreement offered scant details of how disbursement would work or who would be eligible, it said that claimants could seek money from the government for having faced reprisals for “personal, political and/or ideological reasons.” It stated that a five-person commission would consider claims based on criteria like damages a person had incurred or any time they spent in federal custody.

The main agreement also indicated that claims would largely be handed out in secrecy, requiring the fund managers to provide the attorney general on a quarterly basis with a “confidential written report” of those who received any money. The fund would stop processing claims no later than Dec. 1, 2028, just weeks before Mr. Trump is scheduled to leave office.

Frank Bisignano, the chief executive of the I.R.S., signed the original, nine-page deal. The provisions granting Mr. Trump immunity from existing audits, though, was signed only by Mr. Blanche, who has stepped up carrying out Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution against his enemies.

During an appearance before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday, Mr. Blanche defended the fund. At one point, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, repeatedly accused Mr. Blanche of behaving more like a Trump defense lawyer than an independent guardian of the public interest.

Mr. Blanche pushed back, asserting that he was “the acting attorney general.”

Mr. Van Hollen replied, “Mr. Attorney General, you are acting today like the president’s personal attorney, and that’s the whole problem.”

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. 

Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.

A version of this article appears in print on May 20, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: I.R.S. Ordered to Drop Audits Against Trump As Part of Payout Deal. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

 

"Democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it"

 

The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it. Are we today?

The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.

America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.

We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia. After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled.

Most of the countries in today’s world, however, have little use for democracy. Certainly, Putin, Xi, and the Middle Eastern sheiks view it as a threat to their wealth and power. Most of the smaller countries across the world are dominated by wealthy families (oligarchy) or violent warlords (autocracy); during the decades I did international relief work, I spent time in many of them.

And yet we always fought for democracy, even though we started out imperfectly. We helped create the United Nations, a democratic institution. We fought and died for European and Asian democracy. We encouraged democracy around the world through foreign aid programs like USAID and through pro-democracy advocacy operations like the Voice of America.

Until Trump.

Today, we have a president who holds democracy and democratic nations in disdain. He openly ridicules our democratic allies while sucking up to and praising autocrats and oligarchs. He gutted USAID, killed Voice of America, and even tried to overthrow our own democracy and will probably try again.

His racist, homophobic, and “poorly educated” followers agree with his disdain for democracy, openly embracing his despotic proclamations because he hates the same people they hate. Republican politicians who once defended American democracy cow before his threats of revenge when, like Senator Bill Cassidy, they don’t join him in embracing Putin and fail to nakedly cheer Trump’s violations of international law.

Foreign billionaires like the Fox “News” Murdochs and the Middle Eastern sheiks who’ve poured billions into Trump’s family are apparently happy to see our democracy under assault. About a hundred domestic billionaire families are enthusiastically willing to trade democracy and the free press it requires for tax cuts and deregulation.

So, what happens if they win? What happens if America finally, fully abandons the alliances we’ve built up over 250 years and instead embraces this autocratic new world order of Putin, Xi, and the corrupt billionaires who run most of the world’s autocracies?

If we formally pull out of NATO or simply, quietly continue the process of abandoning the alliance? If we leave Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and South Korea to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party? If we continue our embrace of “America’s coolest dictator” Bukele in El Salvador and Rodriguez in Venezuela and let their authoritarianism continue to metastasize across our hemisphere?

If the GOP and its billionaire owners manage to muzzle all but a token remnant of our once-vibrant free press, if ICE becomes Trump’s and Vance’s personal Schutzstaffel and throws open their “detention centers” to the “liberal” Americans they’ve already designated as “domestic terrorists”? If they continue to follow Putin’s system of tightly regulating who’s eligible to vote (while corrupting Democrats like Fetterman) so Republicans never lose?

What happens if they win?

Then the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted, from the days they opposed the American Revolution, to fighting against Lincoln, to “America First” billionaires trying to hire Smedley Butler to assassinate FDR, to now supporting Trump:

A world where democracy is weak.
Labor is powerless.
The press is controlled.
Religion is weaponized.
Elections are managed.
Fear keeps people obedient.
And billionaires rule without accountability.

That’s the oligarch’s endgame and has been for millennia. It’s why they bought off Sinema, Manchin, Golden, and Fetterman and are inserting themselves in elections across the nation. It’s why they’re buying our media. It’s why Republicans in Congress keep sending more and more of our taxpayer money to ICE while ignoring Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses from war crimes to emoluments violations to the open betrayal of our democratic allies.

Not “making America great.”
Not patriotism.
Not Christianity.
Not freedom.

Raw power for a small handful of morbidly rich men, enforced by propaganda, corruption, and violence, both committed by agents of the state (against Comey, James, Schiff et al, and soon to be directed against you and me) as well as J6 freelancers Trump is trying to pre-pay with $1.7 billion just in time for this fall’s election.

Roughly every 80 years, it seems, the battle to preserve democracy comes back around and confronts the generation then living. And here it is again. The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it. Now it’s our turn.

Help to keep up the fight!

-Thom Hartmann

The MAGA Supreme Court is Incompatible with Democracy

 

MAGA Supreme Court majority put a stake through the Voting Rights Act, at least for now, and unleashed a frenzy of chaotic redistricting in the South designed to erase 60 years of voting rights progress. The MAGA justices aggrandized power specifically delegated to Congress in the 14^th Amendment (“The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article”) and the 15^th Amendment (“The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”) to themselves, dismissing Congress’s clear intent to prohibit redistricting that has the effect of diluting minority voting power.

Carolyn Shapiro exposed the power grab: Congress’ clear command in the 1982 VRA amendments that it was protecting minority voters from redistricting that had the effect of reducing their voting power relative to other voters should mean that a state’s desire to advantage one party over another is irrelevant to Section 2 liability. … [I]it essentially incorporates the law of unconstitutional intentional discrimination into Section 2 – precisely what Congress was trying to avoid. But Callais also all but holds that Congress’ power under the 15th Amendment is limited to restricting discriminatory intent, not discriminatory effects.

The Voting Rights Act antagonists did not have the nerve to strike down the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional. The VRA therefore remains nominally on the books but of virtually no value. (We will see how seriously the MAGA majority takes Callais’s assurance that intentional discrimination can still be prohibited; after all, that is precisely what the three-judge panel found in striking down Alabama’s map.) In sidelining Congress and claiming authority to dictate remedies needed to fulfill the promise of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, the Callais majority sparked a massive movement in defense of voting rights, which was kicked off…

The MAGA justices’ reactionary judicial activism is rooted in an insidious sleight of hand. Callais is just their latest willful misreading of the post-Civil War amendments, which never sought to outlaw the race-conscious remedies needed to guarantee the ex-enslaved full citizenship. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson documented in her pristine originalist interpretation, the canard of a “colorblind society” does not derive from the intent, legislative history, or text; it is an invention that comes from deliberately rewriting the 14^th and 15^th Amendments and the VRA in service of white Republican power.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. takes umbrage at the notion the court has become “political.” Gosh, where would people get that idea? Steve Vladeck explained:

[T]he Court inserted itself into the midterm cycle—and set off this race to the bottom—knowingly (if not deliberately), both in what it ruled in Callais and in its willingness to issue the judgment immediately. That latter development was an unmissable signal that it was not averse to having this exact kind of chaos unfold on the ground—a point Justice Jackson made explicitly in her dissent from last Monday’s order. In her words, “as always, the Court has a choice.” …

This, to me, is the key point: whatever one thinks of the ruling in Callais, the Court chose this chaos.. .. Worse than that, all of these developments rather fatally undermine what I’d always understood to be the animating purpose of the so-called “Purcell principle”—which makes sense only as a strong norm against federal judicial intervention in the middle of election cycles. The Court’s own interventions are now wreaking havoc—and a majority of the justices either don’t think it’s their fault, or don’t care that it is.

Having discarded any pretense of political neutrality or consistency, MAGA justices should prepare to reap the whirlwind. They should anticipate that a backlash against Jim Crow will seek to end judicial intrusion into partisan politics and policy matters (e.g., commandeering voting rights remedies, superseding administrative rules with nebulous doctrines such as the Major Questions doctrine) and to re-assert the authority of the elected branches of government.

Democrats should be candid and uncompromising about their plans. An unhinged court, beginning with Shelby County, has exceeded the Plessy court in cementing white supremacy. Proposals to expand seats on the court are not simply designed to match the number of federal circuits; imposing term limits is not merely intended to prevent infirmed justices from lingering on the court. Democrats are prepared to do these things and potentially curtail the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction because the court has become a rogue threat to democracy. That message was on display in a demonstration of grassroots political power on Saturday: Democracy belongs to the people, not to right-wing justices putting their thumbs on the scale for Republicans.

Dramatic reform measures would not be necessary if the MAGA justices had not willfully misinterpreted post-Civil War amendments or played fast and loose with the Purcell doctrine. Had MAGA justices not trashed stare decisis to achieve partisan aims, manipulated the shadow docket to disguise executive power grabs, and brazenly dispensed with any pretense of partisan neutrality, serious judicial reform would not be essential.

Saturday’s Day of Action gave us a preview of the fierce political backlash against Jim Crow that can check judicial tyranny. Democracy defenders must turn out in overwhelming numbers but also apply a litmus test for every candidate for federal office: Will you rein in partisan judicial hacks who made hash of separation of powers and endangered multi-racial democracy?

Democrats will not have the opportunity to control Congress and the presidency until 2029. Nevertheless, they must start now to focus voters’ attention, as they did on Saturday, on MAGA justices’ quest to displace the voters’ elected representatives (i.e., overriding the VRA’s intent) in service of Jim Crow. MAGA justices delegitimized the Supreme Court; it’s up to the voters, through the elected branches, to end their foray into judicial imperialism that threatens multi-racial democracy.

Arrogant judicial partisans steeped in myths about the 14^th and 15^th Amendments have revealed their hostility to pluralistic democracy. If voters want their democracy back, they will have to elect a Congress and president willing to reassert popular sovereignty essential to our constitutional order. Judging from the democratic fervor on Saturday, voters appear up to the task.

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Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now

 

Records show Trump touted Palantir on Truth Social after buying the company’s stock

Donald Trump scooped up shares of artificial intelligence software maker Palantir weeks before he famously lauded the stock, with its ticker symbol, on his social media platform Truth Social, according to records released this week by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

The records show thousands of transactions during the first quarter totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, with each trade listed as a price range.

During the first three months of the year, Trump purchased between $247,008 and $630,000 worth of stock in the now Miami-based AI company, the documents show. In March alone, Trump made at least seven purchases of Palantir totaling as much as $530,000.

The following month, Trump praised Palantir on Truth Social as shares suffered their worst week in over a year. That came as the software selloff accelerated amid the Iran war and the company caught the ire of famed short-seller Michael Burry.

“Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment,” Trump wrote on the social media platform at the time. “Just ask our enemies!!!”

The company’s tools have reportedly been used to identify targets in Iran. Several transactions were denoted as “unsolicited,” indicating that the move wasn’t done by recommendation of a broker or financial advisor.

“Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions. Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions,” a Trump Organization spokesperson said in a statement.

Trump, his family and the Trump organization don’t play a “role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments,” they added. “They receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input regarding investment decisions or portfolio management of any kind,” the spokesperson said.

White House spokesman David Ingle said the president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children and, “There are no conflicts of interest.” Palantir did not respond to a request for comment. The defense tech company is among a batch of such firms currying favor with the president during his second stint in the White House, as Trump accelerates the military’s push for modernization.

-CNBC

For violation of the Emoluments Clause: glen brown: "No president in American history has profited off the presidency the way Donald Trump has, and it’s not close"