The New Republic

10/22/2025

This is underscored by the jarring news that Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him $230 million in compensation related to various federal actions against him. As The New York Times reports, Trump submitted claims in 2023 and 2024 seeking “damages” stemming from the investigation into Russian interference in 2016 and his prosecution for stealing classified documents at the end of his first term.

Now that Trump is president again, he is still demanding those payments, sources told the Times. And one of the officials who would decide the matter is Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—one of Trump’s former personal attorneys.

Ethics experts point out that Trump now appears in a position to command his subordinates to hand him $230 million in taxpayer money. As the Times delicately put it, Trump expects this to happen.

But it gets even worse.

In an interview, Representative Jamie Raskin—who is investigating this as ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee—said his staff’s research indicates that these payments can probably be made confidentially at first, with no immediate public disclosure.

As writer John Ganz points out, this sort of corruption is foundational to MAGA politics. Whether it’s Trump selling favors to kleptocratic allies abroad, or ICE agents getting handed newly created government jobs by the thousands to arrest nonviolent day laborers on real worksites, or Trump pardoning 1,500 of his insurrectionist followers in exchange for them serving as MAGA’s paramilitary street-violence wing, everything is subject to buying and selling. Meanwhile, explains Don Moynihan, Trump is simultaneously gutting internal executive branch oversight. For MAGA, all this is a positive.

Enter Trump’s reinvention of the presidency as a Bribe Delivery System. His bad-faith threats toward law firms and universities have invited them to hand over huge sums toward causes Trump likes. His frivolous lawsuits against media companies give their corporate overlords a way to effectively bribe him—with payments to his “presidential library”—to ensure government approval for other business. And any officials who might be legally vulnerable after carrying out Trump’s orders have put themselves in a position of subjugation where displeasing him might risk losing his protection later.

It doesn’t matter where this money goes in the end. These are still functionally extortion payments, or tribute payments, being directed in accordance with Trump’s commands—payments that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. But feeding this BDS is now the cost of doing business—or perhaps even surviving at all—in Trump’s America.