Donald Trump Is Stealing Your Money

There are many ways that Donald Trump is currently making your life worse, not to mention generally waging war on the concept of "the future": accelerating the death of the biosphere, doing his best to eliminate the federal government and university as sites of middle-class employment, driving up the price of energy now and food in the immediate future thanks to the idiotic war with Iran he's losing alongside his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu (who, if you are Palestinian, Lebanese, or Iranian, is trying to kill your family with Trump's help), and making it impossible for you to vote against any of this. He is also straight-up stealing your money to redirect it to the freaks and sex offenders who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In January, Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit against Trump's own Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, demanding $10 billion in damages. The suit stemmed from the case of Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who pleaded guilty in 2023 to leaking the tax returns of Trump and several billionaires to the New York Times and ProPublica in 2019 and 2020. In a more sensible world, the release of those documents should have prompted national elected officials to publicly reckon with the fact that the government and the Americans they supposedly represent were being cheated out of billions of dollars, but instead, Littlejohn faced harsh prosecution. He was sentenced to five years in prison in Jan. 2024.

However, even at the time, Trump and his organization made a show of protesting the sentencing. In their view, Littlejohn had not suffered enough and Trump had not been made sufficiently whole for the revelation of information that presidents and presidential nominees customarily have chosen to make public of their own volition since the early 1970s. Trump attorney Alina Habba made a big public stink outside of Littlejohn's sentencing hearing. "A government agency and its contractors and employees have no business stealing the personal data of American citizens in reckless disregard, let alone the then-sitting president," she said. "This likely cost my client thousands of votes and was all by design."