The $1.776 Billion Loyalty Test

Trump sued his own administration and settled with himself for $1.776 billion. The fund pays pardoned January 6 rioters. Senate Republicans are in open revolt. Kelly Ayotte and John E. Sununu have said nothing. The Cornyn precedent is two days old. Silence is a position.

On May 18, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a $1.776 billion settlement of a lawsuit President Donald Trump filed earlier this year. The lawsuit was Trump v. Internal Revenue Service. The plaintiff was the president in his personal capacity. The defendants were the IRS and the Treasury Department — both agencies of the administration Trump himself runs. The president sued his own government for $10 billion. His own Justice Department settled with him for $1.776 billion. He was, structurally, the plaintiff, the defendant, and the arbitrator.

The settlement money does not go to Trump personally. It funds what the administration calls the “anti-weaponization fund.” The DOJ says the fund will compensate “victims of lawfare and weaponization” by previous Justice Departments. The named victims-in-waiting include MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, fake-elector architect John Eastman, and the attorney who represents roughly 400 January 6 defendants. The fund’s terms, per a lawsuit filed against it, restrict eligibility to people who claim mistreatment by “Democrat” administrations.

None of this passed Congress. There was no appropriation. The money moves from the Treasury to the DOJ to the beneficiaries because the president sued himself, settled with himself, and authorized the disbursement himself. New Hampshire’s Republican governor has not said a word. Her party’s leading Senate candidate has not said a word. Granite State taxpayers are paying for it anyway.

The Number Is the Tell

The fund is $1.776 billion. Not $1.7 billion. Not $1.8 billion. The DOJ chose the figure precisely, and the symbolism is the point. The administration is selling a slush fund for pardoned insurrectionists as a patriotic restoration project, and the number on the check is the founding year.

That choice tells you what the fund is for. It is not a remedy for prosecutorial overreach. A remedy for prosecutorial overreach would be tied to documented harms and overseen by a court. This fund is tied to a year on a flag.

It is also, on its face, unconstitutional. The Constitution’s Appropriations Clause is clear: no money shall be drawn from the Treasury except by appropriations made by law. Congress did not appropriate this money. The Society for the Rule of Law Institute — an organization run by veterans of past Republican administrations — has called the arrangement a “wealth transfer from American taxpayers” to the president’s political allies. Ninety-three members of Congress have filed an amicus brief raising the Article I issue. Two federal lawsuits are already pending. The president of the United States cannot constitutionally sue himself, settle with himself, and pay his political supporters with money Congress never approved. The administration is doing it anyway.

What the Senate Republicans Said

The legal arguments are running on a slow track. The political ones are not. On Thursday, May 21, Blanche flew to the Capitol to defend the fund to a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans. He brought a one-page memo. The meeting did not go the way the administration hoped. Within hours, Senate Majority Leader John Thune punted the GOP’s $72 billion ICE and Border Patrol funding bill to June — blowing past Trump’s own June 1 deadline — rather than allow Democratic amendments to force Republican senators to take recorded votes on the fund.

Then the named statements started landing.

Thune said he had not been consulted on the program in advance. He said it “would have been nice” if he had. He also said it was “water under the bridge,” which is what a majority leader says when his conference is breaking in public. The conference broke in public anyway.

What Ayotte Didn’t Say

Gov. Kelly Ayotte spent the week the fund was announced doing other things. She has made no public statement on it. Her office has not responded to questions about it from national outlets. The state’s former U.S. senator, former state attorney general, and current chief executive — a woman who has run on rule-of-law credentials her entire career — has chosen to treat the largest unappropriated Treasury disbursement in recent memory as if it is not happening in her party’s name.

The political logic of the silence is easy to read. Ayotte endorsed Trump in 2024 after declining to in 2016. She owes the MAGA wing her general election margin. She also has to govern a state where Emerson College polling in late March found 59 percent of New Hampshire voters disapprove of the president, against 39 percent who approve. Independents in the same poll disapproved of Ayotte by a narrow margin even before this story broke. A direct statement against the fund irritates the White House. A direct statement defending it irritates a 59-point disapproval majority. Silence is the compromise.

Silence is also a position. The governor of New Hampshire is, in this moment, neither defending the constitutional principle that money cannot leave the Treasury without Congress nor objecting to a slush fund for pardoned January 6 rioters. She is hoping the story passes. It will not. The lawsuits are filed. The Senate vote is coming in June. New Hampshire’s share of the federal tax base — the working Granite Staters and businesses that pay into the Treasury every quarter — is funding this disbursement whether Ayotte comments on it or not. The longer she waits to comment, the worse the eventual answer looks.

The Cornyn Precedent

The reason every Senate Republican is reading the room before opening their mouth is what happened in Texas two days ago. On May 26, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican Senate runoff. Trump endorsed Paxton on May 19, one week before the vote. Cornyn had served in the Senate since 2002. He was the former whip and a fixture of the conference. He is now out of a job because the president decided he was insufficiently loyal.

This was not the only one. On May 16, Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow knocked Sen. Bill Cassidy out of the Louisiana primary entirely. Cassidy had voted to convict Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial. He finished third. On May 19, Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein defeated Rep. Thomas Massie in the Kentucky primary. Massie had spent the year criticizing the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. He is out too.

Three sitting Republican incumbents lost their primaries in ten days, each to a Trump-endorsed challenger, each for the same reason: insufficient loyalty. The next Republican who breaks publicly with the $1.776 billion fund knows what that break costs.

Sununu’s Trap

John E. Sununu got Trump’s endorsement on February 1. The endorsement called him an “America First Patriot” and gave him a “complete and total endorsement.” Sununu spent 2024 calling Trump “a loser” in an op-ed supporting Nikki Haley. The endorsement happened anyway because Senate Republicans wanted Sununu in the race and Trump wanted to flip the seat. The endorsement is conditional. Every Trump endorsement is conditional. Cornyn’s was too.

Sununu has said nothing about the fund. Neither has Scott Brown, who is running to Sununu’s right at 19 percent in the most recent Emerson primary numbers, against Sununu’s 48. Brown is hoping for exactly the kind of opening Cornyn just opened — a moment of perceived disloyalty that lets Trump rescind an endorsement and hand it to the more aggressive candidate. If Sununu speaks against the fund, that moment arrives. If he speaks for the fund, he hands Chris Pappas the general election. The trap is constructed. The candidate is in it.

Pappas has been ranked the most bipartisan Democrat in Congress. He leads Sununu by an average of 3.7 points in the RealClearPolling aggregate and leads both Sununu and Brown in the April UNH Survey Center poll. He has stayed mostly quiet on the fund, but the math is simple: every day Sununu does not speak is a day Pappas can run an ad asking why. The ad writes itself.

Generational Malpractice

The structural argument against the anti-weaponization fund is not partisan. It is generational.

The federal taxpayers funding this slush fund — a category that includes every working Granite Stater — will pay for it twice. They pay once in the direct disbursement to the fund’s beneficiaries. They pay again, for decades, in the Treasury debt service that funds federal spending in general. A $1.776 billion outlay rolls forward through the budget for the working lives of the people writing the check. The 22-year-old in Laconia who pays federal income tax this year is paying for Lindell’s lost MyPillow sales until he is 50.

That is the small cost. The large cost is the precedent. Once a sitting president can sue an agency of his own administration, settle the suit with himself, and direct $1.776 billion of Treasury money to a fund for his political supporters without a congressional appropriation, that mechanism is permanently available. Every future president will have it. Every future president will be expected to use it. The next administration of either party that wants to reward its constituency now has a roadmap and a precedent. The precedent did not exist before May 18. It will outlast every senator who is silent about it this week.

This is the central argument of Generational Malpractice: policy failures compound across generations, transferring costs from the people who make them to the people who inherit them. The fund is that argument in compressed form. The president, the attorney general, and the senators who will eventually vote on it are not paying the long-term cost. It falls on the generation arriving at adulthood with the mechanism already in place.

Ayotte’s silence is institutional malpractice. The governor of a state has a structural obligation to defend the constitutional order that creates her office. When that order is being looted by her own party’s president, refusing to comment is not neutrality. It is a transfer of cost downward — political cost to her successors, financial cost to the next generation of New Hampshire taxpayers.

The Bill Comes Due

The fund will face the lawsuits. Some will succeed. The Article I argument is strong, the Society for the Rule of Law brief is detailed, and at least one federal judge will eventually rule that the executive branch cannot disburse $1.776 billion from the Treasury without an appropriation. The appeal will take years.

The structural damage outlasts the legal outcome. The administration has now demonstrated that it can announce a slush fund, weather Senate Republican criticism, blow past its own deadlines, and continue as if the constitutional objection is a PR problem rather than a binding limit on executive power. The next time it wants to do this, it will know the playbook.

Kelly Ayotte had a choice this week and she made it. John E. Sununu had a choice this week and he made it. Scott Brown made his by default. Pappas is waiting. New Hampshire voters will get to make theirs in November. The candidates who treated a $1.776 billion DOJ slush fund for pardoned January 6 rioters as too politically inconvenient to discuss will be asked, at some point between now and then, what they were doing the week of May 21. The answer will be: nothing.

Nothing is a position.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice.