President Donald Trump Sues the American Government for $10 Billion

Back a few weeks ago I’d seen a ridiculous joke circulating about President Donald Trump. As an energetic former real-estate developer, he’d supposedly dispatched bulldozers to suddenly knock down our White House as part of a new construction project.

But then the next morning I was shocked to discover that the story was absolutely true. Trump had indeed demolished the history-laden 1902 East Wing, home to generations of First Ladies, doing so without any advance notice or public discussion.

A month later, I’d seen an equally ridiculous satire that Trump had declared himself “the Acting President of Venezuela,” publicly assuming that role after his Delta Force commandoes had successfully kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the president of that oil-rich Latin American country. The Devil’s Ches... Talbot, David Best Price: $4.05 Buy New $8.05 (as of 07:00 UTC - Details)

But once again, that ridiculous joke turned out to be entirely true.

Given those two incidents and some others, I’d resolved that I would never again dismiss as a joke anything I heard about the activities of our 47th chief executive, no matter how outlandish it might seem.

That new policy served me in good stead when I heard that America’s president was suing his own government for $10 billion. I thought that the story might possibly be true, and sure enough it was.

Under normal circumstances I’d think something like that would have generated banner-headlines across all our media outlets. But given so many other dramatic recent events, it seemed to have gotten only limited public attention, being buried on the inside pages and receiving similarly light coverage in the social media ecosphere that has largely replaced our mainstream media outlets as sources of information.

But the comprehensive article in the Wall Street Journal laid out some of the considerable peculiarities of this case. These were made clear in both the title—“Trump Lawsuit Against IRS Puts Him on Both Sides of the Same Case”—and the subtitle: “The president is the plaintiff, but he also oversees the people who could decide on a payout.”

WASHINGTON—President Trump’s lawsuit against the government that he runs presents a mind-bending minefield of conflicts that could end with the president’s appointees approving a federal payout to him.

Trump is simultaneously supervising the private attorneys demanding at least $10 billion in damages over the past disclosure of his tax records, while also overseeing the senior Justice Department attorneys with authority to settle the case and authorize a payment.

The unusual dynamics are intensified by Trump’s expansive view of executive authority and his history of leveraging the presidency’s unique powers to secure settlements from private parties, said Peter Keisler, who served as acting attorney general in the George W. Bush administration.

“This creates the risk of the most collusive lawsuit of all time, because it is ultimately the president suing a defendant whom he says has to do whatever he directs,” Keisler said.

Trump, two of his sons and his businesses sued the government in federal court in Miami on Thursday, arguing that they were harmed when former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn illegally disclosed their tax information to the New York Times and ProPublica in 2019 and 2020…

The extraordinary lawsuit puts Trump on both sides of the same courtroom. He is the plaintiff in his personal capacity, seeking damages for an illegal action that made him a crime victim. But he’s also the ultimate boss of the defense attorneys in an administration that declared that federal lawyers cannot take legal positions contrary to the opinion of the president or attorney general.

Perhaps I’m mistaken but I’ve never heard of any previous case of a democratically-elected national leader suing his own government in such a way, nor for that matter any reigning monarch nor dictator.

A few weeks before that lawsuit was announced, Trump had sat down for a wide-ranging two-hour interview with four New York Times reporters, and he was extremely bold in his public assertions of his own totally unlimited power and authority.

And he said that he did not feel constrained by any international laws, norms, checks or balances.

Asked by my colleagues if there were any limits on his ability to use American military might, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

• The Trump Doctrine: “They Have It. We Want It. We Take It.”
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 12, 2026 • 7,200 Words

Those sorts of statements struck me as what Louis XIV might have said, or perhaps some of the more arrogant Czars of the Russian Empire.

Although probably apocryphal, the most famous phrase attributed to that former figure, who exemplified absolute, divine monarchy, was L’État, c’est moi—“I am the State”—and Trump’s remarks immediately brought that phrase to my mind. But although the French Sun-King did many remarkable things during a 72-year-reign that stretched into both the 17th and 18th centuries, I don’t recall that he ever sued himself in such a way. So we really do live in extraordinary times.

Given that our official national debt is fast approaching $40 trillion, growing by a couple of trillion every year, the $10 billion that Trump is demanding is obviously just a pittance, an insignificant, trifling amount. Perhaps this was one of the reasons that the story received relatively little attention.

Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that Trump will receive that full payout. After all, our president often brags of his brilliance in handling business deals. So it would surely make sense for President Donald Trump to appoint Negotiator Donald Trump to handle the settlement talks with Plaintiff Donald Trump, perhaps effectively bargaining down the latter into accepting a much smaller payout such as $7 billion. And if that happened, Trump could then reasonably boast that he had saved our long-suffering American taxpayers billions of dollars.

Indeed, since Trump and his avid supporters have sometimes suggested that he might run for a third term, this notable financial success might be one of the major campaign issues.

Admittedly, the Twenty-Second Amendment might pose an obstacle to such a 2028 campaign. But as I noted last week, Trump and his administration have already successfully defanged the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments, with the Sixth Amendment also facing serious risk. And while these early component parts of our famed Bill of Rights are reasonably well-known, I doubt that even three Americans in one hundred could explain what the Twenty-Second Amendment did. So Trump could easily issue an executive order repealing that 1951 statute, and almost no one would know or care that it no longer existed.

The Alt-Right movement had been enthusiastic supporters of Trump from the 2015 launch of his original presidential campaign, and those right-wing activists had regularly used the term “Clown World” to ridicule and denounce the absurdities of American society and the rest of the West. The Alt-Right disappeared years ago and I’ve only very rarely seen any recent use of that particular pejorative phrase, but it’s difficult to imagine any better example of our own unfortunate country’s current predicament.

The same day that the WSJ first broke the story of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against his own government, the front-page of that same newspaper had featured a different story, much longer at nearly 4,000 words but involving a far smaller financial payment to the Trump family. A team of four journalists had revealed that top oil sheikhs had secretly bought a large stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, and the article opened with the following revelatory paragraphs:

Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities.

The deal with World Liberty Financial, which hasn’t previously been reported, was signed by Eric Trump, the president’s son. At least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a World Liberty co-founder who weeks earlier had been named U.S. envoy to the Middle East, the documents said.

The investment was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Abu Dhabi royal who has been pushing the U.S. for access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips, according to people familiar with the matter. Tahnoon—sometimes referred to as the “spy sheikh”—is brother to the United Arab Emirates’ president, the government’s national security adviser, as well as the leader of the oil-rich country’s largest wealth fund. He oversees a more than $1.3 trillion empire funded by his personal fortune and state money that spans from fish farms to AI to surveillance, making him one of the most powerful single investors in the world.

The deal marked something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.

Under the Biden administration, Tahnoon’s efforts to get AI hardware had been largely stymied over fears that the sensitive technology could be diverted to China. Of particular concern was one of Tahnoon’s own companies, the AI firm G42, which had stoked alarm among intelligence officials and lawmakers over its close ties to the sanctioned tech giant Huawei and other Chinese firms. The company said it severed ties with China in late 2023, but concerns persisted.

Trump’s election reopened the door for him. In the months that followed, Tahnoon met multiple times with Trump, Witkoff and other U.S. officials, including in a March visit to the White House where the sheikh told officials he was eager to work with the U.S. on AI and other issues, according to people familiar with the matter.

Two months after the March meeting, the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters. The framework agreement called for roughly one-fifth of the chips to go to G42, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

The agreement was widely viewed as a coup for the emirate’s ruling family, overcoming longstanding U.S. national security concerns and allowing the country to compete with the most powerful economies in the world at the cutting edge of AI advances.

Thus, soon after top UAE sheikhs invested hundreds of millions of dollars in that Trump family company, the Trump Administration completely reversed our country’s existing national security policy and authorized the sale of 500,000 top AI microchips to a UAE enterprise. This obviously raised all sorts of serious questions.

Those questions become even more serious when the Journal writers went on to explain:

At the time of the investment, World Liberty had no products.

Surely investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a company with no products seems unlikely to have been done for purely economic reasons. Furthermore, as part of that investment, the leading UAE lobbyists for that huge microchip sale had actually joined the board of the Trump family company.

The microchip purchaser had close ties to China and these had been the national security grounds under which the American government had previously blocked that sale. Ironically enough, exactly those Chinese-affiliated individuals, one of whom was Chinese by birth, had then actually joined the leadership of the Trump company.

The Journal article went on to describe some of the worrisome implications of this secret transaction: The Secret Team: The C... L. Fletcher Prouty Best Price: $11.58 Buy New $11.87 (as of 06:10 UTC - Details)

Legal experts said the deal with Aryam could violate the emoluments clause and said the proximity of the country’s chip agreement to the World Liberty deal posed a significant conflict of interest.

The provision is intended to prevent any government official from being “in the pocket of a foreign government,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor and former ethics lawyer for the city of Washington, D.C. “This sure looks like a violation of the foreign emoluments clause, and more to the point, it looks like a bribe.”

The transaction, she said, “should be a five-alarm fire about the federal government being for sale.”

Trump’s conflicts of interest have so dwarfed those of his predecessors that “it’s like complaining about kayaks when B52s are flying overhead,” said Ty Cobb, who served as a top White House lawyer in Trump’s first administration. “My advice as an ethics lawyer would have been clear: You don’t do business deals with the families of the leaders of foreign countries. It taints American foreign policy.”

In 2020, the Biden Administration had used national security issues to impose serious restrictions on the sale of cutting-edge AI microchips to China. My own view at the time had been that this policy was entirely wrong-headed, and nothing since then has changed my perspective.

But the Trump Administration has been at least as hawkish towards China as was the Biden Administration, and they have naturally maintained or even extended all those technological restrictions. So their sudden willingness to reverse that policy and make a special exception so soon after hundreds of millions of dollars were given to a Trump family company seems a very doubtful way of running a serious country.

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