The Ballroom Tour

While the president explained drone ports, his DOJ posted permanent IRS immunity, Jan. 6 rioters did per-capita math, and a terrorism prosecutor raided a screen-printing shop in Oxnard.

Good morning! On Tuesday morning, the President of the United States stood in front of a construction site on the White House grounds and explained, to assembled journalists, that the building behind him was simultaneously a ballroom, a drone port, a sniper platform, a missile shield, and a gift to the American people. The roof is dead flat. The glass is four inches thick and yet “you can see through it as though it didn’t exist.” The columns go directly to the roof. Everything is knit together. “There will never be another building like this built that I can tell.” He held up a rendering and noted that it made him look thin. “You don’t have to look at my waist,” he told the press corps. “You can look at this.” It is the Death Star with catering.

While this was happening, the Department of Justice quietly posted a one-page document to its website.

The document, signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the man Senator Jack Reed called the president’s consigliere to his face at a Senate hearing the same morning, declared that the federal government was, and here the document went to all caps, FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from pursuing any pending tax claims against the president, his family, or his businesses.

This was the second act of a two-day maneuver. On Monday, Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for the creation of a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for people he believes were wrongly targeted by federal investigations or prosecutions. Trump, characteristically, told reporters he didn’t know much about it, it was put in place, he said, to reimburse people “that were horribly treated.” Justice Department officials had defended the fund, in part, by noting that Trump and his family would not personally receive any of its money. What they did not mention on Monday, and posted without fanfare on Tuesday, while the president was explaining drone ports to journalists, was the other part of the arrangement: permanent immunity from an IRS audit that, had it gone badly, could have cost the president more than $100 million.

In plain English: Trump traded away a lawsuit he controlled, helped create a fund for his allies, and received permanent relief from a tax claim that had followed him for fifteen years. The audit dated back to a $72.9 million tax refund Trump claimed and received beginning around 2010, covering every dollar of federal income tax he’d paid during his peak Apprentice years. The IRS argued he wrote off losses on his Chicago tower twice. The liability had been compounding for fifteen years. It is now, per a one-page document posted to a government website while the press was looking at drone renderings, gone.

Trump’s own hand-picked, Clarence Thomas-clerked, party-line-confirmed Treasury general counsel, Brian Morrissey, resigned the same day rather than administer the fund. He thanked the president in his resignation letter and left anyway. Todd Blanche told reporters he had no idea why.

The $1.8 billion fund, meanwhile, is open for claims, disbursements confidential, commission appointed by Blanche, processing to close in late 2028 just weeks before Trump leaves office. At a Senate hearing Tuesday, Blanche declined to rule out payments to January 6th rioters, including those convicted of assaulting police. By Tuesday evening, pardoned rioters were already doing the per-capita math. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader who drew a 22-year seditious conspiracy sentence before his pardon, called it “a good direction.” One rioter noted that even if they each received $1.125 million, that was, by Trump’s own stated standard, citing the Marla Maples divorce, not a lot of money.

We called this one earlier, incidentally. When the fund was announced, we noted the logical endpoint: that James Comey, whom Trump has indicted twice, technically qualifies. By Tuesday, Comey was on CNN saying as much. When the architecture of a grift is predictable enough that a newsletter gets there before the former FBI director thinks to say it on television, the grift is not complicated; it is just so brazen.

In Oxnard, California, more than 100 federal agents arrived at 3am at the home of Leonardo Martinez, who runs VC Defensa, a volunteer organization that operates an ICE-watch hotline, drives citizen children across the border to reach their deported parents, and connects immigrant families with groceries, childcare, and legal resources. The agents broke down the door. Martinez’s mother was woken by a blaring megaphone. A 16-year-old was handcuffed while a toddler watched. The warrant authorized agents to seize evidence of conspiracy to impede federal officers. What they took: a USB drive, two knives, a phone, skateboards, and a riot shield. No arrests were made. The prosecutor assigned to the case works in the terrorism and export crimes unit.

The administration that cannot find a legal basis to audit its own president dispatched a terrorism prosecutor and a hundred agents to a screen-printing shop in Oxnard before dawn.

In Kentucky, Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman who objected to the Iran war on constitutional grounds, pushed for the Epstein files, and voted against the debt-expanding Big Beautiful Bill, lost his seat to a political novice backed by $33 million in PAC money from Paul Singer, John Paulson, Miriam Adelson, and AIPAC. “Can they buy a seat for a warm body in Kentucky?” Massie asked before the votes were counted. Sadly, they could. Pete Hegseth campaigned there in the final days, arguing that in the middle of a fight you don’t weaken your own side. The fight in question is a war authorized by no one in Congress, which is the thing Massie objected to. It was not an entirely dark night at the polls, however. Here on the Oregon coast, MAGA-aligned candidates for county commissioner and county clerk lost their races by 60 points or more. Turns out $33 million in PAC money from Paul Singer doesn’t travel as well as the Pacific fog.

At the Congressional picnic that evening, Trump told the assembled legislators, including those whose oversight function had spent the day evaporating, that they were “spectacular people” and that he loved them all. He ran through the upcoming calendar: a UFC fight on the South Lawn, the Indy 500 around the Capitol, FIFA, the Olympics. “We’re going to have one hell of a time for the next few years.” The country, he said, was “the hottest it’s ever been.” He mentioned Iran in the same breath as the stock market. And then, of the people who used to run the country he’d spent the better part of four months bombing: “I don’t want to say their leaders are gone because it’s not very nice, but that happens to be true.”

The legislators applauded.

In the Strait of Hormuz, three supertankers carrying six million barrels of crude to China and South Korea attempted passage Wednesday along a route designated by Iran’s newly created Gulf Strait Authority, Tehran’s formalized toll booth on the waterway Trump has repeatedly described as international waters belonging to no one. Two of the ships were bound for China. Xi promised no weapons to Iran, and Trump called it a beautiful promise. The ships followed Iran’s route. Brent crude closed just under $108. A shipping analyst cautioned against reading the transits as a broader reopening. “Fundamentally,” he said, “nothing has changed.”

The ballroom, for what it’s worth, is ahead of schedule.

A personal note: Marz and I will be traveling the next couple of days for my uncle’s memorial service. Dispatches may be sporadic. We’ll be back by the weekend, there’s never a shortage of material.