The Monument and the Machine

While two federal judges freeze Trump's slush fund, the self-canonization continues on schedule

Good morning! ProPublica reported this week that Peter Navarro, senior counselor to the president, convicted felon, prison pen pal, and self-described brother to Donald Trump Jr., personally initiated a $620 million Pentagon loan to a small North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. Vulcan had fewer than 50 employees at the time. It had been in existence for roughly two years. Its total funding before the deal was under $10 million. What it did have, as of August 2025, was an investment from 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Trump Jr. is a partner. That investment landed about three months before Navarro called down to the Office of Strategic Capital and said, in the words of a Pentagon official who was there: “The call came from the White House: we have to get this done.”

Staff worked late nights. The vetting process that normally takes many months was compressed into weeks. The loan was announced in November. Vulcan’s estimated valuation went from roughly $200 million to $2 billion. Trump Jr.’s stake, undisclosed in size, as all the best corruption is, appreciated accordingly. The week before the announcement, Trump Jr. had Navarro on his streaming show, where Navarro called him “brother” and Trump Jr. called him “my boy” and complimented the physique Navarro had developed in federal prison, where he served time for defying a congressional subpoena. They spoke warmly about rare earths. Nobody mentioned Vulcan.

The Pentagon, asked about the expedited timeline, said officials balance “lightning speed with rigorous diligence.” The White House said the administration is working “in the best interest of the American people.” Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he “has no knowledge about how this deal came together.” This is the tell: when everyone’s alibi is that nobody knew anything, somebody knew everything.

Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, did not mince it: “This is our money they’re spending. This is corruption we pay for.” Democrats tried to subpoena Trump Jr. Republicans blocked it. Another drone parts company Trump Jr. advises and holds shares in is reportedly under review for its own Pentagon loan. The machine, as they say, is working as designed.

Keep this in mind as we proceed. Everything that follows is either the price tag or the entertainment budget.

This morning, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia froze Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund entirely. No transfers in. No claims processed. No disbursements out. Full stop, at least until a hearing on June 12. The order came in a lawsuit brought by people who argue, with considerable irony, that they were genuinely persecuted by the federal government — a former prosecutor fired for his work on January 6th, a professor arrested at an immigration protest — but who expect to be excluded from the fund because they were persecuted by the wrong administration. Trump’s fund, it turns out, is not for victims of political persecution. It is for the right kind of victims. Judge Brinkema found that distinction legally interesting enough to freeze the whole operation while she thinks it over.

This is the first meaningful judicial roadblock to the fund since its existence was formalized this month, and it arrives with company. Earlier this week, 35 former federal judges, led by the prominent conservative jurist Michael Luttig, filed a brief urging a separate district judge to reopen the dismissed IRS lawsuit that served as the fund’s legal fig leaf. (The fund is $1.776 billion, in case you missed it, a number chosen to gesture at the nation’s founding, because subtlety has been sandblasted out of this administration along with everything else.)

The legal architecture of the scam, briefly: Trump sued the IRS, a government he controls, for billions in damages under a statute that caps relief at $1,000. When the judge asked whether there was actually a live case or controversy, meaning whether Trump was essentially suing himself, they voluntarily dismissed rather than answer.

They then announced a settlement referencing the dismissed case by name that directed $1.776 billion in Justice Department funds toward a slush fund insulated from congressional oversight, with a bonus provision prohibiting IRS audits of said fund.

The former judges’ argument, stripped to its core: the case was a fraud on the court. The settlement loses its legal predicate the moment a judge says so. It won’t by itself kill the fund; this ultimately requires a political solution, but between Brinkema’s freeze and the Rule 60 motion, the scaffolding is coming off. Every Republican facing a midterm now has a federal judge on record questioning whether this was ever a legitimate settlement at all, or just a president settling with himself and handing the bill to the public.

The administration will fight it. They always fight it. But judges, as a category, do not enjoy being told they have been defrauded. Today, two of them are saying so simultaneously.

While the legal machinery grinds, the branding operation continues apace. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s first-ever female director, Patty Salamone, was abruptly reassigned last month after refusing to begin work on prototypes for a new $250 bill bearing the president’s portrait, a bill that federal law expressly prohibits, since only deceased persons may appear on U.S. currency. She said, on her way out, “the buck stops here.” You have to admire the economy of it. Treasury Department political appointees, including at least one 2020 election denier, have continued pressing Bureau employees for prototypes anyway. Those employees, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, confirmed the pressure campaign is ongoing.

Why $250? Same reason the slush fund is $1.776 billion: the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, an occasion the president is apparently celebrating by urinating directly on it. The portrait in question features Trump in his preferred self-image, glowering, squinting, projecting what he understands to be toughness and what the rest of us understand to be a man who has never been told no by anyone he couldn’t fire.

No president in American history has attempted this. The last living person to appear on U.S. currency was a mid-level Treasury bureaucrat who managed to put his own face on a five-cent note in 1866 before anyone could stop him. That remains the bar. We are currently attempting to limbo beneath it.

Getting the bill into circulation would require an act of Congress. The administration appears to be planning to pursue exactly that, which means Republican members will be asked to go on record endorsing the proposition that a sitting president should appear on the money, before heading home to campaign in districts where their constituents, whatever else they believe, tend to have a developed sense of the ridiculous.

Speaking of the ridiculous. Freedom 250, the administration’s official celebration of the nation’s semi-quincentennial, which sounds like something from a dystopian dream and looks like one too, announced its musical lineup this week for what it is calling the Great American State Fair. The acts: Martina McBride, Flo Rida, Young MC, C+C Music Factory, Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day and the Time, and Brett Michaels.

This is not a joke. This is the official cultural programming for the 250th anniversary of the American republic, staged on the grounds of a White House that has been, in the words of the Bulwark’s JVL, visually transformed to look like “the British came back and were like, ‘we’re finishing 1812, bitches.’”

Since the announcement, Young MC has dropped out. Morris Day and the Time have dropped out. The first comment on Morris Day and the Time’s Facebook page upon hearing the news was “thank [god], I nearly died.” One half of Milli Vanilli is dead, has been since the Behind the Music special, and the surviving half did not perform their own songs in the first place, which raises questions about what exactly is being offered. C+C Music Factory is a brand name currently operated without either of its founding members, one of whom died in 1995 and the other of whom had the name taken from him through legal maneuvering and is reportedly not pleased about any of this.

Vanilla Ice, notably, has not dropped out. Vanilla Ice is the one act whose presence requires no explanation. He has performed at Mar-a-Lago. He is all in. There is something almost clarifying about that.

The celebration also features a UFC cage fight on the White House lawn, for which a structure is currently being built, tickets to which will be distributed to military members, “American heroes,” and, one assumes, though no one is saying it directly, donors. Regular Americans may watch on screens at the Ellipse. Bread and circuses, except the bread is also behind a velvet rope and the circus is Vanilla Ice.

The Bulwark notes, that the TV series The Boys recently aired an episode in which its Superman-analog villain, Homelander, had a golden idol of himself erected at a church before ascending as a Christ figure. That episode aired approximately two weeks before Trump unveiled his own golden statue at Mar-a-Lago. The writers of The Boys, who have spent years trying to satirize authoritarian celebrity narcissism, have essentially been lapped by events. You cannot parody what is already beyond parody. You can only document it.

Then there is Vietnam. The Financial Times reported this week that in Hung Yen province, north of Hanoi, farmers are digging up the graves of their ancestors. The cemetery sits on land designated for a $1.5 billion Trump Organization golf course and luxury development, 990 hectares of some of Vietnam’s most fertile farmland, fast-tracked through approvals six weeks after Liberation Day tariffs threatened Hanoi with a 46 percent levy. Vietnam, correctly reading the situation, understood that a Trump golf course was the price of doing business with the Trump administration. The groundbreaking was held. The prime minister called it “significant to strengthening Vietnam-US relations.” Eric Trump called it “the envy of all of Asia and of the entire world.”

The farmers being offered $3 per square meter for land they have farmed for generations were not quoted in the press release.

Some are refusing to move. Others are demanding higher compensation than local officials, who have been told to complete land clearance on an accelerated schedule, are authorized to offer. The graves are the sticking point. In Vietnamese tradition, disturbing the dead is a spiritual injury. One resident whose family has been buried in the cemetery since 1967 asked, simply: “Why should I move them?” He received approximately $900 for relocating three graves, and described himself as outraged by the price.

The construction company handling site clearance is owned by Vietnam’s defense ministry. Its secondary function is unexploded ordnance removal. There is still ordnance in Hung Yen from the last time America came through.

The Trump Organization, for its part, is not paying development costs. It licenses the name and collects fees. A subsidiary of the local partner has already paid $5 million in licensing fees, per Trump’s financial disclosures. The brand gets paid, and farmers move the graves. The ordnance gets cleared, again. A golf course gets built, eventually, on the bones of the country’s fruit-growing heartland, in a province where signs of prosperity are visible in every alley, houses being built, children sent to study in the cities, land that has fed families for generations.

“You can tell this land is very fertile,” said one farmer. “We have been relying on land to farm and could manage to build such houses, so you can tell how much value the land brings in.”

He’s not wrong. That’s rather the point.

The IEA’s emergency oil release, the buffer against the catastrophic market consequences of the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed, runs out on July 9. The buffer is providing roughly 2.5 million barrels per day, and by the middle of July, those temporary cushions will be exhausted. Analysts are no longer modeling for a swift resolution. They are now planning for an extended period of severe energy disruptions, with fears that inventories could hit critical stress levels before the Strait reopens. Gas prices have already crossed $4.50 a gallon nationally, with analysts warning they could continue climbing for months.

The Freedom 250 celebration is scheduled for July 4th weekend. Vanilla Ice is still on the bill.

The show, as they say in show business, must go on.