Donald Trump said Monday that he deserves reparations from American taxpayers, and the Trump reparations claim has nothing to do with slavery. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, he was defending a federal fund created to pay people who say the previous administration went after them unfairly, a fund the Justice Department has now rescinded. He said they went after him, and that if you want to talk about reparations or payment, what was done to him gave him a very good case against them.
He also called the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden corrupt. The fund at the center of this is worth understanding, because it is where the money would come from. It carried roughly $1.8 billion and was called the anti weaponization fund. Weaponization is the term Trump and his allies use for their claim that federal law enforcement was turned into a political weapon against them. The fund was created out of the settlement of a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS over the disclosure of his tax returns during his 2016 campaign. Rather than take the case to a verdict, the lawsuit was dropped and the settlement money was routed into a pot that people could file claims against. Among those eligible were the roughly 1,600 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, nearly all of whom Trump had already pardoned. Trump said Monday that those people were treated horribly and the fund could have given them some solace.The Trump reparations comment is not the first time he has said the government owes him personally. He has previously said he could be seeking $230 million from his own Justice Department, and he acknowledged out loud how unusual the arrangement is, noting that he is the one who makes the decision and asking whether anyone has ever had a case where they decide how much to pay themselves in damages. Any settlement would be paid with taxpayer money.His stated reasoning is that the two federal indictments brought against him after his first term were politically motivated. Both cases were dropped after he won the 2024 election. That is the harm he is describing when he uses the word reparations.
People who worked in the Justice Department under Biden dispute the premise. Anthony Coley, a former Biden Justice Department official, said no entity has ever ruled that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago was improper or that Trump’s rights were violated, and said Trump should be preparing to meet his maker rather than trying to take $230 million from American taxpayers and rewrite history.
For the people who have spent decades on the actual reparations movement, the word choice is the story. Reparations in the United States has meant one specific thing for generations, which is repair owed to the descendants of enslaved Black people for centuries of chattel slavery and the policies that followed it. Bills to even study the question have been introduced in Congress since 1989 and have never passed.
The timing cuts another way too. What the anti weaponization fund demonstrated, before it was rescinded, is that the federal government can identify a group of people it says were harmed, put a dollar figure on that harm, build a claims process, and start writing checks, all inside of a few months. The machinery exists. It has always existed. What has been missing for the descendants of enslaved people is not a mechanism but a decision.
Trump has not filed a formal claim for reparations for himself, and the fund he was defending is no longer active. The Justice Department has not said publicly whether the $230 million claim is still moving.
