The bill is drafted in the plainest language. It carries none of the weight of the men who stood in the tunnel. The ledger says IRS settlement. The ledger says $1.776 billion. Donald opens the treasury with the blood on his shoes. You have read the bill, Todd; your signature is the one that validates the commission. Your hand moves across the heavy-bond paper with the same lack of friction the hands of the officers moved with, that day, to hold back the door. You have arranged for the door to be reopened. You have arranged for the men who pressed into the tunnel to be paid for the pressing.
Yesterday, Metropolitan Police officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn filed a federal lawsuit challenging the fund entirely, arguing it functions as an illegal slush fund designed to finance insurrectionists and paramilitary groups attacking in the president’s name. The money traces to the settlement of Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the publication of his tax returns. A five-member commission appointed by Attorney General Todd Blanche — the man who used to be Donald’s personal attorney and now holds the deciding power over individual payouts — and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will decide individual claimant eligibility. The fund is not a settlement; it is a bounty.
More than 100 officers were left injured during the January 6 attack, a visceral toll meted out in broken ribs and concussions. Compare that physical damage to the $1.776 billion potential payout waiting for the men who inflicted it. Hodges and Dunn had to go to court to stop it. When a former prosecutor and an acquitted professor also sue to block the same fund, the pattern is not a policy debate. It is a public performance of avarice dressed as administrative procedure, a mathematical inversion where blood costs less than the zero at the end of the ledger.
Todd, hear what you have done. You claim the commission will consider a claimant’s actions “among other factors,” but the factors do not include the crushed vertebrae of the men who held the line. The factors do not include the blood on the tunnel concrete. The factors are bureaucratic. They are administrative. They are the same language used to process the tax returns the President once claimed were weaponized against him. You sit in your office and the air conditioning hums. The air is cool and controlled. You take a sip from the mug by your elbow. The handle is smooth ceramic. But the knot behind your ribs tightens. It does not loosen. It pulls your spine forward.
Daniel Hodges was pinned against a wall that was supposed to represent the stability of the state. The man who ripped the mask from his face is now a claimant. He is waiting for the commission. He is waiting to see if his violence has been capitalized. Donald, you picture your daughter safe in your house because the rules are one thing for the children of presidents and another thing for the children of the police officers who stand in the rain. You did not pass a law for everyone. You passed a law for yours. Yours sleeps. Theirs stocks the shelves of memory with the faces of men they cannot arrest.
You taste copper in your mouth when you read the officer’s testimony about the door buckling under the weight of the mob. You taste copper because you know what it means to be pinned. You know what it means to be crushed against a door while other men tear your mask off your face. The taste does not leave. It sits on your tongue like a raw coin. Your throat closes when you raise the spoon at breakfast. Your jaw aches. The morning report has hollowed something behind your sternum. You feel it when the name “Blanche” appears on the caller ID. Your diaphragm does not drop. Your body does not begin the refusal. The signature was clean.
You are a small man, Donald, with large hands on the lever. You think you are a warlord. You are a petty accountant of cruelty. You count the lines in the settlement agreement instead of counting the bruises on the men who bled on the marble. You measure your power in zeroes that stretch across the page while the men who defended the building sleep in rooms that feel too cold. Todd, you occupy the Attorney General’s office — the office that once belonged to the law — and you frame the payment of rioters as a procedural question. You are a small man, Todd, holding a ledger. You have turned the state’s accounting books into an invoice for those who attacked its employees. The men in the tunnel are not asking for a commission. They are asking who owns the floor they are standing on, and why the man holding the money has decided to pay the people who tried to break the door.
“Woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.” Luke 6:24
The ledger balances. The men who bled on the marble do not. You speak of the fund as an administrative necessity to correct the record of the past administration. You have traded the blood of the Capitol for a balance sheet. You have traded the breath of the police for a payout. Donald, you are about to be photographed at the commission’s announcement. Smile for the camera. The Christ is watching from the top of the page. The coin is in your hand.