Trump gets “forever” immunity on his past tax affairs

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways the US has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:39You've heard us say many times before that Donald Trump's just done something unprecedented, that we've never seen a president behaving like this before. Well, he's done it again by creating a breathtakingly audacious slush fund, the proceeds of which can probably be spent on his friends and allies, and granted himself immunity from tax audits, all as part of a deal he's done with the Internal Revenue Service. We will explain the ins and outs of that in this episode. And also, we'll look at the electoral contest, the primaries, where Donald Trump's candidates won, and he's claiming victory, even though his name wasn't on the ballot.

1:16He's knocked out opponents like long-serving Congressman Thomas Massey in Kentucky. Those SOBs in Washington tried to buy my vote. They couldn't buy it.

1:32Why did the race get so expensive? Because they decided to buy the seat. And it got real expensive for them. By knocking out candidates like Massey, Donald Trump shows us that he is strengthening his grip on the Republican Party, even at a time when his approval ratings and poll numbers are terrible. And by getting rid of these rebellious Republicans in Congress, he's showing lawmakers, don't you dare try and stand up to me. Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.

2:20This is a big cover up and this administration is engaged in it. This guy has Trump arrangement syndrome. I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.

2:34Hello, it's Sarah in the BBC Washington Bureau. And it's Anthony across the table from Sarah in Washington, D.C. Just back from a trip. Back from Kentucky at a big congressional race there, which we are about to talk about. Yeah, we will get on to the slush fund and this amazing deal that Donald Trump did with the IRS later. First, let's pick up on the fact that yesterday, Tuesday the 19th, there was a little kind of mini Super Tuesday in America with six different states having primary elections where they choose the candidates for the Republican and Democrat parties who will go into the midterm elections in November.

3:10And we're interested in these because in a lot of them, inside the Republican Party, there was a more establishment candidate and a Trump challenger. And in most cases, in fact, I think all cases, it was the Trump candidate who won, wasn't it, Anthony? Yes, it was. And in Kentucky, most notably, it was Thomas Massey, the longtime iconoclastic rebel libertarian candidate, congressman who lost to a Trump-backed political novice, Ed Galrain. It was a good night for Donald Trump, really, wasn't it? It was a good night for Donald Trump. The marquee contest was that Kentucky race. And well, was he able to stand up to Donald Trump?

3:49Was he able to win reelection despite facing the full force of Trump's financial and endorsement onslaught? No, he lost. And he actually lost by about 10 percentage points. So it wasn't even all that close. Let's listen to Massey give his concession speech and maybe he can explain why he ended up coming up short. We didn't lose this race because we didn't have enough money. You know, it is the most expensive race ever. I think when they add it up, right now they can count$35 million. I think when they add it up, it's going to be a lot more than that. Because on our side, we know we spent more than$15 million.

4:25And we were able to go toe-to-toe. There was never a week that we got outspent more than two to one in this entire race. Look, for 14 years, those SOBs in Washington tried to buy my vote. They couldn't buy it.

4:47Why did the race get so expensive? Because they decided to buy the seat. And it got real expensive for them. Look, they used a lot of dirty tricks, but we stayed the course. We did not. We didn't bend a knee. We didn't throw a foul ball. We didn't do any of those things. We didn't kneecap anybody. We had lots of opportunities to try a lot of stuff like that, and we never did it. We ran a clean race. Yeah, so that is very interesting that Thomas Massey is saying that it wasn't specifically about the money, even though tens of millions were spent on what's now the most expensive primary race in America.

5:33He was being challenged by a Donald Trump-backed candidate because he had voted to release the Epstein files, he had voted against extra spending that would have increased the national debt, and he voted against the war in Iran. All things he'd broken with Donald Trump on, but he said he was the one holding the flame of Trumpism because these were all things that Donald Trump campaigned on but just wasn't delivering in office. and pointed out he'd been loyal to him 90 % of the time voting with him in Congress. So, Anthony, you were there talking to voters. You must have met people who in 2024 had voted for both Donald Trump and Thomas Massey, and they're now being asked to pick between the two of them.

6:10Right. And a lot of them were conflicted. I talked to some people who voted for Massey, who was a little upset about the fact that Trump was campaigning against him. I've talked to some voters who voted against Massey, but liked him as a person and felt they kind of admired his stand on principles. But that didn't matter. And when it came down to it, Massey was making the case that he was standing on principles and that his voters should side with him because of these stands. And a majority of the voters, it turns out, did not like the fact that he was breaking with Donald Trump. I mean, as an example, this is Alan, a Republican I spoke with at a coffee shop in Union, Kentucky, and he laid it out pretty clearly why he was not supporting Thomas Massey.

6:51and he does not represent Kentucky any longer all his you know and he takes pride in of course opposing Trump so that he can get all those interviews and stuff like that and then you know so then what do you really stand for you know you have to decide I mean his buddies Ro Khanna do you stand with Ro Khanna or do you stand with Donald D Trump he's made his bed so to speak so you like at Galrain or is it just that he is the other? I do. I've met him a couple of times and I do like him. And I think he's a principal person. Yeah. Got a guy who's going to get to Washington to support Trump's agenda.

7:30Supports Trump's agenda and stand for the Kentucky values. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Trump's agenda doesn't always line up with, but you know, he is the president and he was elected. So we have to, and he represents all 50 states, you know, so it's may not perfectly line with Kentucky, But it's closer than the other side. So Ro Khanna, that's a reference to the Democrat from California that Massey worked with in getting those Epstein files released with a vote in the House of Representatives. But I think what you hear there is that Massey was too enamored by his press clippings, that Massey wasn't focusing on sticking with Trump and moving the ball forward and being a team player.

8:09And that was what sank him. So all of the explaining I heard on the campaign trail, all of this, I vote with Trump 90 percent of the time. all of this, you know, I'm really trying to just improve the bills, not destroy them. None of that mattered. It was a contest framed between Donald Trump and Thomas Massey, and voters in that district picked Trump. Yeah, that's fascinating. And if he had had Trump's backing, he would have won, presumably. Easily. It's all about the president, even though he wasn't on the ballot. Yeah, he had Trump's backing in 2024, and he coasted to victory, even though he was still the kind of guy who voted against some of the Republican priorities because they raised the deficit too much.

8:48He was always an anti-interventionist. Another thing is that because the House has been so closely divided during Donald Trump's second term, where just a handful of votes or the difference between winning and losing a vote, there was a big spotlight put on Massey. So his quirkiness, his stands on principle, which could have been written off when he was in the comfortable majority at previous times now became really pivotal. And that was what I think got under Donald Trump's skin. So this is fascinating, I think, for two reasons that take it way beyond Kentucky and make it a national issue. We're seeing polls that Donald Trump is the least popular he has been in this term at the moment, and yet he's winning these kind of electoral victories.

9:31And also, when you see somebody who has rebelled a bit on principle, like Thomas Massey, losing his primary, every other Republican in Congress is going to look at that and think, oh, that's what happens if you stand up against Donald Trump. He's not the first to lose a primary for going against Donald Trump, but he's probably the highest profile and the one who maybe had the best chance of actually managing to hold on to Kentucky despite Donald Trump going against him. So I think there's a lot we can learn from this. Yeah, that was the feeling that he had the best chance to stand up to Trump and to be the new normal going up against an unpopular president.

10:08That, as you mentioned, did not turn out to be the case, but he does join a long list of Republicans, including Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, who lost to a Trump-backed rival in the primary contest in Louisiana on Saturday. Also, we've talked about in the past those five Indiana state senators who wouldn't redistrict in accordance with Donald Trump's plans and the Trump campaign turned against them and they got voted on off. I think there is a feeling among Republicans who have any kind of long term hopes of sticking around and rising through the ranks of the party, that if they take stands that go against Donald Trump and if they attract his ire, they are they're toast.

10:53They're not going to be able to to win, not only win general elections, but even just become the Republican nominee, no matter how long they've been in office, no matter how many friends they have outside of Donald Trump, it just doesn't matter. Yeah, look at Lauren Boebert, a Republican congresswoman who used to be very, very MAGA and loyal to Donald Trump. We've talked about her on the podcast before. She went down and was campaigning with Thomas Massey in Kentucky. And immediately Donald Trump started putting out in Truth Social that he was looking for somebody to challenge her in a primary who would stand up against Lauren Boebert because there she was daring to campaign for an opponent of Donald Trump's, although it turns out that she was cleverly doing this after the filing deadline in her state.

11:32So nobody will be able to challenge her on that. But Donald Trump has also been posting on Truth Social a graphic saying that he had 37 wins on May the 19th and zero losses. And he's counting them across the six states that were voting in primary elections on Tuesday and saying that his candidates won in every single time. So it does make him look very, very preeminent in the party. But this is at a time when he is prosecuting a war in Iran that lots of diehard Republican, certainly influencers, the people with loud voices in MAGA don't like. We know that everybody is feeling the price rises, particularly in gas, in petrol, but that's feeding through into groceries and all sorts of other things.

12:16He's got a really low approval ratings in opinion polls that sample the whole American population. And yet here he is apparently able to command the voters in these Republican primaries. Right. And that is his remarkable ability. He has remade the Republican Party in his image. And even as he is struggling, he has been able to weed out people that he finds insufficiently loyal. Let's talk about Bill Cassidy again a little more. He's that Louisiana senator. This is him in his concession speech talking about why he lost. You know, I've had the privilege of representing the state of Louisiana for 12 years.

12:50I've been able to participate in democracy. And when you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn't turn out the way you want it to. But you don't pout. You don't whine. You don't claim the election was stolen. You don't find a reason why.

13:12you don't manufacture some excuse you thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you've had that privilege and that's what i'm doing right now so uh an incumbent senator uh doesn't get the backing of donald trump and goes down to defeat We've got another one, actually, just in on Tuesday. Donald Trump endorsed a challenger to John Cornyn, the incumbent senator in Texas. He endorsed Ken Paxton, the state attorney general. That contest is on Tuesday. I know we talked about it in the past, but here's another chance next week for Donald Trump to oust an incumbent.

13:50And the thing about Cornyn is he's not even really that anti-Trump. He never had a clear break. Cassidy's thing was he voted to convict Donald Trump during his 2021 Senate impeachment trial. We talked about all the various transgressions that Massey has had. But Cornyn tried to win Donald Trump's favor. He was about to name a highway after Trump in Texas. He had proposed a bill to do that. He had been campaigning with photos of him next to Trump. And Trump, nevertheless, came out with a true social post endorsing Paxton, saying that Paxton was the true loyalists, that he was real MAGA and Paxton had gone to New York to support Trump when he was on trial.

14:27He was one of the people who were leading an effort to overturn the 2020 election. So Trump rewarded that loyalty. He said that Cornyn was a nice guy, but that he wasn't there when times were hard, which I assume means his post-defeat time out of office in 2021, 2022. And that was just not good enough. That sounds like a very good reason to be going to Texas, Anthony. And I know So you never turned down the possibility of a trip to Texas. I know there's some barbecue waiting for me. I might have to do that. It is interesting in this case because Cornyn didn't have that break. Cornyn is very popular in Congress.

15:05He has a lot of friends in the Senate, a lot of Republican friends in the Senate. He's a former member of the Republican leadership, for crying out loud. He was the majority whip. That's the guy who organizes and tries to get people to vote all together in the party. He is an active fundraiser for a lot of his fellow Republicans. So when Donald Trump came out in favor of Paxton, it really, really angered a lot of Senate Republicans who felt like Trump was betraying someone who was a team player. I think that hints at some of the downside of what Donald Trump is doing here. He may be purging disloyal or quasi loyal members from his party.

15:46And next year, they may be replaced by a real diehard MAGA faithful. But in the meantime, he's making a lot of enemies in Congress and in the Senate. And he's also creating a lot of freewheeling members who are retiring either forcefully or by choice who may not be willing to march in lockstep with Donald Trump's legislative agenda for the rest of this year. Yes. Plus also, I think in Texas, it's particularly interesting, isn't it, that what they might be doing is selecting a candidate who is Trump approved, but who might be less popular with the voters. Because to put it politely, Ken Paxton has quite a lot of baggage, whereas the Democrats have actually selected a lot of people thinks one of their most electable candidates for the Senate, James Tellurico, somebody that we should definitely be watching.

16:29And so that might make a much, much tighter race for the Senate seat in Texas. So that would be astonishing as a result of this. What Donald Trump had achieved was turning Texas blue. Yeah. I mean, Democrats have been waiting for that for decades. And this, they feel, is maybe their best chance. At the very least, Republicans have to spend a lot more money on this race than they would have if Cornyn, with his deep pockets of fundraising prowess, would have they would have had to done. So it's a risk. It's a big risk by Donald Trump. And the other thing is, I mentioned these kind of freewheeling votes now, these freewheeling members, the YOLO conference, the YOLO caucus in the Senate.

17:09Cassidy just yesterday came out against funding Donald Trump's ballroom through Senate appropriations. He voted in favor of limiting or advancing a measure to limit Donald Trump's war powers on Iran. He was critical of this weaponization fund that the Justice Department has set up, a$1.8 billion fund to pay off people who feel like they were victims of anti-conservative weaponization. So all of a sudden, he now is a free agent. And you can see the court and do the same thing. All of a sudden, you know, things might get a little more complicated for Trump. Yes. And you've been very polite there saying the YOLO crowd.

17:47I've seen you in some of our shared group texts calling them the YOLO slash DGAF crowd. We won't explain what that acronym stands for. They can Google it. I doubt very much that any American casters don't know what that means. But if they don't, the internet is there for them. But let's pick up, Anthony, on what you were talking about there. This new fund that was announced yesterday. It's not quite$1.8 billion. It's$1.776 billion to commemorate the... I see what they did there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. America's 250th birthday. What better way to commemorate it than setting up a fund that looks as though it's there to reward Donald Trump's friends and allies, because it's going to sit within the Justice Department.

18:32and anyone who thinks that they were the victim of weaponised lawfare, as Donald Trump always calls it. Basically, the people he would say are eligible for this are those who were needlessly and wrongfully prosecuted under the Biden administration. They can now apply to be compensated for that. And it will be decided by a panel of five people not been appointed yet, but will be appointed, in fact, by one of Donald Trump's appointees, Todd Blanche. And so the criticism is that this is just there to reward his friends. But the reason it came about was also kind of astonishing, wasn't it, Anthony?

19:07Yeah, Donald Trump was suing the IRS. The president was suing his own IRS for the unauthorized release of his tax returns, years of his tax returns. It took place. They were leaked to The New York Times in September of 2020. So just before that 2020 presidential election that Donald Trump lost. And he was seeking damages,$10 billion in damages from the IRS. It turns out this was a contractor who got a hold of them and leaked them. It wasn't some sort of an IRS official. So Donald Trump still was saying that this was the IRS's responsibility and he should be compensated. But then Donald Trump dropped it, striking a deal with his own Justice Department.

19:50And this$1.8 billion slush fund is the result of it. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? So you've got a judge who wasn't sure that she would allow the case to proceed because basically you've got Donald Trump in the White House, but you've also got Donald Trump in charge of the IRS. So it's not right that they should be engaged in a legal battle together, but it's absolutely fine for them to make a cosy little sweetheart deal behind the scenes and come to a settlement. It doesn't really seem to me like that's certainly any more ethical, even if it might be a little bit more legal. So yes, you've now got this fund and not total clarity on who is going to be able to apply to it or what the criteria would be to get compensation.

20:29Because if it is the acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, who of course used to be Donald Trump's private personal lawyer as well, very, very loyal to Donald Trump, he's going to appoint the panel that will make the decisions here. And I guess the people applying could include Steve Bannon, for instance. He went to jail for a few months during the Biden administration for refusing to testify in front of Congress. But really controversial would be if Jan 6th rioters, some of whom were convicted and imprisoned, but then were pardoned by Donald Trump on day one, they might not just be taking those burdens, they now might be looking for compensation.

21:05And that caused a bit of a fuss yesterday. I was in the White House briefing room when the Vice President J.D. Vance came to talk to us. And he was asked several times about this and whether or not it would be right if Jan 6th rioters who had attacked police officers were to be compensated out of government money. You previously told me that anyone who assaulted a police officer on January 6th should go to prison. So why not rule out giving them taxpayer funded money? Well, Caitlin, what I said is we're going to look at everything case by case. There are because, Caitlin, there are people who I don't know their individual circumstances And I don't rule things out categorically when I know nothing about a person's individual circumstances.

21:46Let's say a person is accused. Let's say hypothetically, a person is accused of doing something that they never actually did, that they got a kangaroo court, that they had a judge who mistreated them. I think that we should look at those things case by case. We're not making commitments to give anybody money. We're just making commitments to look at things case by case. The vice president wasn't the only person being asked about this fund. And Todd Blanche, who, as we've said, was Donald Trump's own personal attorney, now the acting attorney general, was giving evidence in front of Congress also yesterday.

22:18So he, too, was being asked about this slush fund. And he said he couldn't rule out money being used to compensate January the 6th rioters. Here he is being questioned by the Democrat Jack Reed. This all seems to be an obvious abuse of power by the Department of Justice, by the President. He negotiated essentially himself. You're his appointee. The IRS are his appointees. He's the plaintiff. And the American people, I don't think, are surprised that suddenly all this money is going to his friends or people that he, in his orbit. Will you ensure that none of this money goes to anyone convicted on the January 6th attack on the Congress?

23:06Well, the commissioners will determine who is eligible to receive the money. And who are the commissioners? They're not named yet. Who will name them? I will. Or the Attorney General will. It's not me. So, with the suggestion of the President of the United States. Excuse me? With the suggestion of the President of the United States, your boss. I do not make suggestions. I will. No, no, he won't make suggestions to you. I have no idea if he will or not. I really don't. I have no idea if he will or not.

23:37I would be shocked if he didn't tell you exactly who to put on, and I'd be more shocked if you did not put them on. This is a travesty of the law in the United States and the Constitution. You know, this whole hearing, I think, is exposing something, which is, to me, very frightening. You're a very gifted lawyer. But from my perspective, you have very little faith to the Constitution and the people of America, and you're the president's consigliore. Your perspective is completely wrong, Senator, respectfully. I think the facts will prove me right. Thank you. Yeah. And then, Anthony, the bit that really blew me away was when a bit later in the evening on Tuesday, it was announced that there's another provision in this agreement, which is protecting Donald Trump and his family from IRS audits.

24:28There's actually a part of the agreement says the government is forever barred and precluded from examining the tax returns of Donald Trump, his family, his company and related companies. And we know that actually there were audits going on that could possibly have actually ended up with hundreds of millions of dollars being owed to the IRS. And does that mean the Trumps are off scot-free? All those audits apparently are going to go away. And anything pending, which there were pending audits, known or unknown. So that means that even if there is something that comes up about his past tax returns that wasn't currently pending that the IRS didn't know about right now, they still cannot prosecute Donald Trump for it.