Epistemica

Trump is establishing a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” as part of a settlement against the IRS. He claims it is intended to compensate people who claim they suffered “weaponization and lawfare,” with formal apologies and monetary relief available through a commission appointed by the attorney general. The fund is to be controlled by Trump allies and that its terms echo language Trump and his supporters have used to describe criminal cases arising from January 6.

Trump already commuted the sentences of thousands of January 6 defendants in 2025, including figures associated with the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, and granted a “full, complete and unconditional pardon” to others convicted of offenses connected to the attack. He also directed the attorney general to dismiss all pending indictments related to January 6. The person who used executive clemency to erase punishment for political violence now presides over a mechanism capable of turning claims of loyalist persecution into taxpayer-backed reward.

It is pure authoritarianism from Trump.  In rewarding January 6 rioters, Trump is implying that lawbreaking in the service of dear leader will later be compensated and then redescribed as sacrifice, mistreatment, and patriotism. A mob attack on the constitutional transfer of power is reframed as a grievance to be remedied by all Americans. The American legal order no longer distinguishes guilt from innocence in ordinary constitutional terms. That’s a bygone of the American past.

We are on a fast-track to fascism, which has—as an ideology—treated loyal violence as politically redemptive. The fascists across history tended to reinterpret disruptions and violence against their political opponents as proof of courage, national service, or revolutionary necessity. Mussolini’s Blackshirts are the obvious example. The first Fascist action squads were organized in 1919 to destroy socialist political and economic organizations. By 1920, they were attacking socialists, communists, republicans, Catholics, trade unionists, and cooperatives, with hundreds killed as the squads expanded. In October 1922, armed Blackshirts gathered for the March on Rome that helped bring Mussolini to power. In February 1923, the private Blackshirts were formally transformed into a national militia.

The common counterargument (if you can comfortably call it an argument) to claims of Trump being a fascist is to mention Hitler’s worst atrocities and claim that Trump hasn’t done that. But The Police Decree on the Identification of Jews, the Emigration Ban, and the Night and Fog Decree were all signed by Hitler in 1941, the eighth year he was in power. The path to fascism is more like a steady descent rather than a precipitous fall. Fascism tends to begin with movement violence outside ordinary legality, then launders that violence through the state after power is seized. The state absorbs, blesses, and professionalizes loyalists. Trump’s combination of pardons and prospective compensation follows the same politics, even if the institutional form is different and there are, thankfully, many more federal checks against some of Trump’s abuses.

The Beer Hall Putsch of November 8 and 9, 1923 was an attempted overthrow of the German government. It failed, Hitler was convicted of high treason, and he was released from prison in December 1924. Yet Nazi propaganda later redefined the failed coup as a heroic national act. After Hitler consolidated power, November 9 became a day of commemoration, and the dead putschists were folded into the movement’s martyr mythology. So, an attack on constitutional order was transformed into sacred movement history. Sound familiar?

The Nazi regime also used law itself to ratify political violence. A March 21, 1933 decree granted amnesty for penal acts committed in the “national revolution,” annulled unserved penalties, and discontinued pending proceedings. In July 1933, U.S. Ambassador William Dodd reported that Göring had acquired pardon authority for offenses committed in connection with the National Socialist revolution and could quash proceedings when an offender had violated “the letter of the law” in order to advance the revolution. It was the authoritarian inversion of law. All that matters is whether the act served the movement. If it did, the legal violation becomes secondary if not ignored.

In her The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argued that totalitarian movements tend to organize masses under terms of “unconditional loyalty.” She also wrote that in totalitarian government, “all laws have become laws of movement,” with ordinary positive law displaced by the claimed law of history or nature. Here, “guilt and innocence become senseless notions,” because legitimacy depends on alignment with the movement’s destiny and purpose.

The January 6 pardons and the new compensation fund adopt one of the central authoritarian mechanisms Arendt analyzed. They subordinate law to movement loyalty. They make the leader’s narrative more authoritative than the court record and even treat the state as an instrument for protecting loyalists and punishing adversaries. Once that principle is accepted, legality becomes personal as the ruler’s favor becomes a substitute for law.

With midterms approaching, a movement that has already attacked the certification of one presidential election is now being told that the consequences of such conduct can be erased, reversed, and possibly monetized. Even if no January 6 rioter ultimately receives a payment, the structure creates a rational expectation of future indulgence. It says that disruptions undertaken for Trump may later be folded into a persecution narrative. It weakens deterrence at the very moment when democratic institutions need it most.

In a constitutional republic, public funds should compensate legal injury through transparent, neutral, rule-bound processes. Under Trump’s, or maybe Stephen Miller’s, formulation, pardon removes punishment. Propaganda rewrites the meaning of the act. Payment converts loyal transgression into material benefit. In tandem, they create a political economy of fealty to Trump.

Serve him, and the law will bend around you. Oppose him, and law will be turned against you. Another step towards fascism.