Let us be honest for a moment. We have all stared at a stack of 1099s in mid-April, sweating over a calculator, and wished we possessed the statutory authority to simply issue a federal decree making our tax liabilities disappear. That is not corruption. That is the American dream. So when the news broke that President Donald Trump had successfully brokered a sweeping deal with his own government to grant himself, his family, and his businesses total amnesty from Internal Revenue Service investigations, I did not clutch my pearls like the coastal elites. I stood up and applauded a triumph of small-government efficiency.
The mainstream media is currently hyperventilating over a recent ruling where a federal judge denounced the arrangement as an "improper exercise in self-dealing." I am sorry, but since when is "self-dealing" a crime? In the private sector, we call that "cutting out the middleman." The judge's decision, crucially, did not explicitly kill the deal, which means the wheels of executive-branch synergy are still turning. By sitting on both sides of the negotiating table, the President has saved the American taxpayer countless hours of tedious litigation.
Imagine the grueling stamina required for those closed-door negotiations. Picture the sheer grit it takes for the Commander-in-Chief to stare down a Treasury official he personally appointed, whom he can fire at any moment, and stubbornly refuse to yield until that subordinate agrees the President owes absolutely nothing. That is the kind of hard-nosed dealmaking we were promised in 2016.
By aggressively investigating ourselves and immediately concluding that our files are pristine, we have saved the American taxpayer literally tens of dollars in audit paperwork.
What the left refuses to acknowledge is that this amnesty deal is fundamentally a pro-family policy. The agreement reportedly shields the President’s children and his vast network of corporate entities from the weaponized mathematics of the deep state. We claim to be the party of family values, yet we bat an eye when a father uses the full, crushing weight of the federal apparatus to ensure his sons never have to locate a decade-old receipt for a golf cart? It is hypocrisy of the highest order.
I discussed this very dynamic last week over a bone-in ribeye with a source close to leadership at the Trump International Hotel—a meal I fully intend to write off as a journalistic brainstorming expense. He pointed out something profound: subjecting the President to a standard IRS audit is actually a massive conflict of interest. The President oversees the government; therefore, if the government were to find that he owed it money, he would essentially be paying himself. It is a logistical nightmare. Blanket immunity is the only mathematically sound solution.
Furthermore, this move is a massive win for the working class. Critics argue that letting a billionaire write his own tax clearance is inherently unfair, but they are missing the macroeconomic picture. Every hour an IRS agent spends trying to decipher the depreciation schedule of a Scottish golf resort is an hour they are not spending auditing a waitress in Ohio who failed to declare eighty dollars in cash tips. By removing himself from the audit pool entirely, the President is freeing up federal resources to go after the real tax cheats.
When the executive branch negotiates exclusively with the executive branch to absolve the executive branch, it represents a perfect, unbroken circle of constitutional harmony.
There is a broader principle at stake here regarding how we view success in this country. The federal government is, at its core, a service provider. If you achieve the ultimate level of success—getting elected to the highest office in the land—you should absolutely be allowed to speak to the manager. And if you are the manager, you should be allowed to comp your own meal. We do not get mad at the owner of a restaurant for eating a steak from his own kitchen without leaving a tip. The United States Treasury is simply the President's walk-in freezer.
The judge’s denunciation of the deal as "improper" is nothing more than the dying gasp of an outdated judicial philosophy that believes rules apply equally to people who own skyscrapers and people who rent apartments. But the fact that the judge stopped short of explicitly voiding the amnesty is total vindication. It is a tacit admission that the legal system simply has no mechanism to stop a man who has realized he can just give himself permission to ignore it.
I, for one, plan to apply this precedent directly to my own life. When tax season rolls around next year, I will not be hiring an accountant. I will be drafting a legally binding memorandum between myself, my checking account, and my golden retriever, granting my household total financial immunity for the fiscal year. If the IRS comes knocking, I will simply explain that I have already conducted a rigorous internal review and found my conduct to be flawless. If it is good enough for the Oval Office, it is good enough for me.