Taxpayers get the victory as Trumps anti-weaponization fund dies

President Donald Trump’s decision to drop the Justice Department’s planned anti-weaponization fund is a win for taxpayers — who shouldn’t have to pay for the partisan political machinery that makes such a fund necessary. Trump has faced relentless, extraordinary efforts to destroy him outside of heretofore normal political combat.The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago over alleged mishandling of classified materials despite its own agents’ doubts about probable cause.Officials in Colorado, Maine and Illinois sought to remove him from the 2024 ballot, using a Civil War-era constitutional clause, before the Supreme Court unanimously reversed them.Trump’s infamous mugshot is the result of Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis booking him on a racketeering indictment that subsequently collapsed.And a civil case brought by writer E.Jean Carroll, funded in part by a prominent Democratic donor, resulted in damages of nearly $90 million — despite Carroll being unable to recall what year the alleged encounter took place.That’s important context behind the debate that overwhelmed the now cancelled $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, which was proposed to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. The fund would have awarded money to victims of lawfare unduly targeted by a Justice Department that engaged in politically motivated prosecutions.The president’s critics, not unreasonably, asked whether the fund was legal, given that the beneficiaries had no standing in the original case.They also questioned whether the commission established to award the funds was genuinely independent.But they shied away from the broader uncomfortable truth: Donald Trump wasn’t proposing to do anything his predecessors didn’t do.He was simply, as is his style, doing it more openly, without apology or subterfuge.Consider what happened in the final weeks of the Biden administration.As the lame-duck period wound down, billions of dollars went out the do...