Conservatives blast Trump over $10 billion IRS lawsuit after pledging to reduce waste

Andrew Egger and William Kristol of the center-right publication The Bulwark argued on Tuesday that President Trump’s proposal to pay himself $10 billion from the IRS exposes his hypocrisy and will further alienate voters already souring on him.

Egger was particularly scathing when he contrasted Trump’s rationale for $10 billion from taxpayers with his support for X CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which promised to root out $1 trillion in wasteful spending but actually oversaw a spending increase. Egger pointed out that Musk targeted foreign aid to impoverished nations, slashing aid to charities that provide food and medicine on the grounds that the money rightfully belonged to US taxpayers. He declared that Trump is blatantly contradicting that justification by now trying to take $10 billion from the IRS on the grounds that “nobody cares how much [I pay myself] if it goes to a good charity.”

Egger also questioned whether Trump would actually give the money to charity, given that the president has been legally proved to have self-dealt in his previous “charitable” contributions.

“Trump had been using his personal charity, it came to light after a lawsuit from the state of New York, to pay his business debts, make political contributions, and buy things for himself,” Egger wrote. He concluded by quoting pollster Nate Silver in saying that “the share of Americans who strongly disapprove of Trump broke 46 percent for the first time yesterday,” leading to Kristol’s argument.

Kristol cited a Data for Progress survey which showed that 64 percent of voters believe Trump will attempt to use immigration enforcement to interfere with the 2026 midterms, while another 56 percent believe ICE should be legally blocked from polling locations. He concluded that, despite the assumptions made by many pundits after Trump was reelected in 2024 despite attempting a coup on January 6, 2021, millions of voters care about democracy and freedom as much as economic self-interest.

“You might think congressional Democrats would be doing more to highlight the issue of election interference in the current discussions of ICE funding,” Kristol wrote. “You might think our political, business, and civic elites would be doing more to mobilize on the subject of election interference. They may be getting there, at long last — but reluctantly and hesitantly.”

He concluded by comparing Democratic timidity in confronting ICE with a notorious quote by the French politician Alexandre Ledru-Rollin in 1848:

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”

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