On May 18, 2026, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, who now runs the United States Department of Justice, announced a $1.7 billion settlement with President Trump, drawn from public coffers, after the IRS disclosed his tax returns during his 2016 presidential campaign. The president wasted no time declaring how he would deploy this self-dealt windfall: as reparations for the January 6 rioters. For those of us who have spent decades arguing that the federal government owes a debt to the descendants of enslaved Africans, the president’s declaration was something we have never quite seen before — an accidental confession. The question of reparations was never one of appropriateness or capacity but one of political will. America’s most unlikely reparations advocate has, at last, revealed the truth.
Let us be precise about what just happened. The president publicly identified a class of people harmed by government action. He named a dollar figure equal to that harm and announced his intention to compensate them directly. He referred to this process as “reparations.” A blueprint for collective repair—harm, acknowledgment, compensation, and direct payment—is now federal policy.
The math alone is of interest. Using the very formula embedded in the DOJ’s Anti-Weaponization Fund — roughly $21,250 per person per year since the harm occurred — and applying it to 161 years since the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, each descendant of enslaved Africans would be owed approximately $3.4 million. Of course, the experience of lifelong, generational enslavement doesn’t exist in the same universe as an arrest for rioting. However, the 1,600 January 6 rioters, who have already been pardoned, are set to receive $1.06 million each. The 40 million descendants of American slavery have received nothing. What do you think they deserve?
The arithmetic reveals facts about this nation’s conscience that are not complicated; in fact, they are part of a pattern with a long line of precedent. When the District of Columbia abolished slavery in 1862, Congress did not pay the formerly enslaved. It paid the slaveholders — compensating them for their “lost property.” The first check written in the name of emancipation went to the people who held human beings in chains. Now, in 2026, the first presidential invocation of reparations flows toward those who stormed the Capitol, many of them in Confederate regalia, before the descendants of those the Confederacy sought to keep enslaved have received a dollar. History, as they say, does not repeat itself. It rhymes.
Source: Trump Just Helped Make the Case for Reparations for Black People
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