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I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
Republicans are quietly starting to break with Donald Trump over his $1.8 billion slush fund.
This shows how toxic Trump's corruption has become, and that comes as a new poll shows him at another record low on the economy, which will make GOP anxiety even worse. Trump knows this is a problem. He snorled with rage over a house Republican who's been bucking him lately, which is a key tell. While Trump is successfully excommunicating disloyal Republicans in primaries, that's not stopping the party from breaking with his corrupt schemes on numerous fronts because he's politically weak and doesn't know what to do about it.
“Today we're sorting through all of this with Salon's Amanda Markot, who has a good piece arguing that the only thing anyone will remember about Donald Trump in the end is his corruption.”
Amanda, how is good to have you on? Thanks for having me.
So let's start with GOP Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, a vulnerable Republican from Pennsylvania.
Our reporter asks him about Trump's slush fund. This is the slush fund that the Justice Department created as part of a quote unquote settlement of his bogus lawsuit against the IRS. The fund will pay off supposed victims of government weaponization, including the insurrectionists. Listen to this. Well, we're considering legislative options, we're going to write a letter to the AG to start, but we're considering a legislative option.
We're trying to unpack exactly what the legal machinations are, but can't do that.
We have you ever heard of any other Americans like other than so Trump is a socialist.
So would that be part of the legislative? Of course, of course, you can't do that. Note that Brian Fitzpatrick is supporting a legislative move to block Trump's slush fund, importantly, including undoing the part of the settlement with the IRS that would mix all tax examinations of Trump's businesses and his family,
“which is just an extraordinary act of corruption. What do you make of Fitzpatrick here?”
I mean, I think he's trying to save Trump and especially the Republican Party from Trump. You know, Trump should be writing and thinking letters. He should be because here's a thing. You know, I'm sure that Trump sees, you know, he's a lame duck. He doesn't have to run for office again, so there's a strong possibility that he just doesn't care about voters or political popularity or, you know, approval ratings or whatever. You know, I'm skeptical of that because while the man is very dumb, I think he does understand that if Democrats take the house in January that this is not going to get easier for him.
That we're going to be looking at a lot of hearings. We're going to look at investigations. I think that the FCN files are going to come roaring back to life. Trump actually raged over representative Brian Fitzpatrick in a truly weird rambling slurred tirade. He was asked a question by a fox reporter who happens to be married to Fitzpatrick, Trump then started abusing her, started abusing the reporter by saying, "Oh, her husband votes against me. Listen."
“What her husband votes against me all the time, can you imagine?”
I don't know what's with him. You better ask him what's with him. Her husband is married to a certain congressman. He voted to get, he likes voting against Trump. You know what happens with that? Does it work out well? Boy, Trump sounds like he's in rough shape there. He doesn't drink, so it can't be that. No, I don't think Trump was raging if Fitzpatrick over his bill targeting the slush fund. I think it's some other thing Fitzpatrick as opposed, like the ballroom.
But clearly, Trump has drunk with power having ousted many Republicans in primaries in recent days. Yet at the same time, he's still furious that he can't control all of them.
He just wants to have it all.
as president, art isn't landing with a lot of people is because in their minds, they think why would he want all this money he already has more money than anyone could spend?
And it's like, well, it isn't about the ability to spend it, right? It's just about this megalomaniacold desire to have everything. So he needs utter loyalty from Republicans. He needs all of the money. It's all about, you know, feeling the hole in his soul that he's been trying to fill his entire life.
“And I think that's what we're seeing right here. And it is, it is unfortunate because it would be one thing if it was only Republicans that were being tortured by this man's deep deep personality disorders.”
But like, it's, it's all of us, unfortunately, we, we're all, we're all in this together.
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Thank you and enjoy the show. [Music] [Music] Yeah, apparently. Sure, it sure feels that way and it is torture. That's a very good word for it. I really do think that this shows something interesting about the political situation Donald Trump is in. Brian Fitzpatrick is a Republican from Bucks County, which is a swing county just north of Philadelphia.
This is going to be one of the most contested house races this fall. And here Donald Trump isn't even willing to give Brian Fitzpatrick one tiny little bit of room to distinguish himself from Trump to move away from Trump to move away from the Republican party. This is tough political territory for Republicans, the district that Brian Fitzpatrick represents, and Trump won't give him any room. Can you talk about the district a little like this is not the kind of place where you can win elections as a Republican.
If you're supporting Trump stealing $1.8 billion from the taxpayers and handing it out to insurrectionists who attacked cops.
“So I did some reporting there a few years ago about the efforts to kick moms for liberty off the school boards in the area, right?”
And so I met a lot of the voters there and talked with some, you know, people who were Republicans before the like craziness started, right? And I get a very strong sense that a lot of the swing voting that goes on there. It's a it's a part of the country that even though it's a little bit rural it's a suburban area. It's very educated. It is a lot of professionals. There's a lot of and so you're looking at the kind it is a little bit like suburban Virginia, not way, right? So you're looking at a lot of Republican voters who just want sane conservatives like they're they're the Mitt Romney types, right?
“And I think they really they will be first of all their higher information voters than you would often get with like Republican voters, right, or willing to be Republican voters.”
And so they're probably more likely to be aware of the slush fund, they're probably more likely to care about it. And I think they also are the kind of people that that might actually affect, right, that they the ugliness and the corruption. And I think it's important to understand that while right now it seems to a lot of us like people are letting these corruption stories just kind of wash over them and they don't care.
As the economy gets worse and prices get worse for people.
I think that we're going to start to see a lot more ability to connect the dots for people that the reason that you don't have any money is because Trump took it all right exactly. Well, yeah, a really good window on how hard this is for Republicans is what how speaker Mike Johnson said when he was asked about Trump's slush fund.
And the reporter CNN's Manu Raju points out that the fund could allow the January 6th insurrectionists, including the violent ones access to a whole lot of taxpayer money listen to this.
Will you be okay if January 6th winers the ones who have convicted even some of the ones who attacked the police had access to this taxpayer dollars tax dollars of the $1.20 billion in settlement that the DOJ has created the settlement fund. Do you okay if they had access to that. We don't know any any of the details of that settlement fund. The act in turn general Todd Blanche testified yesterday and he gave a lot of detail and I'll just defer to what he said because he obviously knows a lot more about it than I do he said let me let me tell you what he said.
He said they're setting up a fund to compensate all Americans who have been the subject the target of law fair or weaponization of the federal government.
That's not a partisan proposition either everybody should support that so Amanda that's basically homina homina homina as Ralph Cramden used to say on the honey mooners.
But note how desperate he is to make it appear as if this fund doesn't go to Trump's ally is he kind of dissembles and says it's available to all victims of supposed government weaponization. The funny thing Trump himself has said some of it will go to the January 6 but Mike Johnson knows that that's absolutely toxic.
“Trump once again can help himself he goes out and he tells everyone he's giving it to the insurrectionists because he can and this is just a deep problem for Republicans I think.”
I found it genuinely interesting that Mike Johnson of all people seems to not enjoy this moment because he was. At the forefront of the efforts to steal the 2020 election so he was really deep in that he was one of the drivers of efforts to. We have the house vote to overturn the election in 2020 and try to like basically like and our democracy. So it's interesting to me that he does not seem excited about it because I have this kind of dark fear that this might be Trump's like hail Mary for winning 2026 is the slush fund.
Hear me out. Okay, let's hear it. So basically what is the point of putting this money up is to basically say to the kinds of.
If you put the money out there. We get to them and they will somehow make the losses in 2026 go away by force.
“But Mike Johnson is not stupid. And I think he recognizes that that's a much bigger lift even in the idiotic plan of that led to the capital right and you know in January six.”
Well, I think there's also an element of coalition management to this as well. Trump's way of telling maga of the maga masses that when Trump engages in extraordinary corruption and self dealing. It's actually in there interest in some sense. He's saying don't worry.
“You guys will get a cut of the spoils. So just stick with me. My corruption's good for you. I think that's part of the message as well. Don't you?”
Probably. I mean, one of the things that is is true about fascist movements in the past and isn't hasn't really quite been as true about maga is that. There was an effort to reward like party like every day party loyalists in the past. You know often like Nazis. They would just literally steal stuff from Jewish victims and give it the stuff to people that back the party right. And so, you know, there is a self-dealing element a lot of the time with even just the like ordinary, you know, supporter of fascist movement. And I think Trump has kind of promised these sorts of things.
And in fact, there were some efforts in the past couple of years to imply that deport mass deportations would somehow financially benefit the, you know, white people in America.
It hasn't actually materialized in any way.
Right, I mean, this is sort of how maga fascism really works on some level. Trump loots our country to enrich himself. He meanwhile persuades the power, power military street, the way that this self-dealing is in their interests, they'll get a cut of the spoils, but they actually won't.
Maybe at the end of the day, right?
“It's like to pay lawyers, right? So, okay, at the most, at the most, if you're lucky and you apply for money, it will go to your lawyers.”
But you're not actually going to get it in your pockets. Look, the generous sisters were willing to follow them to the capital. So, I don't know, maybe they'll believe this too.
We're seeing more Republicans moving away from Trump on the slush fund, Senate Majority Leader John Thun told reporters that he's not a big fan of the fund and doesn't see a purpose for that.
Thun also added that there will be a lot of questions that the administration is going to have to answer. Well, I should hope so, Republicans. We also had a senior GOP Senate operative tell Politico in reference to all these big primaries where Trump has ousted all these people. This operative said this quote, "Those so-called victories over the last couple of weeks are just a mirage. They are self-homes." I just find that extraordinary because the really Trump, if you go to his feet on truth social, which I spend too much time on, you see that every time a Republican wins who he's endorsed.
He posts it up there and says endorsed by President Trump. This is his way of saying to the Republican Party, "I own you." But he's forcing through his control, his dictatorial control over the party. He's forcing the party to walk over a cliff. He's demanding that they support things like this slush fund, and that's going to just kill them in the midterms. It's a really, it couldn't be happened to a bunch of nicer assholes, really. Yeah, I'm curious. I'm a little bit curious how the next few months are going to play out because my sense again has been that the corruption stories that have come out have not really taken off with the public like that.
But maybe part of that is because, for instance, a lot of it was with cryptocurrency, and so people don't understand what's happening, right? And the reporting on is very oblique, because there's not a lot of facts that reporters can gather. We know that he's making a lot of money off cryptocurrency. We don't know how. Right? You know, we have some suspicions, but you can't put those in print. But this is him just back in the truck up to the treasury and fill in it.
“One of our money. I think a lot that's a little bit easier to explain to people, and I think terms like slush fund are really helpful, like they sum it up.”
And then I do think this White House ballroom is gunna matter. Like, I think the fact that he talks about it constantly, and he loves to show off pictures of how ugly it's going to be, how gotty, and over, like it's both somehow very cheap looking, but it will cost a fortune, and it's obviously for him, right? It is not for anybody else. And I think that, in my, like, I feel like sometimes like just having a visual representation of this amount of corruption is very, very helpful, and I mean, it will be political malfeasance if Democrats don't just run a million ads, like,
$1.8 billion for J6ers, a White House ballroom for Trump, for you $7 gas. Yes, that's good. And by the way, $1 billion of taxpayer money for the ballroom, we just had a Quinnipiac poll just came out today.
It finds 66% of voters oppose using $1 billion of taxpayer money to enhance security infrastructure at the ballroom, and 60% oppose the ballroom itself.
“I really think that the imagery of Trump just wrecking the people's house, just wrecking the White House to build a monument to himself has really broken through in a way that stories seldom do.”
The imagery of that is so powerful and captures so much about this presidency, and I also think that the slush fund has the capacity to do that as well.
More on the Quinnipiac poll, by the way, it's pretty extraordinary.
Some third of voters, 33% approve of how Donald Trump is handling the economy, 64% disapprove. That's the lowest approval on the economy Trump has gotten in either of his two terms, and get this, among independent 70% disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy, while 27% approve.
“Those are absolutely abysmal numbers, independence hate corruption, these stories will resonate with them. Don't you think?”
I think so. I mean, there's the piece of it that we can't, both the media and Democratic politicians should try the level best not to get distracted by the next shiny object, and this because repetition is super important to get this through to people. It's going to be a long summer, and it's going to be a summer where news consumers are going to see lots and lots of big numbers of money coming out of our pockets because of Trump's craziness, not just the ballroom, not just the slush fund. We're going to get back to Iran or in how much that's costiness, and people do have a very strong sense that that money spent on this other stuff as money that's not being spent on us, and that's correct. I mean, how many people have lost their health care, because of the cuts to Obamacare.
So I think it is going to be really helpful to have these stories kind of coming out. I think the main thing is making sure that it is always brought back to understanding that Trump is getting rich and you are getting poor and those are not coincidences.
“I'm just getting rich and you are getting screwed. That's the message. Thank you so much for coming on.”
Minosakción de he.
