Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Today we’re sorting through all of this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a good piece arguing that the only thing anyone will remember about Donald Trump in the end is his corruption. Amanda, always good to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s start with GOP Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, a vulnerable Republican from Pennsylvania. A 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.
Brian Fitzpatrick (voiceover): Bad news. We’re going to try to kill it.
Fitzpatrick (voiceover): 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 you can’t do that.
Fitzpatrick (voiceover): I’ve never heard that before.
Fitzpatrick (voiceover): Of course. Of course. Yeah, you can’t do that.
Marcotte: I mean, I think he’s trying to save Trump—and especially the Republican Party—from Trump. You know, Trump should be writing him thank-you letters. Because here’s the thing: I’m sure that Trump sees he’s a lame duck. He doesn’t have to run for office again. So there is a strong possibility that he just doesn’t care about voters or political popularity or approval ratings or whatever.
Sargent: 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 the reporter by saying her husband votes against me. Listen.
Sargent: Boy, Trump sounds like he’s in rough shape there. He doesn’t drink, so it can’t be that. Now, I don’t think Trump was raging at Fitzpatrick over his bill targeting the slush fund. I think it’s some other thing Fitzpatrick has opposed, like the ballroom.
Marcotte: He just wants to have it all. He wants to control it all. One reason that a lot of these stories about how much money he’s basically stealing and defrauding as president 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.
It’s all about filling 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 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 it’s all of us. Unfortunately, we’re all in this together.
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.
Marcotte: Yeah, 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. And so I met a lot of the voters there and talked with some people who were Republicans before the craziness started, right? And I get a very strong sense that a lot of the swing voting that goes on there—it’s a part of the country that even though it’s a little bit rural, it’s a suburban area.
And I think they will be, first of all, higher-information voters than you would often get with Republican voters, or willing-to-be Republican voters. And so they’re probably more likely to be aware of this slush fund. They’re probably more likely to care about it. And I think they’re also the kind of people that that might actually affect—that the ugliness and the corruption [matters to them].
Sargent: Right, exactly. Well, a really good window on how hard this is for Republicans is what House Speaker Mike Johnson said when he was asked about Trump’s slush fund. 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.
Mike Johnson (voiceover): We don’t know any of the details of that settlement fund. The acting attorney 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 tell you what he said. He said they are setting up a fund to compensate all Americans who have been the subject, the target of lawfare or weaponization of the federal government. Again, that’s not a partisan proposition either. Everybody should support that.
The funny thing is Trump himself has said some of it will go to the January 6thers. But Mike Johnson knows that that’s absolutely toxic. Trump, once again, can’t 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.
So it’s interesting to me that he does not seem excited about this, because I have this kind of dark fear that this might be Trump’s Hail Mary for winning 2026—the slush fund. Hear me out.
Marcotte: So basically, the point of putting this money up is to say to the kinds of thugs and militiamen and fascist goons that tried to steal the election and rioted at the Capitol in 2020: hey man, if you take violent action on Trump’s behalf, you will get paid for it.
Sargent: Well, I think there’s also an element of coalition management to this as well. This is Donald Trump’s way of telling the MAGA masses that when Trump engages in extraordinary corruption and self-dealing, it’s actually in their 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?
And so there is a self-dealing element a lot of the time with even just the ordinary supporters of a 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 mass deportations would somehow financially benefit white people in America. But it hasn’t actually materialized in any way.
Sargent: 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 paramilitary street thug wing 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?
Sargent: Look, the January sixers were willing to follow him to the Capitol. 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 Thune told reporters that he’s not a big fan of the fund and doesn’t see a purpose for that.
I just find that extraordinary because if you go to Trump’s feed 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.
Marcotte: Yeah. I am a little bit curious how the next few months are going to play out, because my sense 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. And the reporting on it is very oblique because there’s not a lot of facts that reporters can gather.
And then I do think this White House ballroom is going to matter. 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 gaudy and over—like, it’s both somehow very cheap-looking but it will cost a fortune. And it’s obviously for him. It is not for anybody else.
Sargent: Yes, that’s good. And by the way, one billion dollars of taxpayer money for the ballroom. We just had a Quinnipiac poll come out today, in fact—it finds 66 percent of voters oppose using $1 billion of taxpayer money to enhance security infrastructure at the ballroom. And 60 percent oppose the ballroom itself.
More on the Quinnipiac poll, by the way—it’s pretty extraordinary. One third of voters, 33 percent, approve of how Donald Trump is handling the economy. Sixty-four percent disapprove. That’s the lowest approval on the economy Trump has gotten in either of his two terms.
Marcotte: Yeah, I think so. I mean, there’s the piece of it that both the media and Democratic politicians should try their level best not to get distracted by the next shiny object. 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.
So I think it is going to be really helpful to have these stories 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 poorer, and those are not coincidences.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
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