Republican senators are coming to grips with the fact that Trump is not the only threat to their political survival.
It turns out that Donald Trump isn’t immune to the ordinary forces of political gravity. Sure, Trump’s actions in his second term often suggest a man who no longer pays attention to voters, while Republican officials from the Senate to state legislatures still fear crossing Trump and do so at their peril in primaries. That’s the lesson of the swift collapse of Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” after acting attorney general Todd Blanche on Tuesday told the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Department of Justice, “We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” and gave a further affirmative answer when asked to confirm that the fund was “not moving forward, ever.”
Blanche was unapologetic, telling the committee: “The reasons for the fund . . . remain as important as [they] were before,” and refused to commit to writing any of the promises he made under oath. So, why did he fold? Why didn’t the Trump administration just keep doing what it wanted?
Two reasons, one structural and one political. The structural reason is that Congress still, even today, has the power of the purse and occasionally remembers to use it. The administration may not have much fear of lawsuits aimed at stopping the fund, given the conspicuous lack of standing to sue on the part of the challengers. But it still needs to fund immigration enforcement, and some Senate Republicans have vowed to work with Democrats to use that must-pass bill as leverage to block the fund. With Blanche’s concession, the question now moves from withholding funds as leverage to whether Congress itself will include an amendment statutorily precluding it. Ideally, they’d write that language in ways that will bind not only Trump but future presidents inclined to create collusive slush funds like this one and like those created during the Obama and Biden years. It remains to be seen, however, if Trump will veto a bill that does that.
The political reason is that John Thune and his caucus are increasingly exasperated with their relationship with the White House. Trump’s demands for loyalty look like a one-way street after John Cornyn did everything but buff Trump’s shoes with his tongue, and Trump still endorsed his primary opponent. Now, Trump no longer has leverage over Bill Cassidy, or Cornyn, or Thom Tillis, or Joni Ernst — each of whom is leaving the Senate due at least partly to clashes with Trump — or over Mitch McConnell. Nine members of the Senate GOP won’t be back next year, with Alan Armstrong a placeholder in Oklahoma and Cynthia Lummis, Steve Daines, and Tommy Tuberville all retiring (although Daines is trying to hand off his seat to a handpicked heir and Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama as a Trump loyalist). That’s a lot of votes that can’t be coerced. Then there are the senators who will be fighting for their lives this fall, a group that includes Susan Collins, Dan Sullivan, and Jon Husted, and potentially (if there’s a blue enough wave) Roger Marshall, Ashley Moody, Pete Ricketts, and Cindy Hyde-Smith. Some of the departing senators balked loudly at the fund from the start:
“Under what circumstances would it ever make sense to provide restitution for people who were either pled guilty or were found guilty in a court of law?” steamed Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. Tillis derided the White House move as “stupid on stilts” and a “payout for punks.” Trump fired back Friday morning, accusing Tillis of “screwing the Republican Party” in a lengthy social media post.
GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader, who tends to keep his own counsel, issued his own a statement in the aftermath. “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick,” McConnell said.
Thune commented dryly, “I think it’s hard to divorce anything that happens here from what’s happening in the political atmosphere around us,” while Mike Rounds added, “There’s a lot of folks in our conference that are disappointed because we appreciate working with John Cornyn.” Rounds won his own primary last night.
Now, other Senate Republicans sound unsatisfied with relying only on Blanche’s word:
“The only thing that’s going to solve this problem, to get immigration funded and law enforced, is for the president to do away with the weaponization fund,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the chair of the Judiciary Committee that oversees DOJ, said. Asked if the DOJ statement was enough, Grassley said: “The answer is no.” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said the weaponization fund “was a nonstarter from the get-go.”
Grassley, who was first elected to the Iowa legislature during the Eisenhower administration, won’t face the voters again until 2028, when he will be 95. As for why Blanche’s word may not carry that much weight, after he disregarded legal ethics to sign off on the related settlement of IRS audits of Trump (which hasn’t been rescinded even with the abandonment of the slush fund) and presided over the preposterous Jim Comey seashell indictment and the E. Jean Carroll investigation, there’s not much reason to think of him as a permanent fixture at DOJ; it’s hard to picture Trump even bothering to ask the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm him as attorney general. Speaking of dubious personnel choices, Thune was noncommittal on the choice of Bill Pulte to be director of national intelligence, but told reporters, “We don’t need a weaponized DNI; we need professionals there.” That’s definitely not the administration’s favored tune.
Republican senators may not have lost their fear of crossing Trump, but it seems plain that a lot of them are either coming to grips with the fact that Trump is not the only threat to their political survival — or feeling immortal now that they are already politically dead. That will make it a lot harder going forward for Trump to get their agreement to things like the anti-weaponization fund that can be defended on no other ground than personal loyalty to the president.