Transcript: Trump Rages Wildly as Slush Fund Prompts Quiet GOP Revolt

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here_._

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic , produced and presented by the DSR Network. 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 it 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 snarled 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 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.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

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.

Reporter (voiceover): What do you make of this $1.7 billion fund?

Brian Fitzpatrick (voiceover): Bad news. We’re going to try to kill it.

Reporter (voiceover): You’re going to try to kill it? Okay. And how?

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.

Reporter (voiceover): Have you ever heard of any other Americans—other than Trump and his associates—who are unauditable by the IRS?

Fitzpatrick (voiceover): I’ve never heard that before.

Reporter (voiceover): So would that be part of the legislative—

Fitzpatrick (voiceover): Of course. Of course. Yeah, you can’t do that.

Sargent: 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 nix 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?

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.

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, this is not going to get easier for him. We’re going to be looking at a lot of hearings. We’re going to look at investigations. I think that the Epstein files are going to come roaring back to life.

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.

Donald Trump (voiceover): When 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—she’s married to a certain congressman. He votes against—he likes voting against Trump. You know what happens with that? It doesn’t work out well.

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.

But clearly, Trump is 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.

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.

And it’s like, well, it isn’t about the ability to spend it, right? It’s just about this megalomaniacal desire to have everything. So he needs utter loyalty from Republicans. He needs all of the money.

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.

Sargent: Yeah, apparently. 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? 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.

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.

It’s very educated. It is a lot of professionals. It is a little bit like suburban Virginia in that way. So you’re looking at a lot of Republican voters who just want sane conservatives. They’re the Mitt Romney types.

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].

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 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.

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.

Manu Raju (voiceover): Would you be okay if January 6th rioters—the ones who were convicted, even some of the ones who attacked the police—had access to taxpayer dollars, $1.8 billion in settlement that the DOJ has created, the settlement fund? Would you be okay if they had access to that?

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.

Sargent: So, Amanda, that’s basically homina homina homina , as Ralph Kramden used to say on The Honeymooners. But note how desperate he is to make it appear as if this fund doesn’t go to Trump’s allies. He kind of dissembles and says it’s available to all victims of supposed government weaponization.

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.

Marcotte: 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. He was really deep in that. He was one of the drivers of efforts to have the House vote to overturn the election in 2020 and try to basically end our democracy.

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.

Sargent: Okay, let’s hear it.

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.

Part of me wonders if in his little addled mind Trump thinks that he can basically put this money out there, wink at 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 than the idiotic plan that led to the Capitol riot on January 6th.

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?

Marcotte: Probably. I mean, one of the things that is true about fascist movements in the past, and hasn’t really quite been as true about MAGA, is that there was an effort to reward everyday party loyalists in the past. Often Nazis would just literally steal stuff from Jewish victims and give the stuff to people that backed the party.

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.

And so, yeah, in that sense, it’s kind of a classic Trump grift. He’s going to dangle this big pot of money in front of them, imply that they’re going to get a piece of it. But honestly, that makes me think they won’t.

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?

Marcotte: Well, it’s like, it’ll go to pay lawyers, right? So okay, 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 pocket.

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.

Thune also added that there will be a lot of questions that the administration is going to have to answer. Well, I sure 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, “Those so-called victories over the last couple of weeks are just a mirage. They are self-owns.”

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.

But through his dictatorial control over the party, he’s forcing the party to walk over a cliff. He’s demanding that they support things like the slush fund. And that’s going to just kill them in the midterms. It couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer assholes, really.

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.

We know that he’s making a lot of money off cryptocurrency. We don’t know how. And we have some suspicions, but you can’t put those in print. But this is him just backing the truck up to the Treasury and filling it with our money. I think that’s a little bit easier to explain to people. And I think terms like “slush fund” are really helpful—they sum it up.

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.

And I think sometimes 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 J-sixers; a White House ballroom for Trump; for you, $7 gas.

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.

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. 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.

And get this: among independents, 70 percent disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy while 27 percent approve. Those are absolutely abysmal numbers. Independents hate corruption. These stories will resonate with them. Don’t you think?

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.

Not just the ballroom, not just the slush fund—we’re going to get back to the Iran war and how much that’s costing us. And people do have a very strong sense that money spent on this other stuff is money that’s not being spent on us. And that’s correct. I mean, how many people have lost their healthcare because of the cuts to Obamacare?

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.

Sargent: Trump is getting rich and you are getting screwed. That’s the message in a nutshell. Amanda Marcotte, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me.