General Discussion

A few days after the Trump administration unveiled its $1.776 billion compensation fund, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went to Capitol Hill to brief Senate Republicans on the details and answer their questions. He likely expected some modest pushback, since a handful of GOP senators had already gone on record announcing their opposition to what they described as a “slush fund.”

But Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer probably wasn’t prepared for the ferocity of the response from those in attendance. In fact, we don’t even have to speculate based on leaks from unnamed officials: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said on his podcast that his Senate colleagues “screamed” at Blanche, as part of “one of the roughest meetings I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate.”

“Fiery does not begin to cut it,” Cruz added. “My guess is there [were] probably 45 senators in the room; at least half of them were blasting the attorney general, and they were pissed.”....

The president was left with a choice: Keep fighting an uphill battle for a brazenly corrupt scheme or back down from a fight he was likely to lose. He apparently went with the latter.....

By any fair measure, the fund never should’ve existed in the first place, and many legal scholars characterized it as the single most corrupt step ever taken by an American president. The initiative began with an outlandish $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against his own administration over the leak of his tax returns during his first term, which he dropped as part of an agreement to create a $1.776 billion fund that would compensate “victims” of the Biden administration, notwithstanding the inconvenient fact that Republicans have never been able to identify any actual, legitimate victims.

There are some key questions that have not yet been answered. For example, the day after the administration announced the fund, Blanche unveiled an addendum of sorts, which said the Internal Revenue Service would no longer scrutinize past or present alleged tax irregularities surrounding the president, his family, and his controversial businesses. The development, among other things, freed Trump from having to worry about a potential $100 million penalty.

Whether this arrangement remains intact as the White House backs off from the existence of the fund remains unclear.