Trump to abandon $1.776 billion compensation fund amid bipartisan backlash, source says

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.”

Note, he was referring to an exclusively Republican audience — Democrats were not invited to this briefing, and none were in attendance — suggesting that “at least half” of the Senate GOP conference wanted Trump’s sycophantic acting attorney general to know, with varying degrees of intensity, that they were not on board with this idea, especially in an election year in which the party is already facing headwinds.

The president has faced occasional and sporadic pushback from his ostensible allies on Capitol Hill since returning to power nearly 16 months ago, but the bipartisan condemnations of this idea — up to and including Trump’s own former vice president, who called the fund “deeply offensive” and “totally unacceptable” — were unlike anything he’s seen since the Jan. 6, 2021, riot itself.

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.

A senior White House official told MS NOW’s Jacqueline Alemany on Monday that the White House is dropping its plan for the fund.

Axios was first to report on the White House’s intentions.

The developments come three days after a federal judge blocked the gambit from advancing, as part of a preliminary move.

A Justice Department spokesperson appears to have leaned into Friday’s court ruling, expressing the DOJ’s disagreement with the outcome in a statement to MS NOW, but concluding that it “will abide by the Court’s ruling.” The same statement also referred to the fund in the past tense.

The department’s statement, however, wasn’t altogether true: The federal judge in Virginia did not permanently kill the fund. Instead, she blocked it for two weeks until she could hear additional arguments about its future.

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.