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Let’s don’t waste any time debating the legality of President Donald Trump’s IRS “settlement” (click here to read part one and here to read part two). As my colleague Matt Ford explains at length, this deal is very illegal. The only question is whether Congress and the courts can move quickly to stop Trump’s theft of $1.8 billion from the U.S. Treasury to reward MAGA criminals, plus several hundred million dollars more to shield Trump and his family from IRS penalties. If they can, we’re a nation of laws. If they can’t, we’re a banana republic.The settlement is illegal mainly because it violates the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which states: The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.Trump has, with great impunity, been violating the Constitution’s two emoluments clauses, domestic and foreign, since he first entered office in 2019. The nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued Trump during his first term over foreign emoluments violations concerning payments to Trump’s hotels and apartment buildings and royalties from foreign government–owned broadcasters related to The Apprentice. But CREW said Trump’s businesses also likely violated the domestic emoluments clause because some of the transactions involved payments from the federal government or state governments. CREW’s lawsuit was dismissed in district court, but CREW prevailed on appeal and the case was remanded back to the district court. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court. By now it was September 2020. The high court waited four months and then dismissed the case as moot because Trump had lost reelection. A similar lawsuit brought by the District of Columbia followed a similar trajectory, but didn’t get as far as CREW’s lawsuit before the Supreme Court decided that time had run out. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement. If an emoluments case could get this far based on Trump’s business transactions, a case in which Trump pockets federal funds directly should be, in any properly functioning republic, a slam dunk. This is not only a legal settlement between a president and his own administration, which is outrageous enough. It’s also a legal settlement of a lawsuit that would lack legal merit even if Trump weren’t president, because the statute of limitations had passed by the time Trump filed it. (More on that here.) On top of all that, everybody knew Trump was in an unseemly race to settle before the presiding judge, Kathleen M. Williams, tossed the case out. IRS civil servants, bless them, were eager to fight Trump in court! To settle, for a large sum, a lawsuit that’s doomed to fail quickly is grand larceny. Did I mention that the settlement prompted the Treasury Department’s general counsel to resign?Ninety-three Democrats filed an amicus brief Monday urging Judge Williams to “make clear that any purported settlement between the parties, and any related voluntary dismissal, intended to avoid the Court’s scrutiny would contravene the DOJ’s settlement authority and the Constitution.” But by then Trump had already withdrawn his lawsuit, denying Williams any opportunity to reject the settlement. Still, the Democrats’ brief is a good roadmap for future action. “A settlement payment,” they wrote, “especially for an unmeritorious claim … is a straightforward violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause.”It’s just a question of figuring out who has standing to sue. In CREW’s earlier emoluments lawsuit, the nonprofit teamed up with various people in the hospitality industry who could claim harm from Trump’s market advantage in peddling his influence as president. This time, two police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021—Harry Dunn, formerly of the Capitol Police, and Daniel Hodges of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police—are suing to block Trump’s slush fund on the grounds that it will “finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” The plaintiffs say that they “already face credible threats of death and violence on regular basis; the Fund substantially increases the danger.” Also, it “will directly finance the violent operations of rioters, paramilitaries, and their supporters who threatened Plaintiffs’ lives that day, and continue to do so.” Hodges in particular had a rough January 6. From the legal complaint:Making his way to the [Capitol], he was separated from his platoon, hit from above with a heavy object, kicked in the chest, and driven to the ground. Shortly thereafter a rioter grabbed Hodges by the face and tried to gouge out his eyes.… In the rushing crowd of the mob, Hodges was nearly crushed between metal doors by the enraged attackers. He later said that he thought, “this could be the end.”How do Dunn and Hodges know that January 6 rioters will be compensated? Because Trump spoke last year of creating a compensation fund for them. Asked by a sycophantic Newsmax interviewer whether the rioters would be compensated financially (“because they lost opportunity, they lost income”), Trump answered: “There’s talk about that. There are a lot of people—a lot of the people that are in government now talk about it. Because a lot of the people in government really like that group of people. They were patriots as far as I was concerned.” Trump’s comments caused a minor furor at the time. The plaintiffs also got a boost Tuesday when NBC News reported that Ed Martin, who used to lead the Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group (he now handles the even dirtier business of giving out pardons) was heard earlier this year predicting that the Justice Department would give out millions to the January 6 rioters. Martin was wrong only about the amount, which he lowballed at $40 million. Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, told my TNR colleague Greg Sargent earlier this week that House Democrats would introduce a bill blocking the slush fund and similar efforts in the future, and that they would file a discharge petition to get around Republican House leaders who would otherwise block a vote. “We need to put Republicans on the spot as to whether or not they are going to endorse this rank corruption,” Raskin told Sargent, “or whether they are going to stand up for basic constitutional values.” We now have a text of that Democratic bill, courtesy of Axios’s Andrew Solender. It bars the use of any federal funds for the settlement slush fund, and says that in future no “compromise settlement or award” may be given to a president, vice president, their families, a president-owned entity, a Cabinet member, a political appointee, etc. In addition, no future settlement can be paid alleging harm from the January 6 riot, the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, or any other civil action that was “dismissed with prejudice.” There remains the matter of Trump’s canceled audits. But are they really canceled? The indemnification language forbids prosecutions and various types of claims, but it doesn’t include the word “audits,” suggesting the prohibition affects penalties but not investigations. I note further that the IRS is not a signatory to the agreement, and that Attorney General Todd Blanche probably lacks the legal authority to cut any such deal without the IRS. “He is not a party to the case,” observe Anna Bower and Eric Columbus on Lawfare, “and he is not exercising any authority delegated to him by the settlement agreement.” Starting in two and a half years, any Justice Department “freed from Trumpian political constraints would likely treat Blanche II as presumptively invalid.” But why wait that long? Assuming the Democrats retake the House, which remains probable even with Republican redistricting, any brave civil servant at the IRS who blows the whistle on a superior’s attempt to block a Trump audit will be guaranteed a friendly hearing at the House Ways and Means Committee. Indeed, any civil servant who obeys any such direction could make himself vulnerable to prosecution; the maximum penalty for failing to resist executive branch interference with an IRS audit is a $5,000 fine or a five-year jail sentence. That’s yet another way the law doesn’t allow the deal that Trump just cut. We just need to enforce it. If we don’t, we are no longer a country governed by the rule of law.

The Trump administration set the stage for the largest heist in American history this week by creating an illegal fund of taxpayer dollars to compensate President Donald Trump and his allies—including the January 6 insurrectionists for being brought to justice after storming the Capitol in 2021.The Justice Department’s announcement that it will set a $1.8 billion slush fund to settle a $10 billion lawsuit from Trump himself against the IRS drew widespread outrage from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who are exploring ways to block the payments. It also drew criticism from Capitol Police officers who were injured on January 6, who have filed a lawsuit to challenge the legality of this compensation scheme. Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, reportedly resigned after the fund was announced. Until now, Trump’s efforts to reward the insurrectionists who sought to illegally keep him in power in 2020 have been more unethical than illegal. Nobody seriously questioned the lawfulness of Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,500 defendants in January 6–related cases, nor his decision to fire prosecutors who investigated those cases. Not everything that is morally wrong is necessarily illegal.Trump’s efforts to extract billions in federal tax dollars for personal gain—either for self-enrichment or for rewarding his militant supporters for their coup attempt—may have finally crossed the line. What’s more, he and his associates may have broken the laws in ways that even so-called “presidential immunity” bestowed upon him by the Supreme Court cannot protect him.When did Congress authorize the creation of this slush fund, you might ask? Well, it didn’t. Congress created a “permanent, indefinite appropriation” known as the Judgment Fund, to “pay many judicially and administratively ordered monetary awards against the United States.” This allows the federal government to comply with court rulings without constantly seeking individual appropriations from Congress each time a court awards compensation to a plaintiff deemed worthy of a legal remedy. Creating slush funds for a president’s insurrectionist co-conspirators is neither what Congress intended nor what it authorized.The Justice Department claimed that it was creating the Anti-Weaponization Fund as part of a settlement agreement from a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump himself in his personal capacity against the IRS, which he also runs in his official capacity as president. Overseeing the “negotiations” is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was one of Trump’s own personal lawyers before his appointment as deputy attorney general.No law degree is necessary to find fault with this arrangement. As conservative legal scholars are fond of reminding us, the Constitution vests the executive power of the United States in the president of the United States. The president cannot shake hands with himself. Any agreement or contract that a president makes with himself binds only himself, and no one else.To that end, this “settlement” has no legal force beyond that which the Trump administration gives it. Trump’s lawsuit had been assigned to Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami. Last month, she called for additional briefing on whether the lawsuit was constitutionally valid. Article 3 requires courts to only hear “cases and controversies.” In this instance, this means that the parties must be adversarial to one another.Federal judges typically approve litigation settlements. After the two sides moved to dismiss the case, Williams pointedly noted in her order closing it that she had not agreed to any settlement, nor had one been filed with her.Because the Notice does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record. Additionally, Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the “public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources” and the “fair administration of justice,” 28 C.F.R. §§ 50.9, 50.23—neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.The absence of judicial review is even more notable when it comes to an addendum to the “settlement” that was revealed on Tuesday after the case was formally closed. In the memo, Blanche purported to immunize Trump from any future prosecutions, claims, costs, and so on related to his past IRS tax returns, as well as his family members and his personal businesses. The Justice Department did not announce this decision; it was uncovered by Politico’s Josh Gerstein instead.There is no precedent for such brazen corruption in the annals of American history. Nothing else comes close. Watergate seems almost quaint now. Teapot Dome is practically a minor accounting error. The president cannot simultaneously extract billions from the Treasury for corrupt gain while immunizing himself and his family from tax audits. To describe the scheme is to describe its criminality.So what can be done? Trump and his allies appear to be operating under the assumption that they cannot be prosecuted for these acts in the future. One can hardly blame them for it: The Supreme Court’s disastrous invention of “presidential immunity” in the 2024 case Trump v. United States has paved the way for all sorts of crimes by the Trump administration since he returned to power last January.It is important to note, as always, that “presidential immunity” is not real. The Constitution does not explicitly grant any form of immunity to presidents, nor can it be implicitly derived from the constitutional text. If anything, the text requires presidents to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” which a president cannot do if he is breaking them. Presidential immunity is utterly alien to our traditions and our national culture. Trump v. United States was wrong the day that it was decided. It is not constitutional law, and it barely pretends to be. So emboldened is Trump, however, that he may have breached even the Roberts court’s expansive vision of his own impunity. Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. United States lays out a three-part scheme for presidential immunity. For acts within a president’s “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” Roberts claimed, there is absolute immunity from criminal prosecution. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, this would immunize presidents from taking bribes in exchange for pardons—a message that Trump apparently took to heart—and insulate them from ordering the military to kill their political opponents.But beyond that sphere, presidential immunity gets weaker. Most presidential powers as we understand them come from powers delegated or authorized by Congress, not from Article 2 of the Constitution. For all other official acts, Roberts claims that the president only gets “at least presumptive immunity.” And for unofficial acts, there is no criminal immunity.The full bounds of the categories have not been tested in court since the ruling. Since there are so few presidents, it is also not exactly easy to build up case law on the matter. Even within the funhouse mirror of the court’s new jurisprudence, however, basic logic can still reign supreme.If Trump were to claim even a single dollar from the Anti-Weaponization Fund, he would be violating the domestic emoluments clause in Article 2. The clause specifies that the president receives a fixed salary, but simultaneously bars him from accepting “any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” What counts as an “official act” by a president is a nebulous concept at best under the Supreme Court’s reasoning. If there is anything that falls outside that scope, however, it would be something that is explicitly forbidden by Article 2.Federal law also makes it a felony offense for federal officials to steal or embezzle federal funds. In addition to the president himself, Trump’s subordinates may have also placed themselves in future legal peril by executing the scheme on his behalf. Philip Allen Lacovara, a former deputy solicitor general, argued in Bloomberg Law on Wednesday that the agreement amounted to a “collusive settlement” that could open the participants up to criminal charges.“Collusive settlements are a species of fraud,” Lacovara explained. “Most typically, they involve self-interested deals in which a person with insurance agrees to settle a bogus claim or commits to an unreasonable payment in the hope of foisting the costs on an insurance company. Courts find settlements to be fraudulently collusive when, for example, there is no real effort to defend against liability or to contest the exaggerated claim for damages.”Lacovara noted that the statute of limitations for these offenses, if dated from this week, would extend into 2031—well into the next president’s term. Presidential immunity, insofar as it exists, extends only to the president and not to his subordinates. Trump may try to shield Blanche and other associates from future prosecutions through preemptive pardons, but he could not save them from bar associations, which can review their professional misconduct and impose sanctions.Any funds disbursed by the Anti-Weaponization Fund may also be recoverable by lawsuits from ordinary Americans, Lacovara noted. Under federal law, recipients of stolen federal property “are deemed to hold it in trust for the real owner—the American taxpayers—even if they are ignorant of the illegality of the scheme,” he explained. “In addition,” he continued, “the federal False Claims Act allows private citizens to sue anyone who collects money based on a false claim—such as having been the ‘victim’ of ‘weaponization’—and to recover penalty damages from the recipient of ill-gotten federal money.”Trump went to great lengths since last year to rewrite his criminal history and the January 6 prosecutions by framing himself as the victim of “lawfare” and the “weaponization of the federal government” under former President Joe Biden. By trying to steal almost $2 billion from the federal government, he has only confirmed that the scandal was never that he was prosecuted by the Justice Department—it was that he escaped scot-free. That is, at least for now.

I don’t know that I’ll watch Stephen Colbert’s final episode of The Late Show tonight, which will also be the final episode of The Late Show’s 33-year run on CBS. I did, however, watch David Letterman’s. Last Thursday, the enigmatic, Santa-bearded comedian emerged from retirement for one last appearance on the show he created at CBS back in 1993. It was, as one might expect, a bit sentimental and a bit silly. The only two hosts The Late Show has ever known talked briefly about the death of the show, then about Letterman’s new dog, then about memories of his mother—who had been a frequent guest on the original version of The Late Show—and then the two adjourned to the roof, from which they hurled Colbert’s custom-made chairs, along with other sundry objects, in a bit they called “The Wanton Destruction of CBS Property.” And while it made me melancholy to watch these two titans of linear TV throw their last meal of watermelons from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater, it wasn’t only Colbert’s demise that was bumming me out. It feels appropriate that the house Dave built would eventually fall due to the sniveling cowardice of the “suits,” as he liked to call them. (CBS declined to renew Colbert’s contract last year and decided to shutter the show in what they say was a business decision, but which many observers interpret to be an apparent move by Paramount to appease the Trump administration.) In 1991, David Letterman was the host of Late Night With David Letterman, a zany, aggro variety show that occupied the post–Tonight Show time slot on NBC. That year, Johnny Carson, the longtime host of Tonight, shocked both the viewing public and his network by announcing his retirement. As detailed in Bill Carter’s extensive history of the drama, The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night, Letterman had long dreamed of replacing his idol Johnny Carson, and Carson himself saw Letterman as his heir apparent. But, unbeknownst to either of them, NBC had made an agreement with frequent Tonight Show guest-host Jay Leno that the show would be his upon Carson’s retirement. So Letterman lit out for the territory, taking his talents to CBS, where his Late Show began airing in 1993 as a direct time-slot competitor to Leno’s Tonight Show. Letterman’s show, then, came into the world as a giant middle finger to the network executives at NBC who did him wrong. Of course, it’s not as if Letterman independently financed a late-night talk show on public access TV. He just swapped one set of suits for another, but CBS granted him the independence to continue directing his venom toward his betrayers, long after the late-night war was settled. In an incredible segment from 1998, Letterman interviewed Norm MacDonald, who’d just been fired from NBC’s Saturday Night Live, allegedly for making too many jokes about O.J. Simpson, a close friend of NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer. There’s a gleam in Letterman’s eye as he lays into the network for their shortsightedness. “I know Don Ohlmeyer,” he says, “and, between you and me, he’s an idiot.” Then, in 2010, when NBC got caught in another Tonight Show succession drama—giving the show to Conan O’Brien before taking it away and giving it back to Jay Leno—Letterman’s CBS monologue became must-see TV every night, a raucous running commentary on the pettiness and venality of corporate media decision-makers.As Letterman told Colbert, “You can take a man’s show, you can’t take a man’s voice,” I couldn’t help but find the moment hollow. So it’s fitting that a television program born as a result of the intransigence of one major network would die as a result of the intransigency of a different network. As I listened to Letterman impart hard-won koans to his successor—“You can take a man’s show, you can’t take a man’s voice,” he said—I couldn’t help but find the moment hollow. It’s nice to think that Colbert will still have his voice, presumably to podcast with when the time comes, but sometimes the show matters too. This particular one meant a lot to me; it meant a lot more to Stephen Colbert and David Letterman. One day, the political figures who influenced these events will be out of power, and the corporate officers of these major media corporations will seek survival above all else. There may be a day again, in other words, when a show like Colbert’s can exist without interference. But, whatever comes next, The Late Show will be gone—no amount of podcasting will bring it back.Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was always a different animal from Letterman’s. Coming out of the wild experimentation of Letterman’s NBC Late Night, The Late Show toed a narrow line between the courtliness of a Carsonian talk show and the chaotic anti-comedy that was always Letterman’s personal sensibility. There were regular bits like “Stupid Pet Tricks,” “Will It Float?” and my favorite, “Hairpiece (Not a Hairpiece)?” And there were regular disruptions of TV form, like when Letterman would cut away from his patter to stock footage of a car accident. And the interviews could be strange trips, as well. But he was also, more often than not, in control of the proceedings. For all his manic hijinks, Letterman had an almost classical intuition for hosting. Whatever happened once they got out there, Letterman extended a kind of old-school hospitality to his guests. When Letterman retired, I’ll admit that I hoped his replacement would be Amy Sedaris, a beloved recurring guest who would have been a fit standard-bearer to bring The Late Show’s comic pandemonium into the future. Instead, the show went to Colbert, a longtime comedy partner of Sedaris, and transformed in different ways. Never experimental or radical, Colbert replaced Letterman’s rascally manners with the warm wiliness of your favorite high school teacher. Colbert interviewed guests with an earnestness that could read as smarm in a media environment so unused to that kind of sincerity. This was quite a departure from the comedian’s previous life playing a Bill O’Reilly–esque satire of Fox News journalism on The Colbert Report. On that show, distanced from his own authentic personality, Colbert could be cutting and astringent. Losing that made sense when he made the transition to The Late Show, but it also meant losing other aspects of his appeal. The new Colbert felt more aligned with the naïve optimist who launched the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in 2010, a stunt that was meant to pillory political hypocrisy across the political spectrum but that served as a cringey precursor to the kind of bothsidesism that now seems endemic in political commentary. Colbert tried to begin his Late Show from an apolitical angle, to trade his old precision satire tools for a softer approach, but, within a year, it became clear that he needed to get political to survive. Still, as the critic Will Leitch wrote recently, “The Late Show was a perfectly fine show, but it was never transcendent in the way The Colbert Report was. It was just another show in which an older White guy told safe jokes from behind a desk.”In that way, it feels odd to mourn so hard for a show like this. By the time Letterman retired in 2015, we were already well into late-night’s viral era, a period inaugurated by the rise of Jimmy Fallon. As much as the circulation of clips online helped breathe some life into the form, it would prove to never really be enough. In 2024, for instance, Fallon’s Tonight Show was reduced to four episodes per week, and Seth Meyers, who hosts Letterman’s original Late Night, had to fire his studio band. It would not be a surprise if either of those shows bit the dust in the coming years, for reasons political or otherwise.Of all the snide and smug voices of the men of late-night, Colbert’s was the godliest. Despite his partisan bite, the most righteous. One of Colbert’s most visible innovations in the format was the conspicuous introduction of his devout Catholicism into the proceedings. Never preachy, Colbert could sometimes affect the manner of a cool catechism teacher, bringing to mind the jokes that might punch up a stultifying homily, a kind of welcoming rebelliousness cushioned by belief in a system bigger than us all. Viral clips of the show would often feature Colbert and his guest engaging in questions about the existence of God. (Notably, the most overt instance of recent censorship came when CBS pushed The Late Show not to air Colbert’s interview with James Talarico, much of which focused on the possibilities of a new Christian left. The interview went straight to the show’s YouTube channel.) Of all the snide and smug voices of the men of late-night, Colbert’s was the godliest. Despite his partisan bite, the most righteous. They don’t make hosts like that anymore—they hardly ever did.A hallmark of the MAGA movement—at least in its second wave—is the seeming contradiction between its weaponized nostalgia and its compulsion to tear things down. Trump motored through both elections on the energy of a sentimental politics of return to a lost America, an America perhaps represented by the wide reach and influence of a program like The Ed Sullivan Show. The past, we are told, has been altered beyond recognition by derangements of public consensus like #MeToo and DEI, and so the mission of this politics is to rid the country of those unasked-for revolutions. But the means have all been destructive. Rather than reform or rat out existing institutions, this administration has sought eradication. This is the logic of Elon Musk’s DOGE quest. You can’t reform the Department of Education; you have to get rid of it. You don’t get a late-night comedian fired or bring him in line; you get his show canceled.But what does a show matter? The late-night shows—whether it’s The Late Show or The Tonight Show or Jimmy Kimmel Live!—are locations of the sloppy, sometimes generative convergence between TV’s past and its future. They can be spaces that reinforce norms, but they can also be spaces of figuring out. Letterman helped the format to take on that charge, and Colbert, in his spiritual pilgrimage for a media environment free from fear and insanity, was striving along those lines. The continued existence of these shows gave that kind of exploratory improvisation a place at the center of the cultural ecosystem, and a budget to go with it. What the closing down of The Late Show represents is the wanton destruction of cultural property. It was imperfect, outdated even, but the possibility of change goes out the window now that it’s gone. I’d love to say that I hope, one day, something better replaces it. I love the Dick Cavett-on-drugs audacity of The Adam Friedland Show, and Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney was full of surprises. The talk show, if anything, is a genre on the rise online. But The Late Show is dead, and the late-night show is dying as an institution. To imagine its glorious return would be to avow a misguided kind of faith in the institutions and stewards of contemporary corporate media. It’s too late for that now.

       there was smoke coiling the sky, dust and rubbish   windblown in an alley, a light rain beginning to fall,   once a black Cadillac rusted in a field of milkweed,   October snow come down over Lake Huron,   once a young man disappeared and was found   days later a hundred and fifty miles away alone   weeping near the railroad tracks in Carey, Ohio,   those thoughts, those days, consciousness expended   determining the value of wage labor, the long-eared owl   in the red maple watches a father in his living room chair   weeping, furies and Molochs, hot-eyed comedies,   the shy and kind one’s mercies redeem me,   old-souled premonitions, eternities repeated   in a red and black flow.

Mom is still alive!It’s fall!The trees outside her window turnThe sheets and blankets on the hospital bed come and go like hills in a paintingNo one would buyGentle and white and very stillLike a snow scene or a dish of ice-cream

The super-rich and their vassals are deeply invested in the system because it richly rewards them. They’ll deploy everything they can – from the media to the ‘security’ forces – to prevent change Jonathan Cook Substack Two pronounced – and inverse – trends in western societies have long been observable, and yet they are rarely […]

The new legislation from Senate Democrats aims to insulate Stars and Stripes from the Trump administration’s efforts to assert control.

President Rodrigo Paz, who has restored US-Bolivia relations, was elected last year on a promise to enact economic “shock therapy.”

Republicans are starting to break with Donald Trump’s corrupt $1.8 billion slush fund. Vulnerable House GOPer Brian Fitzpatrick announced that he’s pursuing legislation to block the fund. Other Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, are raising serious questions about it. Relatedly, Trump let out a bizarre, angry tirade about Representative Fitzpatrick. Trump ripped him for disloyalty, snarling that this “doesn’t work out well” for Republicans. Though Trump’s anger might not have been about Fitzpatrick’s opposition to the slush fund, Fitzpatrick also opposes his ballroom. So this shows how Republicans are enraging Trump by running from his corruption. We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who argues that Trump’s corruption will be his legacy. We discuss new polling showing Trump at record economic lows, why the fund is deadly for the GOP, and why his pathologies don’t permit him to let Republicans get distance from him. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.