Even MAGA anchor Joe Kernen has some concerns about President Donald Trump’s “slush fund.”
Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” compensation scheme has been met with bipartisan pushback, including from the pro-Trump CNBC host.
On CNBC’s Squawk Box, Kernan asked GOP Majority Whip Rep. Tom Emmer about “the slush fund, or whatever you want to call it.”
“The move to go back on the audits and permanently put those to bed, is that a bridge too far for some Republicans that might have been uncomfortable with other things? Are we finally hitting a point where some people are saying enough?” he asked.
Emmer, in response, went on a somewhat unrelated rant about the Senate, even with its GOP majority, not having enough votes to pass MAGA’s signature voting legislation, the SAVE Act.
“This is a Senate that tells us regularly they don’t have the votes. They don’t have the votes for the SAVE America Act that more than 70 percent of Americans agree with. You’re bringing up something that was added, as I understand it, to the funding bill—we call it the funding bill because we had to do it with 50-plus-one because Democrats apparently hate our law enforcement and weren’t willing to fund CBP and ICE. Now they’ve added this fund,” Emmer ranted.
Emmer said he would like to hear from Trump’s former personal attorney, who is now the administration’s acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche. Blanche signed off on the fund after Trump agreed to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.
“I would like to hear from Todd Blanche. I understand that [Senate Republicans] started to hear from him yesterday as to exactly what this is. Great! Let’s find out what it is before everybody crucifies it. I think people over there look for excuses every day to say no instead of enacting the agenda of 77 million people,” he continued.
Kernen was not having Emmer’s explanation, as he asserted that the optics of the “slush fund” looked suspicious.
“Maybe having your own personal lawyer at this point become AG, the AG is the only person that could have gotten rid of these audits, right? And it was his personal lawyer! It just looks… It just looks, smells bad!” Kernen declared.
Kernen, one of Trump’s longtime golf buddies, is hardly the first conservative to question the president’s new scheme.
As it currently stands, the new so-called “Truth and Justice Commission” will be under no obligation to disclose how it is spent, and the identities of recipients can be kept private. The funds will can be used to pay Trump allies who claim to be victims of government “weaponization,” including Jan. 6 insurrectionists that the president has already pardoned.
Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents a swing district, is spearheading a bipartisan effort in the House to kill the fund in its current form.
“A massive discretionary fund, with no oversight or approval from Congress, represents a dangerous backsliding in the transparency of our institutions and our commitment to the American taxpayer,” he wrote in a letter to Blanche.
Trump, in turn, took his anger out on Fitzpatrick’s fiancée, Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich.
“Her husband votes against me all the time, can you imagine?” Trump said. “Voting against Trump, you know what happens with that—doesn’t work out well.”
