Senate Republicans Chicken Out—Again.
How can something this unsurprising still be so disappointing?
Finally, some decent economic news. The May jobs numbers are in, and the economy added 172,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. That exceeded the market’s expectations. What may be most remarkable is that only 47,000 of those 172,000 were in health care and social assistance—the two sectors that had been basically propping up our economy. But it’s not all bright lights and gravy. The war in Iran isn’t over—feeding fears of coming inflation. And now we have New World screwworm detected in cattle in Texas, likely spiking beef prices before the summer break. Why can’t we just have nice things? Happy Friday.
Join Catherine Rampell and Sam Stein for Receipts Live on Substack and YouTube today at noon EDT.
They Are Who We Thought They Were
by William Saletan
On Thursday, Republican senators had a chance to kill Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for professed victims of “weaponization” by the Department of Justice. They refused. A Democratic amendment to block the fund, as part of an immigration-enforcement spending bill, failed in the Senate. Subsequent attempts to limit or outlaw the fund failed as well.
Republicans seem to think they can walk away from this issue because Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, has said he won’t implement the fund. They’re wrong. Blanche’s corrupt deal with Trump, in which he agreed to set up the fund as part of a fake “settlement” of a Trump lawsuit against the IRS, remains intact. And it’s not just the slush fund that is very much alive. The deal also continues to guarantee—and Blanche has refused to withdraw—immunity for Trump and his family against any investigations by the IRS.
DOJ revealed the immunity guarantee on May 19, a day after it announced the slush fund. Under the pretense of settling Trump’s suit, Blanche issued an order that insulated Trump and his family from tax enforcement:
The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES each of the Plaintiffs from, and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims, counterclaims, causes of action, appeals, or requests for any relief, including injunctive relief, monetary relief, damages, examinations, or similar or related reviews, appeals, debt relief, costs, attorney’s fees, expenses, and/or interest, whether presently known or unknown that . . . have been or could have been asserted by Defendants against any of the Plaintiffs.
Blanche extended this immunity to Trump’s family members, “trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries.” It covered “any matters that were raised or could have been raised” in the Trump family’s legal battles with the IRS. The order could save Trump more than $100 million in known tax obligations the IRS might otherwise have recovered. And that’s not counting whatever else he and his family are hiding.
The deal was unprecedented and corrupt in numerous ways. Among them:
It shielded Trump from audits based on a lawsuit that wasn’t about audits. (Trump sued because his returns were leaked by a contractor, not by the IRS.)
In so doing, it violated DOJ policy that settlements must be limited to germane matters.
It selectively yielded to Trump while DOJ fought lawsuits by other parties regarding the same leaks.
It violated a law that bars the IRS from withdrawing audits at the president’s direction.
It overrode civil servants in the IRS who had written a long memo outlining arguments for challenging Trump’s lawsuit.
It bypassed judicial scrutiny by inventing a phony “settlement” that took the case out of court.
It evaded a judicial order that had instructed Trump and DOJ to show that they were adversaries, not colluding partners.
Nobody from DOJ bothered to challenge Trump’s suit or even show up in court.
As Trump’s personal attorney, Blanche was handsomely paid. In 2023 and 2024, his firm got more than $9 million from a pro-Trump PAC.
In one respect, the immunity order was even more corrupt than the slush fund: The slush fund didn’t extend to Trump and his family. The immunity order did. That difference has turned out to be pivotal. When Republican senators signaled that they opposed the slush fund, the DOJ said it would be willing to drop it. But not the immunity order. That was never taken off the table. In fact, Blanche made clear when testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee that the immunity order would not be dropped.
Under questioning from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), he claimed that the order was normal procedure. “Anytime the IRS settles with an individual taxpayer or another company, as part of the settlement, it’s standard,” he said.
He was lying. As a matter of IRS and DOJ policy, Blanche’s deal with Trump was grossly abnormal. But as a matter of Trumpian morality, Blanche’s compromise—publicly dumping the slush fund while keeping the immunity order—was standard operating procedure. Trump did what he always does: He screwed other people and protected himself.
By rejecting amendments to kill the slush fund legislatively—and not even attempting to block the immunity order—Republican senators essentially accepted that compromise. With their complicity, Trump has once again put himself above the law.
Trump has announced his intention to nominate Blanche to be the attorney general (in a full rather than an acting capacity). In refusing to drop the immunity order, Blanche has made his ethical emptiness clear. In an interview with Sean Hannity last weekend, he dismissed the “drama around the fact that [Trump] settled with his own DOJ.” Such putative conflicts of interest were immaterial, said Blanche:
Is a congressman allowed to work on tax legislation if he or she stands to benefit from it? Of course. It’s their job. . . . When [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller said, “You might want to indict the president for obstruction,” and [Attorney General] Bill Barr said no, was that a conflict? That was his AG saying, “I’m not going to indict you, sir.” No, we do that all the time.
Yes. In Trump’s government, flunkies like Blanche and Barr do that all the time. And if Republicans in Congress won’t stop the corruption, voters will have to step in.
Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?
by Benjamin Parker
Donald Trump’s most dangerous traits are probably his greed and his cruelty.1 The former inspires the massive corruption that is corroding the framework of the republic. The latter motivates the widespread abuses of government power that infringe on people’s rights, intimidate legitimate opposition, and—in the cases of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and unknown numbers of deportees and former USAID aid recipients around the world—end people’s lives. Will described above how Senate Republicans overnight refused to thwart Trump’s greed. But they also enabled his cruelty.
Less than a year after pumping $170 billion into immigration enforcement, Senate Republicans voted early this morning to add another $70 billion to that sum. In other words, Senate Republicans looked at the last year of mass deportations, of ham-handed “enforcement operations,” of wrongful detentions and deportations, of foreign torture chambers and domestic prison complexes, of masked government thugs and semi-official government violence, of protests, of court rebukes, of chaos in the Justice Department and in America’s cities, and they thought: Yes, we’d like more of that, please.
Much of the new money, like the money approved last year, will be used to hire and equip new ICE and Border Patrol officers. But as Adrian Carrasquillo has noted, there will be less training for those new officers precisely because they are being rushed into service. The worry last year was that Trump was turning an enlarged, heavily armed ICE into his own personal paramilitary. After witnessing ICE’s cruelty and lawlessness since then, we should be even more concerned now—especially to the degree immigration and election fraud are entangled in Trump’s mind, about which more below.
If Democrats manage to retake just one chamber in the midterms, it will be all but impossible for them to rescind any of this funding, or to change the rules governing immigration enforcement. Even if they take both houses, they will likely have to resort to the same reconciliation tactics Republicans are using now if they want to cut ICE and the Border Patrol back down to a proper size. And even then, they will face the problem of Trump’s veto, the possibility of more government shutdowns, and the difficulty of maintaining opposition to an authoritarian president while holding together a fractious majority.
And those are just the medium-term problems. The bigger questions about what to do with all those ICE agents; how to repair the economic damage from mass deportations; how to make whole all the people who have been wrongly injured (or worse); and how to create an immigration enforcement system that enforces the law without breaking it—those are the real, long-term hurdles. Unfortunately, after the Senate’s vote overnight, we’re further from addressing those problems than we were at this time yesterday.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Europeans Don’t Trust Us… In fact, they consider us a threat, writes PAUL ROSENZWEIG.
I Used to Be a Pizza Hut, Ask Me Anything… An indie documentary explores the afterlives of an iconic brand’s castoffs; ADDISON DEL MASTRO reviews.
We Got a Billionaire Problem… On the flagship podcast, JONATHAN V. LAST and KATHERINE POMPILIO join TIM MILLER to discuss whether America needs to start taxing extreme wealth, assess the Democrats’ search for a standard-bearer, and examine what happens when pardoned January 6th offenders reoffend.
Bringing ‘Day of the Dead’ Back to Life… On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, SONNY BUNCH is talking about Scream Factory’s new 4K of George Romero’s Day of the Dead with JEFF ROLAND and JOHN HARRISON, covering the film’s legacy, its painstaking restoration, and why this collector’s edition is a must-own for horror fans and physical media enthusiasts alike.
Quick Hits
INSURRECTIONIST RECIDIVISM: Just over five hundred days have passed since Donald Trump, on the first day of his second term in office, pardoned more than a thousand January 6th criminals. The supposedly tough-on-crime president chose not just to pardon those convicted of more minor offenses like trespassing, but also those who attacked police officers. And there’s no way anyone could have predicted this, but 97 of those pardoned people already went out and committed crimes again. Lawfare has the details:
The alleged crimes by Jan. 6 defendants since Jan. 6, 2021, run the gamut from relatively low-grade offenses like property damage, possession of drug paraphernalia, and trespassing to serious felonies like grand larceny, stalking, planning to assassinate law enforcement officials and prominent politicians, and defrauding government agencies. One Jan. 6 pardonee was convicted in February 2026 of child molestation and sentenced to life in prison. Another was convicted in 2025 of reckless homicide.
At least 14, meanwhile, have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and at least six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have faced charges for physical assaults, illegal firearms possession, or other violent crimes. . . .
Perhaps most strikingly, five recipients of presidential clemency were arrested in connection with conduct that occurred at least in part subsequent to Trump’s freeing them from prison—meaning that Trump’s clemency order on the first day of his second term may have actively facilitated criminal conduct. These include:
• Andrew Paul Johnson, who was freed from prison as a result of the pardon in 2025, was convicted of five charges, including child molestation, in February 2026, and sentenced to life in prison. The criminal conduct for which he was convicted took place both before and after his pardon.
• Zachary Alam, who was convicted of felony charges of grand larceny and burglary just months after his pardon.
• Ryan Nichols, who was charged with deadly conduct and harassment on May 10, 2026, after allegedly threatening a person with a gun in a church parking lot.
NUMBERING THE NONSENSE: For almost a decade, Donald Trump has been insisting that massive numbers of illegal immigrants are voting in American elections, distorting popular vote totals and maybe even swaying the outcomes of races. Now, after the Trumpified Justice Department has had a year and a half to look into this top-priority issue, we have a good idea of just how big the problem really is.
It’s really, really small.
Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh complained to Justice Department prosecutors last month that the total number of prosecutions for illegal immigrants voting was just ninety, according to a New York Times report. But even that overstates the problem: “Even smaller than the number of active investigations, experts and a review of records suggest, is the number of noncitizens who have so far been charged with such voting crimes since President Trump took office for a second term.”
The number of cases that will actually result in conviction will likely be lower than the number of prosecutions. It will certainly not come near the 11,780 votes Trump asked Georgia officials to invent in 2020.
THE OTHER HALF OF THE WAR: The United States and Iran have been at an impasse over the Strait of Hormuz—and the future of Iran’s nuclear program and possible sanctions relief—for weeks. But part of the reason the talks seem to be going nowhere is because of the other half of the war, which is proceeding 1,300 miles away in Southern Lebanon.
Israel has been at war with Iran and its proxies since October 7th. That war wasn’t limited to Gaza—it also involved the bombardment of Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut and the killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah; an air campaign against the Houthis in Yemen; the bombing campaigns against Iran in 2025 and 2026; a limited invasion of Syria to seize strategic geography near the Golan Heights; and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. That last item—the Israeli invasion and occupation of the home turf of Hezbollah—has been a sticking point in negotiations between Washington and Tehran for months.
Trump allowed himself and the United States to be drawn into a war without a clearly defined goal. Trump deserves the blame for being gullible, naïve, and hubristic, and it’s no surprise that he’s reportedly losing his patience with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who cares more about prosecuting his country’s war against Iran and its proxies than about Trump’s domestic approval rating.
The Trump administration has been attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, which would presumably be a necessary prerequisite for a more formal Iranian–American ceasefire. But Hezbollah just rejected the latest option. To borrow a phrase: Nobody knew the Middle East could be so complicated.
Cheap Shots
This is debatable; there are so many to choose from.
Please tell me when we decided to believe the employment numbers, after Trump gutted BLS?
Where is the ad campaign? The whole effort associated with tying the slush fund to the immigration bill involved forcing Rs to pick a side. Forcing people to pick a side means nothing if nobody knows which side they chose.
Messaging should be primed. NOW!!! Time purchased during the NBA Finals (which will be watched by at least a few Texans!) Come on, Ds; this ought to be routine stuff!!!