Trump Gives Away the Game on His $1.8 Billion Slush Fund Plans

President Trump doesn’t want to put in writing that his slush fund is dead, and he’s prepared to sacrifice acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for it.After the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed its scheduled vote on whether to advance Blanche’s nomination for attorney general Thursday morning, due to Republican opposition, the president made it clear that he cares a whole lot more about his $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” than Blanche’s future.“Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it! He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Thursday. “I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”The vote was postponed thanks to Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who have refused to vote “yes” on Blanche’s nomination over concerns about the status of Trump’s settlement with the IRS, which gave an IRS audit immunity deal to Trump and his family and created the nearly $1.8 billion slush fund for aggrieved Trump allies who feel that they’ve been attacked for supporting the president. Although Blanche testified publicly that the fund is not “moving forward,” staffers in the Justice Department and White House continued to promise Trump allies some form of payment after the fact.Cornyn has repeatedly requested written confirmation from the Justice Department that the fund is dead. Without a statement in writing—as well as limits on Trump’s IRS audit immunity deal—he and Tillis are sticking with “no.”But rather than kill the fund for good, Trump says he’ll wait them out. Blanche can be replaced. The slush fund, apparently, cannot.“I thought we were pretty close to landing the plane last night, but this morning there’s been some more complications,” Cornyn told reporters Thursday. “I think if this were just between me and Todd Blanche, we would have worked this out. But apparently he’s getting some pushback from higher ups at the White House. I don’t know who, but this doesn’t need to be this hard.”“We want to make sure that it remains dead, and that the president isn’t given any immunity from future audits that the ordinary taxpayer would not enjoy,” Cornyn clarified to CBS News.Although both Cornyn and Tillis are set to leave office in January, their outspoken pushback serves as further evidence of the growing cracks in Trump’s grip on congressional Republicans.“POTUS is mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis,” Cornyn posted after Trump moved to sideline Blanche.The Union of European Football Associations, or UEFA, is pulling out of future World Cups over FIFA’s plan to sell shares to the highest bidder, including members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle. UEFA announced Thursday that the organization of 55 national associations “will not participate in FIFA competitions” going forward. The decision comes shortly after FIFA President Gianni Infantino threatened to cut funding from teams that don’t get behind his moneymaking scheme. “We unanimously and unequivocally reject FIFA’s proposal to transfer ownership interests in the World Cup and other FIFA competitions to private investors,” the statement said. Last week, FIFA announced the creation of the FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE, which is expected to raise up to $4.2 million in the next year by “carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE.” Critics immediately decried the decision to sell stakes in the World Cup, which is managed by FIFA, a nonprofit organization. The move could potentially earn Infantino tens of millions of dollars. “This model has no place in the world of football,” UEFA said in its statement. The group said it would continue to boycott so long as Infantino’s proposal “stayed alive.”Infantino reportedly held investor discussions with members of the Trump administration. The move came amid mounting concerns over Infantino’s relationship with Trump, after the U.S. president openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a player on the U.S. men’s soccer team. In addition, FIFA reportedly stated that once the approval was granted, the investor group would be led by Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared who is under investigation for alleged corruption. Read more about Infantino’s plan:Republicans apparently have no problem with President Trump protecting himself and his family from any tax investigations ever again. On Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee voted down an amendment to a tax procedure bill that would have prevented the IRS from making any tax audit immunity deals with a sitting president, their family, or any connected entities. It also would have effectively killed Trump’s IRS audit immunity deal and required the Treasury Department to report any related agreements to Congress. Every Republican on the committee voted against the amendment, including Senators Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, who will be leaving the Senate at the end of this year after being defeated in GOP primaries by Trump-backed challengers. Cornyn and Cassidy have vocally opposed Trump’s settlement deal with the IRS, which not only would give the president, his family, and his businesses protection from audits from the IRS, but also calls for the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund for anyone who claims to have been victimized by “political weaponization” from the federal government. Cornyn in particular has vowed to vote against Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until he gets a written agreement that the slush fund is dead and the IRS audit immunity deal is narrowed in scope (so as not to apply to future filings). But their opposition to the settlement seems to end at actually taking any legislative action against it. The amendment vote was forced by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking member on the committee, and was supported by every Democrat on the committee. The amendment failed by a 14–13 vote. “Our office has received more than 7000 messages from constituents expressing their opposition and anger,” Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell told Bloomberg Law. “We need to make clear to those law-abiding citizens that the well-connected are not above the law and they don’t get a free pass when it comes to compliance with our tax laws.”Other Republicans on the committee claimed that approving the amendment would have doomed the bipartisan bill altogether. It’s a package of changes to tax procedures, including collections, processes, and administration. Republican Senator Mike Crapo, the committee’s chair, said “this is not the place” to resolve the settlement. “If this bill were to become the vehicle where this issue is resolved, it would achieve basically making this bill a partisan bill,” and that “would turn this bill into a bill that has a much dimmer future for becoming law,” Crapo said. He and his fellow Republicans haven’t offered any other solutions to Trump’s unprecedented and outrageous IRS settlement, though. Elon Musk is planning to revive his shady America PAC to help out President Donald Trump’s party in the midterm elections. Despite the billionaire technocrat’s pledge last year to stay out of politics, his America PAC is planning to direct its efforts toward door-knocking, direct mail, and digital advertising, sources told Axios Wednesday. “America PAC was an essential partner for our historic GOTV operation in 2024, and their return for 2026 is a huge boost for Republicans across the country,” James Blair, Trump’s senior political advisor told Axios. “We will again outsmart our opponents and ruthlessly execute our mission for the GOP between now and Election Day,” he added. The news of Musk’s return to politics came alongside reports that his company SpaceX had landed a $1.6 billion military contract.It’s not clear how much Musk plans to spend, but given the $288 million he personally poured into Trump’s reelection effort, the number is expected to be high. America PAC has a history of using shady means to drum up the conservative vote. During the 2024 presidential election, America PAC launched a series of digital ads using the image of Trump’s assassination to invite people browsing Google to “register to vote.” In key battleground states, users were directed to a very different page, prompting them to enter their phone number, address, and age. Once complete, users were then greeted by a “Thank You” page, with no actual link to voter registration in sight. The information collected from user responses to this ad campaign informed the PAC’s canvassing efforts in those states. So, in effect, collecting private data that went right back to the Trump campaign.Musk also waded into murky legal waters with his direct mail scheme. In Georgia, residents received partially pre-filled absentee ballot applications from Musk’s America PAC, in violation of state law. Members of the Georgia State Elections Board voted to issue a formal letter of reprimand to Musk’s America PAC—but it seems that nothing happened after that. And Musk’s door-to-door efforts weren’t exactly a breeze. Canvassers reported that the app they used was buggy, and some even exploited its technical issues to fake door knocks. Other canvassers said they were tricked and threatened as part of Musk’s get-out-the-vote efforts. If Musk’s America PAC is really coming out of dormancy, then Americans can expect even more misleading ads, illegal mailers, and chaotic canvassing efforts. The State Department is having some trouble identifying states.At the annual International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this week, the U.S. State Department unveiled a map of the African continent with every single country mislabeled. Nigeria drifted into the Sahara Desert, landlocked and lost; Mozambique was relocated to the eastern Horn of Africa; and the Ivory Coast, somehow, found itself nowhere near a coast. The map also included a country with no name, while Cameroon, dutifully included in the list of countries, got no real estate on the map at all.The map was revealed about halfway through a presentation about the State Department’s new international health agreements. It was supposed to depict opportunities for Annual Program Statements by country in Africa, as part of the implementation process for remaining AIDS prevention programming after President Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency dismantled USAID last year. According to an analysis by Reuters, the map contained an artificial intelligence watermark which identified it as made by OpenAI. Presentation attendees—including high-level officials representing several of the mislabeled countries—took screenshots of the map and posted them online. Photos posted by journalist and AIDS expert Emily Bass were shared across LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views, Reuters reports.“The U.S. government’s failure to catch this error before displaying the slide at the top international AIDS conference in the world, in a session that featured the Director General of Nigeria as an invited guest, is not only disrespectful to African collaborators, it’s also a significant tell,” Bass wrote on Substack. “As this session made clear in so many ways, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy is redrawing the map and rewriting history.”Matt Petit, who focuses on geopolitics and AI at the Atlantic Council, called the map “beyond embarrassing” in a post on LinkedIn. “Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work.”In a statement following the presentation, the State Department claimed “full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” It went on to blame a staff member for hastily changing the slide deck before the session began. Despite the embarrassing moment, the department said it remains “committed to fighting AIDS.” Maybe a map that can’t identify a single African country says more about America’s AIDS diplomacy than a briefing ever could.