Even Mitch McConnell Called It "Morally Wrong"
The slush fund broke the Senate GOP open. The Iran deal finished the job. But until there's a vote, a revolt that ends before the weekend is just a press release.
This is “What I’m Hearing” — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.
For 48 Hours, Senate Republicans Told the Truth.
On Thursday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche walked into a closed-door briefing to sell Senate Republicans on the $1.776 billion slush fund and the tax-immunity deal attached to it. Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reported the room was “incredibly hostile” — roughly half the conference stood up to object. One Republican senator texted him: “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.” And Mitch McConnell, in a statement afterward, said: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.”
That’s the former Senate majority leader, on the record, calling a Trump initiative morally wrong. As Heather Cox Richardson laid out in her reconstruction of the week, this was a genuine revolt. As many as 25 Republican senators are looking for ways to rein in the fund, openly questioning its legal basis, refusing to swallow Blanche’s explanation of how the money would flow.
Then the Iran deal blew up alongside it. By Tuesday, Bill Kristol at The Bulwark had three sitting GOP senators on the record trashing Trump’s exit from the war he started. Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker said it “would be a disaster.” Ted Cruz called it “a disastrous mistake.” Lindsey Graham blasted it on Friday — then reversed himself within 24 hours to call it “simply brilliant,” which is very on-brand for Lindsey Graham. Robert Hubbell reports 14 American service members have now died in what he calls Trump’s “war of choice.” Iran is preparing to charge “fees for navigational services” through the Strait of Hormuz, and CENTCOM struck southern Iran again Monday night. Brown University’s Iran War energy tracker puts the extra cost to the average household at $330 and climbing.
You’ve probably heard a lot about this Republican revolt over the long weekend. And the dissent is certainly notable. This is the first stretch of Trump’s second term with both Mitch McConnell and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee on the record calling Trump’s moves “morally wrong” and “a disaster.” The hawk wing and the MAGA-isolationist wing are visibly at each other’s throats, and Democrats now have on-camera Republican quotes for every 2026 ad they’ll ever need. And yet, none of the dissenters are willing to call out Trump by name. McConnell aimed his ire “at the nation’s top law enforcement official,” not Donald Trump. McConnell is willing to see the administration's moral corruption, but is still unwilling to lay it at Trump's feet.
This so-called “revolt” is meaningless until real actions are taken. A vote on the War Powers Act is coming. And a bill to prevent any federal funds from going to Trump’s slush fund is reportedly working its way through Congress. If Republican Senators break from their dear leader on those votes, then we can start to talk about an actual “revolt.” Until then, it’s all just empty words.
Read more: Letters from an American, The Bulwark (Kristol), Robert Hubbell, Off Message (Beutler).
3,600 Trades in 90 Days.
I wrote last week about Trump’s financial disclosure and the same-day stock buys that followed his public praise of specific companies. The new numbers make the pattern impossible to wave off. A fresh Office of Government Ethics disclosure, broken down by The Bulwark, shows the president executed more than 3,600 individual stock trades worth up to $750 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Three thousand six hundred trades in ninety days.
Judd Legum at Popular Information has more. Trump bought Thermo Fisher stock the same day he toured one of the company’s facilities, and bought Apple after praising it from a stage. Sent to the podium to answer for it, JD Vance told reporters the president “doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his Robinhood account buying stocks” — a denial that would be more persuasive if the federal disclosure didn’t list 3,600 trades. Worth remembering: Vance has said he and Trump both support banning members of Congress from trading stocks. Democrats should hand him that quote every single time a new brokerage statement leaks.
Four days later, Legum reported, Trump posted four Truth Social ads for Stake.us — an online casino that regulators in multiple states call flatly illegal, now blocked in at least 17 states and facing a Los Angeles City Attorney lawsuit that calls its coin mechanic “a ruse.” Stake’s co-founder gave Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC $1 million on April 27.
The president is running a personal brokerage account out of the Oval Office, buys stock in companies on the same day he promotes them, and posts paid-looking ads for an illegal casino that cut his super PAC a seven-figure check. His own vice president went on television and said it isn’t happening, while the federal government’s own disclosure form says it is 3,600 times over. There is a clean word for trading on information and access that the public doesn’t have, and for taking money to promote a product to the people who trust you.
And the family is doing even better than the patriarch. The venture capital firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, 1789 Capital, has gone from managing $200 million in assets to $3.5 billion in the single year since his father returned to office — a 1,650% surge that the firm markets, without irony, as "patriotic capitalism."
Read more: The Bulwark (Press Pass), Popular Information.
The DOJ Spent the Holiday Weekend Deleting January 6 From the Internet.
While the Senate was fighting over whether to pay the January 6 rioters, the Justice Department was quietly erasing the record that they were ever prosecuted. Aaron Parnas reported that the DOJ began a mass overnight purge of its own website to remove references to Capitol-riot prosecutions — press releases, sentencing summaries, and the conviction record of the Oath Keepers. The department didn’t deny it. It reframed the deletions as undoing “weaponization” and “partisan propaganda” from the Biden era.
Parnas spent the weekend screenshotting and archiving the pages before they vanished. Decoding Fox News tracked the specific deletion of the Oath Keepers conviction release. One of the scrubbed pages, per the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield, documented a January 6 defendant who also faced child-solicitation charges in Texas. The government is not just preparing to pay these people. It is deleting the evidence of what they did.
On one side of the Capitol, the administration is building a $1.776 billion fund to write checks to the people who attacked it. On the other side, the Justice Department is going page by page through its own website, on a holiday weekend, deleting the official record that those people were ever charged. Pay the perpetrators; erase the crime. This is how a government rewrites history.
Read more: The Parnas Perspective, Decoding Fox News.
What Can You Do - Build Your Power
Read and bookmark this post from Antonia Scatton. It contains fifty ways you can use your voice and lived experience to counter the corruption seeping through our politics.
That's your Tuesday. Mitch McConnell called Trump's slush fund “morally wrong,” three Republican senators called the Iran deal “a disaster.” Trump made 3,600 stock trades in three months and went on TV to promote an illegal casino that paid his PAC a million dollars. The DOJ spent the holiday deleting January 6 from the internet.