“Stupid on Stilts”: Republican Senator Rips Trump’s Slush Fund

Thom Tillis, who has represented North Carolina in the Senate for more than a decade, is retiring at the end of the year, and in recent months the Republican has become more outspoken about the leader of his own party.

In an interview with Spectrum News Wednesday, Tillis was asked what he thought of Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund, which was established last week as a result of a settlement between Trump and the IRS.

“I think it’s stupid on stilts,” Tillis said. “It will invariably put us in a position where your taxpayer dollars and my taxpayer dollars could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer, admitted their guilt, got convicted, got pardoned, and now we’re going to pay them for that? That’s absurd. The American people are going to reject this out of hand.… When you take money from me to give to a purpose that I vehemently disagree with, that’s tyranny.”

It’s a solid explanation of what’s wrong with the fund, which is expected to be doled out to Trump allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by past administrations. These allies include January 6 rioters and members of Trump-backed super PACs.

Donald K. Sherman, the president of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the fund “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history” in a New York Times interview. Various applicants—including the leader of the Proud Boys, the Trump-obsessed founder of MyPillow, and a former Trump campaign official—are already trying to stick their hands in the honey pot.

House and Senate Democrats are looking to introduce legislation that would block the fund, or at the very least force votes on it. Similar to the issue of taxpayer money going to Trump’s ballroom or the Iran war, MAGA Republicans seem to realize the fund is unpopular, and don’t want to go on the record about whether they support it.

Tillis is a rare Republican unafraid to take a stand against Trump once in a while.

In June 2025, he voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act after expressing concerns over proposed cuts to Medicaid in his home state. Trump, unsurprisingly, threw a fit and threatened to endorse Tillis’s future primary challengers.

Since Tillis then decided to retire, Trump sort of got his wish. Trump has endorsed Republican Michael Whatley in the upcoming North Carolina Senate race. But Democrat Roy Cooper is a worthy opponent who is leading in recent polling.

The Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the 2024 presidential election has finally reached the public—and it leaves a lot to be desired.

CNN published the report Thursday after months of the DNC refusing to release it, with Chair Ken Martin saying it would be a “distraction,” back in December. On Wednesday, Martin repeated that assessment, and added, “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime—not even close—and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on the report that was produced.

“After last November’s massive Democratic wins, I didn’t want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize. For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word,” Martin said.

The report doesn’t examine many of the major criticisms of the Democratic Party’s 2024 campaign, from President Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection to the impact of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, which the Biden administration failed to stop. Another glaring omission was the impact of Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee for president late in 2024 without anything close to a primary or electoral process.

It also includes multiple errors—it cites Washington Governor Bob Ferguson as a candidate who supposedly did things right, only to point out later that he underperformed Harris at the polls. In other discrepancies, it has conflicting vote percentages written for North Carolina’s gubernatorial race and misspells the names of multiple Democratic politicians.

The solutions the report offers are minimal. One paragraph states, “Building to win requires new thinking, and building to last requires thinking about more than the next election. It requires finding the best way to connect with the right voters in the right places, and if 2024 has proven anything, there is enough money to do it all the right way.” But what that means doesn’t get much elaboration.

Martin seems to be right about the report’s flaws. But hiding it and not commissioning a new one—or at least not editing this one to a passable standard—is a scandal in itself. At a time when Republicans are polling at historic lows, Democrats need to capitalize and offer a better vision for the country. This isn’t it.

Read the full report here.

The MAGA-verse is lining up for the Justice Department’s taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” payouts.

The DOJ launched its $1.8 billion slush fund earlier this week, offering compensation to virtually any right-winger who felt targeted by the previous presidential administration. To no one’s surprise, the free-for-all has already attracted quite a crowd, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio.

Lindell lost practically everything he had defending Donald Trump’s 2020 faux election claims. The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to promote the conspiracy, railing against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic and claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Trump from retaking the White House.  

Doing so ultimately cost him millions of dollars in legal fees and penalties, and nearly decimated his infomercial-based business—all of which Lindell now claims is the basis for him to recoup some $400 million from the Trump administration. 

Tarrio faced 22 years in prison for his role in orchestrating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, before he was pardoned by the president last year. Tarrio told the Miami New Times that he would “definitely” be applying for compensation. Reuters reported that Tarrio estimates his claim to be somewhere between $2 million and $5 million.

“I’m not greedy,” Tarrio told Reuters. “But my life was all fucked up because of this.”

Hundreds of other pardoned January 6ers are also in the queue, including a sex offender who bear-sprayed cops and a convicted child molester who told his victims he would give them money from the slush fund in exchange for their silence.

At least one pardoned riot participant is seeking $30 million in restitution for the alleged governmental weaponization.

Democrats attempted to stave off such payments in January, when California Senator Alex Padilla introduced the “No Rewards for January 6 Rioters Act,” but the bill has made no progress since.

The DOJ chief, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, doesn’t see anything wrong with forcing the American people to foot the bill for Trump’s aggrieved allies.

“What American would say, ‘Oh my gosh, that is terrible’? I very much disagree with the idea that the American taxpayer is indignant that a victim of weaponization—a victim who suffered, whether it was legal fees, loss of job, they had their life turned upside down that was not appropriate,” Blanche told CNN Wednesday. “I do think the American people have an issue with that. To the contrary, I think they do want their taxpayer dollars spent on things like that.”

The lawsuit filed against President Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund has been assigned to a judge already on the president’s bad side.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon will be overseeing the case against Trump’s slush fund too. Leon has previously drawn Trump’s ire not only by delaying the construction of the White House ballroom, but also by striking down the president’s executive order to target law firm WilmerHale.

On March 31, Leon issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking construction on the ballroom, saying in his ruling, “Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!”

Just over two weeks later, Leon ruled that Trump could work on the underground, national security–related parts of the project but not on the aboveground ballroom.

“National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” Leon said in his ruling, criticizing Trump for trying to go around his earlier injunction by claiming the ballroom’s bulletproof glass, bomb shelters, and other security measures were for national security reasons.

This infuriated Trump, who called Leon a “Trump Hating” judge who was “highly political” and accused him of having “gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built.”

Now Leon will be in charge of examining whether a slush fund to pay Trump’s political supporters who run afoul of law enforcement is constitutional. Considering how much criticism is already being raised against the fund, even from Republicans, Trump may soon be writing another angry screed on Truth Social.

Donald Trump just wants to let the kids vape.

Eight days after Reynolds American, an American tobacco company with a history of government lobbying, threw $5 million at a Trump-backed super PAC, the Food and Drug Administration moved to ease restrictions on flavored vapes, allowing companies like Reynolds to roll out flavors previously banned because they were too marketable to minors.

The donation was made April 30 and revealed in a campaign finance filing posted Wednesday. It was first reported on by The New York Times.

Shortly after the $5 million donation, a Reynolds executive and two Reynolds lobbyists had lunch with Trump at his Florida golf club, and reportedly pressed the president on current FDA regulations. Trump pulled out his phone and called his appointed commissioner of the FDA, Marty Makary, to complain. Makary did not pick up.

The next week, The Wall Street Journal found that the president had become frustrated with Makary because of his refusal to approve blueberry, mango, and menthol vapes from one manufacturer due to health concerns. Under pressure from Trump, the FDA announced a few days later that it was removing some restrictions, and Makary resigned.

In his first term, Trump took some steps to control youth vaping, which was exploding in popularity. But on the campaign trail in 2024, he pulled an about-face, promising to “save vaping” in a poorly disguised effort to capture the youth vote.

Vapes from Chinese companies sold in American convenience stores and gas stations remain popular with young people, and have created a $6 billion market share. Instead of properly regulating those devices and reducing vaping rates, Trump would prefer that U.S. companies profit from the crisis, as well—and donate to his super PACs, of course.