Harry Litman - They Blinked [View all]
As of this afternoon, President Trump is retreating from the $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, according to The New York Times and multiple other reports. The White House communicated the decision to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill today. The decisive moment came earlier Monday, when Speaker Mike Johnson met with Trump and told him bluntly that the fund was torpedoing the $70 billion immigration enforcement bill—the centerpiece of the administration’s legislative agenda.
That conversation, a source says, is what finally convinced the president to drop it. Senate Majority Leader Thune had already told reporters that changes were a “safe bet” and that “the best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.” House Republicans had been actively looking for ways to kill the fund, and the Senate was already in open revolt—with more than a dozen Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham, privately urging Trump to pull the plug.
Trump and the DOJ waged a similar, strategic retreat a few weeks ago, when his lawyers filed a panicked voluntary dismissal two days before they would have had to walk into Judge Williams’s courtroom and explain, under the solemnity of federal proceedings, how Donald Trump suing an agency he controls, defended by his own former personal criminal defense lawyer, constituted a genuine adversarial lawsuit. Pinned between a rock and a hard place, he bolted.
So Trump blinked. Again. And on an ill-advised move—bogus and illegal on multiple fronts—on which he nevertheless had fully staked his diminishing political capital.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/they-blinked
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