Don’t look now, but it appears that Congress is actually doing its constitutionally prescribed job: checking presidential power.
On Monday multiple outlets reported that President Donald Trump was backing off of his so-called anti-weaponization fund: the $1.776 billion discretionary account Trump functionally awarded himself as a result of his lawsuit against the IRS. While it’s unclear whether this decision is permanent or final, the reporting all suggests that it is the direct result of an unusual revolt by Senate Republicans, who have openly defied Trump over the fund.
“It was a nonstarter from the get go,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) told NBC News.
Congress is not the only actor to push back on the fund. One federal judge had temporarily paused its implementation, which provided a face-saving pretext for the Department of Justice when it announced the fund’s suspension. Another judge had opened an investigation into the lawfulness of the settlement that created it. And state leaders in New York and California had proposed legislation that would tax any payouts from the fund to their residents at 100 percent.
But lower courts and blue states have been two of the most consistent actors checking Trump’s abuse of power throughout his presidency. The Republican majority in Congress, by contrast, has been Trump’s accomplice, and he had just successfully targeted members in several primaries to reinforce his dominance. That they intervened in a dramatic and potentially decisive way here demands explanation: What about this fund, amid all of Trump’s corrupt and anti-democratic behavior, galvanized a backlash?
To find out, I spoke with DC insiders on both sides of the aisle, as well as leading scholars of American politics. They told a fairly consistent story: one in which the awful election year politics of giving Trump a fund to pay out January 6 rioters, combined with the specific timing of a must-pass funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), forced usually deferential Republicans’ hands.
“We’re kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place right now,” a Senate Republican aide told me on Monday. “There were dozens of senators that had concerns [on our side].”
This does not mean that Republicans in Congress are, going forward, going to be a consistent roadblock for Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. The circumstances here are specific, and they’re ultimately members of a party he controls.
But it does suggest that there’s still some congressional limit on Trump’s ability to wield power for personal gain — a limit that could grow harder the worse his approval rating gets. Trump’s mismanagement of his relationship with Congress is having increasingly real consequences: bad ones for him, but good ones for American democracy.
The anatomy of a Republican revolt
To understand what just happened with the weaponization fund in Congress, you need to understand a little bit of context about the past few months of legislative back-and-forth.
In February, in the wake of the killing of two US citizens during the ICE surge in Minnesota, Democrats demanded strict legislative restrictions on domestic immigration enforcement — blocking funding for DHS when Trump refused. In late April, the parties agreed to a compromise: They would fund every part of DHS except for ICE and Border Patrol, which would operate using last year’s budget outlays until a separate bill could be passed funding them for the forthcoming fiscal year.
Unable to compromise with Democrats on ICE restrictions, Republicans decided to try and pass their funding using a process called budget reconciliation. Reconciliation is not subject to a Senate filibuster and thus can’t be blocked by the Democratic minority, though it does allow them to force amendment votes. The plan was to pass a reconciliation bill in late May.
But on May 18, the Trump administration announced the creation of the “anti-weaponization” fund. It was the result of Trump essentially settling a lawsuit against himself — he filed suit against the IRS, an agency he controls, as a private citizen over his leaked tax returns — the fund was designed to support victims of alleged political persecution under the Biden administration. There were no rules constraining its disbursement, and Democrats immediately pounced: claiming that Trump was robbing the Treasury to pay himself and violent January 6 rioters.
Republicans knew that these Democratic attacks had bite. On May 21, GOP senators met with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to see if there was anything that could constrain potential abuse of the fund. The meeting, by all accounts, was a disaster: Blanche had no good answers for their questions, as the fund was designed to give Trump maximum discretion over payments. Furious, they left town for a weeklong Memorial Day recess without passing the reconciliation package funding ICE and Border Patrol.
Which brings us to Monday, June 1: Congress returned to Washington.
When the day began, Republicans were contemplating a very difficult choice. If they tried to pass the ICE funding bill, Democrats would force them to take a series of votes on amendments constraining Trump’s power over the weaponization fund. If they simply voted down Democratic ideas, they would own the fund in political terms — becoming valid targets of biting attack ads if Trump paid out a cop beater or child molester. If they passed some restrictions without White House approval, they’d suffer Trump’s wrath.
And while the revolt was most visible in the Senate, it wasn’t confined there. As Republicans searched for a way out, and Democrats sharpened their knives, House Speaker Mike Johnson went to the White House on Monday to talk with Trump about the fund. We don’t know exactly what was said during that meeting, but leaks about the fund’s suspension began appearing shortly afterward — with every piece citing Republican opposition in Congress as a key reason for the decision.
Why the GOP revolt on weaponization matters
It is hard to say, at present, whether the weaponization fund is really dead and gone. Many Republicans in Congress are still skeptical, with some actively pursuing a legislative fix to ensure it stays gone.
“Is the weaponization fund impacting the reconciliation bill and its passage? The answer is yes,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told Semafor on Tuesday.
The revolt’s proximate causes are, as we’ve seen, very specific: the perfect storm of must-pass legislation, an election year, and an especially brazen (and widely covered) act of Trump corruption.
In many of these cases, the problem was of Trump’s own making.
“The timing of it forces their hand,” said Matt Glassman, an expert on Congress at Georgetown University. “It can’t be ignored, because the administration chose to announce it at the dumbest possible time.”
But there is a deeper, and more important, lesson here: that Trump has limits, even with the mostly pliant Republicans in Congress. This is “a predictable reaction from the members,” says Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and president of the GOP-aligned Targeted Victory Fund.
Indeed, the weaponization fund is not the only recent act of congressional rebellion.
Trump’s proposal to build a new White House ballroom, widely seen as a pointless vanity project, has run into significant opposition — with Republicans refusing to fund it as part of the ICE reconciliation package. Just recently, the Senate voted to advance a War Powers Resolution act that would, in theory, force Trump to end the war in Iran absent explicit congressional authorization. And Trump has lost some key policy votes, such as when the House passed a bill in February that would end Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
In many of these cases, the problem was of Trump’s own making. The ballroom, like the weaponization fund, was an obvious political liability in an election year. The War Powers Act was the direct result of Trump’s heavy-handed attempt to control Congress: it passed because Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) switched his vote to “yes” after losing a primary to a Trump-backed candidate.
The point is not that Congress has, all of a sudden, discovered its constitutional spine. It is still uncommon for Republicans to fight back against something Trump really wants, and many of his defeats there are symbolic. High-profile effective challenges to Trump remain quite rare.
However, there is a difference between “quite rare” and “unheard of,” which is basically how Congress operated in the early months of Trump’s presidency. It seems that the specific ways he has gone about trying to consolidate his own power has, over time, created space for greater friction in Congress — or even actively generated pushback. And given the narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, it doesn’t take a lot of resistance to block a bill.
This creates opportunities for Trump’s opponents. The entire situation with ICE funding, the thing that forced Senate Republicans’ hands in the first place, is a direct result of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s hardline stance back in February. Lacking formal power, Schumer and the Democrats manipulated the legislative process to engineer conflict between Senate Republicans and the White House. They couldn’t have foreseen the specifics of the weaponization fund, but they created conditions where something like this became more likely.
But perhaps more importantly, the budget process creates a bottleneck for Trump’s power consolidation at a moment where time is of the essence.
Despite recent gerrymandering, Democrats remain overwhelmingly likely to retake at least the House in November. Once they control a chamber, Trump’s ability to consolidate power will become significantly weaker: He’ll be unable to pass legislation on party-line grounds, and will face hostile oversight from Democratic-controlled committees.
If Trump were a more competent authoritarian, along the lines of a Viktor Orbán or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he might be using his remaining time controlling Congress to grab as much formal power as he could. Instead, he’s chosen to mismanage his relationship with Congress, a series of costly and time-consuming fights that could have been avoided with defter management.
American democracy would be in far better shape if Republicans actually did care about stopping Trump’s power grabs as a matter of constitutional principle. They don’t, for the most part. But their instincts for political survival, and frustration with the White House, are starting to assert themselves in democratically valuable ways.