'Mask came off': Ex-GOP strategist flags damning reason Senate GOP backed off slush fund

Senate Republicans backed off their plans to formally block President Donald Trump's "Anti-Weaponization" slush fund in the reconciliation package — and this infuriated former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who laid into them in his latest Substack.

The Trump administration, facing massive backlash from lawmakers and the public alike, agreed to kill the fund unilaterally, but with the Senate not acting, the fund could theoretically be restored at any time.

“I think what, what was talked about, and then ultimately done away with, is, in my view, it’s a settled issue,” Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told the press.

This isn't good enough for Schmidt.

"Then why not kill it? Why not prohibit it? Why not bury it once and for all? Why preserve the possibility that it might live again?" he wrote. The answer could only be because "the modern Republican Party no longer functions as an independent political institution. It functions as an extension of Donald Trump’s will."

The fund itself, wrote Schmidt, is a "masterpiece of Orwellian absurdity" that allows Trump to corruptly reward his allies under the guise of restitution for corrupt government action. Meanwhile, he continued, "The people who spent years insisting that government power had been abused now seek to preserve a mechanism that could one day be used to abuse more of it."

Ultimately, court cases might finish the fund off, Schmidt continued, but that doesn't resolve the issue: "Why were Republicans unwilling to permanently prohibit it? Why were they unwilling to draw a line? Why were they unwilling to say no? The answer is because saying no to Donald Trump has become the one unforgivable sin in American politics."

"The corruption is no longer hidden. The abuse is no longer denied. The mask has come off," he concluded furiously. And the biggest question is no longer how much power Trump will try to grab for himself, but "why so many Republicans remain unwilling to deny it to him."