When you’re a cultlike party leader with the power to cancel members of your own party, it’s not often you get a face-full of wrath from your angry acolytes. Your butler, however, will catch the hard feelings.
“That’s how Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Friday described a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that’s drawn bipartisan opposition,” reports NBC News.
According to NBC, screaming, yelling and accusations of self-dealing, was how Cruz characterized it on his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
“Fiery does not begin to cut it,” said Cruz. “My guess is there’re probably 45 senators in the room, at least half of them were blasting the attorney general, and they were p——.”
ABC News reports Senate Republicans met with Blanche on Thursday to discuss the fund, which “ultimately derailed a vote on a Republican bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.”
But Cruz said several of his GOP colleagues felt that they could not politically defend the fund because it appeared as though President Donald Trump “cut a deal with himself.”
“There were multiple senators yelling at the attorney general, saying this feels like self-dealing,” said Cruz.
This is passion and volume that President Donald Trump himself will likely never hear from his own team — not as long as Trump can use his mostly MAGA voting cohort in Republican primaries to oust GOP dissenters and replace them with a hand-picked substitute.
So where does a frustrated Republican turn when your supreme leader is single-handedly destroying your midterm election chances with his unpopular policies? Well, you vent to the messenger.
“… I got to tell you, the Republican senators were p—— … the entire meeting,” said Cruz. “They were screaming at the acting attorney general, [while] he was trying to lay out [that] the legal basis was quite sound.”
The fury Senate Republicans unleashed on Blanche reflects deeper fractures within the GOP.
Republican senators face a political bind: defending the fund risks alienating voters already angry over Trump's unpopular war in Iran and skyrocketing inflation, yet publicly opposing Trump invites a primary challenge from a MAGA-backed rival. Blanche's insistence that the legal basis was "quite sound" fell flat—senators understand their constituents won't accept an administration official legitimizing what looks like a brazen power grab.
The meeting exposed a growing gap between Trump's absolute authority within party circles and the political reality facing senators in swing states. For many Republicans, the $1.8 billion slush fund represents a breaking point where personal survival instincts finally override party loyalty and fear of Trump's retribution.