President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he was not sure whether a proposed $1.8 billion fund for people claiming political persecution was dead, a departure from acting attorney general Todd Blanche’s more definitive assurance of the fund’s demise a day earlier.
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“I’d have to ask the lawyers,” Trump said when a reporter asked him whether the fund was dead or just on hold. “I don’t know.”
A day earlier, Blanche told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the administration is “not moving forward with the fund. Period.”
The president’s vaguer response is likely to roil Republican lawmakers, many of whom are sharply opposed to the fund and pressured the White House to abandon it by threatening to derail a $72 billion immigration enforcement funding package that Trump badly wants.
After Blanche’s assurance that the fund was dead, all Senate Republicans voted to move forward on the budget package, which advanced 53-46 along party lines Wednesday.
Even so, many Democrats and some Republicans said they wanted a more formal assurance that the administration had dropped any intention of creating such a fund, and several said they would introduce amendments to the immigration bill officially killing the idea.
When asked why he dropped the fund, Trump suggested it was because “a radical-left judge ruled against it.”
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Friday paused work on the fund pending a June 12 hearing on the matter. The administration has suggested she had permanently and definitively shut down the fund — a far broader reading than conveyed by the judge’s language.
Trump spoke of his “love” for the idea of a payout fund aimed at people who claimed they were the targets of political prosecutions by the government. The proposal has been sharply criticized by lawmakers in both parties as a vehicle that would reward the president’s allies, including those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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“We’ll see how that all works out,” Trump said. “But a radical-left judge ruled against it, but these people, their lives have been destroyed, their families have been destroyed, many of them. Not just, I’m not just talking about a few people, many of them. I’m one of them.”
Trump also suggested that the people who swarmed the Capitol that January day in 2021 in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory had done so “with love.” He talked about a “tremendous crowd” that gathered early in the day during a speech he delivered.
“And there was so much love and friendship. It was the most amazing thing. People were crying,” Trump said.
The pro-Trump mob at the Capitol that day assaulted police officers and ransacked lawmakers’ offices. Many members of Congress were evacuated or barricaded themselves in their offices.
Trump cut off the reporter when she pressed him on Republican lawmakers’ concerns that “people who beat up cops” would be eligible for payments from the fund.
Trump’s unexpected Oval Office session with reporters was his first public appearance — and his first exchange with the White House press corps — in about a week, an unusually long time for him.
The hiatus unfolded as Trump faced several setbacks, including a judge’s ruling against the president’s plans for the Kennedy Center, the delay in reaching a deal with Iran and the loss of a Trump-endorsed candidate in Iowa.
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