Media Must Expose GOP Senators as Caving to Trump

Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis spent weeks demanding that Todd Blanche commit in writing to killing Trump's corrupt IRS deal — a deal that handed the president personal immunity from tax audits and created a $1.776 billion slush fund. Then, after a private weekend conversation with Blanche, Cornyn folded. What did he get? A memo formally rescinding the slush fund — while leaving Trump's IRS immunity almost entirely intact, narrowed only to exclude a few family members. A federal judge had already voided the deal as never having been a legitimate legal settlement in the first place and threatened Blanche with a formal ethics complaint. Cornyn called it a win anyway. Meanwhile, Senator Susan Collins negotiated a provision blocking White House political control over federal grants — that expires in December, after which the administration is free to do exactly what she claimed to stop.

This is the Republican moderation playbook in full: make noise, extract a cosmetic concession, declare victory, and vote yes. It is a performance of independence designed to last just long enough to get through an election cycle, not to actually restrain anything.

We call on the media to cover Republican senators' supposed pushback on Trump not as genuine dissent, but as the political theater it consistently proves to be — tracking not what senators say during negotiations, but what they actually deliver when the votes are cast. The public deserves reporting that measures outcomes, not intentions, and that calls a cave a cave.