By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
On Monday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson trudged down Pennsylvania Avenue to meet with the president about his extremely troublesome “anti-weaponization” slush fund, which had all but brought legislation to a halt in Congress. It could not have been a pleasant chore given the extremely high priority Trump has assigned to punishing enemies from Democratic administrations and rewarding their alleged victims. Johnson was also surely aware that Trump regarded the slush fund as “his” money to dispense as he pleased, since it emanated from a lawsuit against the IRS that Trump himself filed and then settled in his own favor.
Perhaps coincidentally, even as Johnson made it clear to Trump that the slush fund had derailed an extremely important party-line immigration-enforcement bill and cast doubt on every other item in the GOP congressional wish list, Trump’s attorneys were mulling a Friday order from U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams of Florida, whose dismissal of the original Trump suit made the settlement creating the slush fund possible. As Elie Honig explained at New York earlier today, Williams decided to undo the mischief she has allowed to proceed:
