Sen. Whitehouse & Psaki Talk Trump's Cop-Beater Slush Fund and the Bootlicker Billionaire Bezos

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Joining me now is Senator Sheldon White House. He sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is never holds back. He is always speaking his mind. I'm so glad that you can be here with me. There's so much to talk about. I just want to start with this because this happened in the last hour. In just the last hour or so, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, he's in the YOLO caucus as I'm as I'm calling it, ripped the president's slush fund on Twitter and said, quote, "If this need if there needs to be a settlement, the administration should bring it to Congress to decide." I wonder if I'm sure you would love that, but I wonder if you think he has pissed off enough Republicans that that could actually happen.

[00:00:36]>> Not quite. I think that um there's still some primaries out there that give Trump leverage and I think the collapse of his presidency and his way of thinking um and the economic pain that he's inflicted on regular American families.

[00:00:54]All of those things are building up to what I call the the blazing saddles moment where the governor says to all the cronies around him, "Boys, it's time we looked out for our own phony baloney jobs."

[00:01:07]>> And I do think that looking out for their own phony baloney jobs is going to start to become very real for a lot of Republicans who until now have had spines of foam.

[00:01:18]>> We're starting to see that to some degree. Um, you know, even with I like to think they did it for the moral reasons, but even in some Republican senators flipping on the war powers vote. I'm not naive to think it was all for moral reasons. There were some political reasons there for sure. We saw what uh Brian Fitzpatrick said in the hallway today on the sled fund. You know, I'm not I I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, but let's say it built up to there being a point where there was support among enough Republicans to do something. What would that look like to stop it? At this point, >> it's hard to tell because they've been so supine for so long that there's not really a a portfolio of resistance options on the Republican side. I think the closest you come is Matt Gates for attorney general, right? Which blew up because a whole lot of Republicans quietly called the White House and Susie Wild said, "No, no, no. Stop this. this is really really stupid and we got to kill it. But since then they've just been rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled for probably the worst cabinet ever all confirmed and these appalling decisions like the billion dollar ballroom and the billion8 cop beaters slush fund and this crazy >> war in Iran that has no end. So the pressure is really really building hard against them but it is hard to figure out how it's going to manifest. I think bit by bit you're going to see more and more people whether to protect their own phony baloney jobs or because they've had a late come crisis of conscience begin to uh push back a little bit.

[00:02:56]>> Go figure. They don't think an IRS slush fund is going to be really good in their campaign ads. Political geniuses. Let me ask you about the ballroom. this feels a little bit different or you tell me because it seems to to be at this moment that the funding is not currently in the bill in the Senate bill um or that's what the reporting suggests. There's a range of reporting suggesting as to why um you know some of it is unhappiness around the Paxton endorsement. It seems like it's obviously a politically stupid thing for anyone to be forced to support. Give us a sense of why it was stripped out. Do you think it stays out?

[00:03:29]Is there any path forward for Republicans to push it forward? Yeah, I I I think in the Senate there is not interest in getting this ball run done.

[00:03:36]They hate the idea. They wish it would go away. It is terrible optics as they go into the election and people are worried about grocery prices and fuel prices.

[00:03:44]>> So, it's really a huge burden on Republicans right now trying to stagger their way towards the November election. But it followed relatively normal process. Mhm.

[00:04:00]>> They used reconciliation. We've used reconciliation before. They tried to come to Congress. They came to Congress uh before the kind of general uh funding rules of the Congress were being followed. You move over to this.

[00:04:14]>> Mhm.

[00:04:15]>> You've got a fund that's set up with what money? Nothing appropriated for it.

[00:04:20]How was it decided? Who were the adverse parties in the litigation in Trump versus Trump? Mh.

[00:04:28]>> Who was Blanch representing when he alone signed the so-called settlement document? What makes it a settlement when you didn't have adverse parties in the first place? And then right behind all that just awful stuff come all these uh thugs who attacked the capital, who beat our capital police officers, and they're all like saying the quiet part out loud.

[00:04:55]Yeah, this is for us. This is our cop beaters slush fund. And that makes it really hard, I think, for the Republicans. It's one step worse on procedure and these uh January 6th thugs just celebrating this so visibly, so publicly. It totally quiet part out loud.

[00:05:15]>> It I mean I just read only a sampling of it, but it is hor and this is not even that old. It is so horrifying to kind of hear. I mean, what we we've talked about corruption in this administration. It's mind-blowing. And sometimes it can be, and you do this for a living, among many other things, hard to wrap your head around. I hear this from a lot of people when you're out there talking to your constituents or explaining to people the case for why the corruption having happening in this administration is impacting their lives. Give us a sense of how you make the political argument.

[00:05:46]>> Well, the political argument is is really simple. People are suffering economically.

[00:05:54]Their costs have gone way up, whether it's groceries or home insurance or the gas at the pump. And they have a president who came into office promising that costs would go down right away, that he was there to bust things up and make things better for them against a rigged system. And now they're seeing that he's playing the rigged system for himself.

[00:06:17]He's got the kids with the billion-dollar crypto deals. He's got pardons for sale. Everywhere you turn, the donors for the billion dollar ballroom and now this 1.8 billion cop beater slush fund. All of that is super visible and it's totally not looking out for me. And it's that lack of regard and interest for regular people that his really unbelievable comment captured that he doesn't give a thought about Americans financial situations that just I mean the wincing on the Republican side when that uh comment went up on the TV was just like that hurt >> I bet and JD Vance said it was out of context. So, we know the truth there.

[00:07:04]And Trump, I mean, he's become the swamp monster essentially sitting on top of the rig system he created. Okay. You've been so generous. We're going to have you wait. Stay here. We got to do a commercial. You know how this works. Uh when we get back and I just want I want to ask you about uh one man who you've talked about in the past. Um his name is Jeff Bezos. Um I don't know if you saw a CNBC interview this morning. You may have seen it.

[00:07:25]>> I've read the excerpts from it. Well, in case in case anybody watching has not seen it, I just want to play one clip of that. We'll take a break and we'll talk about that when we come back.

[00:07:37]>> I think he is a a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. Trump has lots of good ideas and he he's done a lot of he's been right about a lot of things.

[00:07:47]You have to give him credit where credit is due.

[00:07:50]>> Okay. Back with me now is Senator Sheldon White House. Okay. I I as I mentioned this I mean a few years ago and you track this so closely. A few years ago ProPublica published an investigation showing how in 2007 and 2011 Jeff Bezos did not pay a single penny in federal income taxes. Other billionaires also do the same. It's not a one-off. You've raised this issue many times.

[00:08:11]>> What is the solution and how central do you think an argument about this is right now in our political space? Well, I think it's really important because part of the anger that people feel out there is the feeling that the system is rigged. And that same study that you referenced showed, if I recall correctly, that uh Jeff Bezos paid a 1% tax rate over many years. And so, you're right. If you double 1% to 2%, is that going to save everything? No. But if you move to a world in which billionaires pay the same tax rates as the teacher in Queens, as the plumber, then suddenly parks get better and schools get better and you can have a more robust world for people at the lower end of the spectrum.

[00:08:59]And so the idea that a billionaire thinks that it's about him and him paying more in taxes when what it's really about is America and what kind of an America do we have when the people who have the most for whom their last marginal dollar has literally zero value. They don't even know where it is.

[00:09:16]>> Uh and they avoid the tax system don't pay taxes. duck out on their responsibilities to fund the government and then everybody else has to pick up the slack. And that's wrong from a tax perspective, but it's really wrong from a democracy and morality perspective.

[00:09:36]And I think that helps explain why people are so darned angry. And by the way, it's not every billionaire. Tom Styer's out there working his tail off to become governor of California to fight the fossil fuel industry and fix the climate havoc we have coming at us.

[00:09:50]But this attitude is not for real.

[00:09:55]>> I before the break, I played another clip from the CNBC interview. Uh a sound bite of Bezos saying, and I just want to get this right. He called Trump quote, "A more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. Trump has lots of good ideas. He's been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due." What do you think about that?

[00:10:15]>> Uh he doesn't see the Donald Trump that I see.

[00:10:20]I don't know what Donald Trump he's seeing, but the one with the billionaire ballroom, the one with the cop beater slush fund, the one with the side deals for his family, the one who just gave himself tax amnesty for himself, his family, and all of his companies.

[00:10:38]There's nothing normal about that.

[00:10:40]That's not stable. Uh, in fact, it's downright evil.

[00:10:44]>> Senator Sheldon White House, thank you for being here with me. Thank you.