I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the To the Contrary podcast. Trump backs off that slush fund,

sort of maybe. CBS fires Scott Pelley, a hell of a beginning for the new executive producer.

Maga Loyal is Bill Pulte. The housing guy has been named Director of National Intelligence.

Amazingly, Trump has found somebody even less qualified than Tulsi Gabbard,

and there's a bipartisan consensus about that. And Trump still cannot find a way out of the

war of whim that he started with Iran. Let's try to get our heads around all of that.

And joining me to discuss all of us, our good friend Jonathan Rauch, who is a contributor to the Atlantic and author and just, you know, all around member of the cognitive elite, right?

Jonathan, I mean, how else can I introduce you?

That's me, yeah.

We were talking about the cognitive elite, and I said, well, aren't we the cognitive elite?

I mean, we should embrace that, shouldn't we? So where should we begin? There's so much. Let's talk about the slush fund, because I still can't get over how egregiously corrupt the whole thing was, and the fact that it was so corrupt that people who have swallowed all of Donald Trump's other corruptions are going,

yeah, man, this one's got bugs jumping off this. So yesterday, we had Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, tell Congress that we're not moving ahead with the slush fund, the Goon Squad

slush fund that would give money to January 6th rioters, but they're leaving in place that sweeping immunity

from any IRS audit. So give me your take on that, Jonathan. Is the slush fund gone or what?

Well, I don't think we have a clue what's there and what's gone, Charlie, because they're not

telling us. They're making these deals with themselves in the dark.

They're highly irregular.

There's no congressional oversight.

There's no presumption of regularity.

So what do we know?

You know, they're making it up as they go along.

So apparently they're not going to do the $1.776 billion slush fund for

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