It was a public outcry that came to encompass even some GOP senators that killed Donald Trump’s nutty $1.776 billion so-called anti-weaponization slush fund — the result of his laughable lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and less comical settlement to raid public funds to pay traitors and political allies.

But Trump is still angling to get a free pass from the IRS for himself and his family and he’s still doing dangerous and crazy things like putting the disreputable and unfit Bill Pulte in as the acting director of national intelligence, following the departure of the equally unfit Tulsi Gabbard.

Pulte’s obsession as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency has been trying to frame New York Attorney General Tish James and others Trump who doesn’t like on phony charges of mortgage fraud, which clearly pleases Trump, but that doesn’t make Pulte ready to run the nation’s spy agencies.

As for the slush fund, which theoretically comes from a settlement of Trump’s suit against the IRS, it seems clear that Trump never really had standing to sue in the first place, not only because the matter of the leak of his tax returns had already been handled internally years ago (and the leaker sent to prison), but because these proceedings are required to be adversarial and he is the president. In other words, he can’t sue himself and then settle with himself.

The DOJ official overseeing the talks was Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s own former personal criminal defense lawyer, who sat down with other Trump loyalists to hash it out. It may as well have been the president himself deciding what an agency he runs would do for him. Blanche told a House hearing yesterday that “we’re not moving forward with the fund, period.”

What really derailed it was the opposition from Trump’s own party, which you could be forgiven for having forgotten that they were even still around. It turns out that when they actually choose to act, they still have the capability to act as a check on an out-of-control executive. In fact, we would say that Republicans’ wishy-washiness has now become an electoral problem for them, as multiple lawmakers have been picked off after challenges from Trump-backed opponents.

Every poll conducted over the last several weeks shows Trump is an absolutely toxic political brand on a steady and continuing public opinion decline. The reason that longtime elected officials are getting being defeated in these primaries is at least in part because they have mostly refused to commit to actually constraining Trump’s wanton authoritarianism, and thus seem weakly stuck in a defensive crouch, occasionally throwing a sharp word or a no vote in the president’s direction but also voting up his loony nominees and mostly falling in line the rest of the time.

Will Trump learn from the failure of the slush fund? Probably not. He turns 80 years old in a few days and he’s been unchanged for decades. Witness him putting the stooge Pulte in charge of the nation’s intelligence networks.

If Republicans in the Congress will stand for the Constitution and stand up Trump more often, maybe they can get Trump to avoid his worst instincts, which is better for the nation, better for the GOP and better for Trump himself.

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