This is the May 20, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“There’s a lot of things that President Trump is the first of. No president has been indicted one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times either.”
—Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche attempting to defend the president by noting his extraordinary history of legal issues
JOE’S NOTE
On the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks, Gladys Sicknick traveled from New Jersey to Capitol Hill. Her son Craig walked in carrying his brother Brian’s Capitol Police hat, which the FBI had only returned a month earlier.
“What did he die for?” his mother asked. “What did he die for?”
This week, Donald Trump answered her — with a $1.776 billion weaponization slush fund for people who beat the hell out of her son and other cops.
The number is no coincidence. The same rioters who stormed the Capitol chanting “1776” are now eligible to collect $1.776 billion in taxpayer money.
Sixteen months ago, JD Vance said on “Fox News Sunday”: “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Eight days later, Trump pardoned them all.
Now he wants to pay them.
Republicans burdened with all-time low approval ratings should speak against the proposed cop-killer slush fund. But they won’t.
And they’re blindly going along with a Marie Antoinette ballroom funded by the same taxpayers who can’t afford to buy groceries or put gas in their car.
Take your “Support the Blue” flags down, because you don’t support cops. You just support police officers when Trump gives you permission.
But not the Capitol Hill cops who saved your lives on Jan. 6.
You were such cowards about the events of that day that you even refused to put up a plaque honoring the beaten and the dead. And when you finally did, it went up at 4 a.m., in the dark of night, because you still didn’t have the courage to do it in the daylight.
Today, two officers who defended the building filed suit to block the fund. Both still receive death threats.
Republicans in Congress are allowing all of it — the slush fund, the Marie Antoinette ballroom, a war with no end in sight and with little congressional oversight.
Expect Republicans to pay in November.
CHART OF THE DAY
Source: Gallup poll of 1,000 U.S. adults, March 2-18, 2026. Margin of error: ±4 percentage points
ON THIS DATE
On May 20, 1927, American aviator Charles Lindbergh took off on the first nonstop transatlantic flight from New York City’s Roosevelt Field to Paris-Le Bourget Airport, a journey that took 33.5 hours.
WHAT THEY SAID
Jonathan Lemire on Trump’s revenge tour
“He is taking out his foes, but hurting his party’s chances while he does it. This is motivated by vengeance. This is the retribution tour.”
Ed Luce on the inadequacy of U.S. military supremacy
“America has for too long believed that military superiority is a substitute for diplomacy. The one-trick pony — what Pete Hegseth calls lethality, precision, ability to blow stuff up — is no substitute for thinking.”
Elisabeth Bumiller on Trump’s narcissism
“President Trump seems to be bored with some aspects of the presidency because he’s so focused on these big building projects — the reflecting pool, the ballroom, the arch — from an earlier era in his life.”
David Drucker on independent voters
“Independent voters tell you exactly what’s happening. Democrats are leading among them in generic balloting by double digits — and that just tells you how toxic the environment is for Republicans.”
$1,776 billion is not an arbitrary number
The Trump administration has set aside $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to compensate people it deems victims of government “weaponization,” a figure that echoes the rallying cry of the Jan. 6 rioters who are now eligible to collect from it.
The dollar figure is not coincidental, according to former Justice Department prosecutors, congressional investigators and domestic extremism researchers. It is a direct nod to 1776, the year the U.S. declared independence from Britain. It is also a number that Capitol rioters invoked as they breached the building on Jan. 6, 2021 — in chants, on flags and in Proud Boys planning documents titled “1776 Returns,” which laid out a scheme to seize federal buildings and force a new election. Trump supporters co-opted the patriotic year as a rallying cry for their “1776 moment” to overturn the 2020 election results.
“That number didn’t just appear arbitrarily,” said Michael Fanone, a former officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., who was beaten by rioters while defending the Capitol and lawmakers. “Like everything else, it’s a branding thing. Donald Trump is trying to rebrand Jan. 6 insurrectionists as great American patriots.”
EXTRA HOT TEA
431 parts per million
— The record-high average amount of carbon dioxide detected in the atmosphere last month at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory
ONE MORE SHOT
Arsenal fans celebrate winning the Premier League — for the first time in 22 years — at Emirates Stadium in London yesterday.
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