The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Republicans are quietly starting to break with Donald Trump over his $1.8 billion slush fund. This shows how toxic Trump’s corruption has become, and it comes as a new poll shows him at another record low on the economy, which will make GOP anxiety even worse. Trump knows this is a problem. He snarled with rage over a House Republican who’s been bucking him lately, which is a key tell. While Trump is successfully excommunicating disloyal Republicans in primaries, that’s not stopping the party from breaking with his corrupt schemes on numerous fronts because he’s politically weak and doesn’t know what to do about it.Today we’re sorting through all of this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a good piece arguing that the only thing anyone will remember about Donald Trump in the end is his corruption. Amanda, always good to have you on.Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So let’s start with GOP Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, a vulnerable Republican from Pennsylvania. A reporter asks him about Trump’s slush fund—this is the slush fund that the Justice Department created as part of a quote-unquote settlement of his bogus lawsuit against the IRS. The fund will pay off supposed victims of government weaponization, including the insurrectionists. Listen to this.Reporter (voiceover): What do you make of this $1.7 billion fund?Brian Fitzpatrick (voiceover): Bad news. We’re going to try to kill it.Reporter (voiceover): You’re going to try to kill it? Okay. And how?Fitzpatrick (voiceover): Well, we’re considering legislative options. We’re going to write a letter to the AG to start, but we’re considering a legislative option. We’re trying to unpack exactly what the legal machinations are, but you can’t do that.Reporter (voiceover): Have you ever heard of any other Americans—other than Trump and his associates—who are unauditable by the IRS?Fitzpatrick (voiceover): I’ve never heard that before.Reporter (voiceover): So would that be part of the legislative—Fitzpatrick (voiceover): Of course. Of course. Yeah, you can’t do that.Sargent: Note that Brian Fitzpatrick is supporting a legislative move to block Trump’s slush fund—importantly including undoing the part of the settlement with the IRS that would nix all tax examinations of Trump’s businesses and his family, which is just an extraordinary act of corruption. What do you make of Fitzpatrick here?Marcotte: I mean, I think he’s trying to save Trump—and especially the Republican Party—from Trump. You know, Trump should be writing him thank-you letters. Because here’s the thing: I’m sure that Trump sees he’s a lame duck. He doesn’t have to run for office again. So there is a strong possibility that he just doesn’t care about voters or political popularity or approval ratings or whatever. I’m skeptical of that because while the man is very dumb, I think he does understand that if Democrats take the House in January, this is not going to get easier for him. We’re going to be looking at a lot of hearings. We’re going to look at investigations. I think that the Epstein files are going to come roaring back to life.Sargent: Trump actually raged over Representative Brian Fitzpatrick in a truly weird, rambling, slurred tirade. He was asked a question by a Fox reporter who happens to be married to Fitzpatrick. Trump then started abusing the reporter by saying her husband votes against me. Listen.Donald Trump (voiceover): When her husband votes against me all the time—can you imagine? I don’t know what’s with him. You better ask him what’s with him. Her husband—she’s married to a certain congressman. He votes against—he likes voting against Trump. You know what happens with that? It doesn’t work out well.Sargent: Boy, Trump sounds like he’s in rough shape there. He doesn’t drink, so it can’t be that. Now, I don’t think Trump was raging at Fitzpatrick over his bill targeting the slush fund. I think it’s some other thing Fitzpatrick has opposed, like the ballroom. But clearly, Trump is drunk with power, having ousted many Republicans in primaries in recent days. Yet at the same time, he’s still furious that he can’t control all of them.Marcotte: He just wants to have it all. He wants to control it all. One reason that a lot of these stories about how much money he’s basically stealing and defrauding as president isn’t landing with a lot of people is because in their minds they think, why would he want all this money? He already has more money than anyone could spend. And it’s like, well, it isn’t about the ability to spend it, right? It’s just about this megalomaniacal desire to have everything. So he needs utter loyalty from Republicans. He needs all of the money.