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Senate Republicans skipped town Thursday rather than vote on a multibillion-dollar bill to fund President Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies.

Getting into it: The bill would have funneled more than $70 billion to ICE and Customs and Border Protection to bankroll Trump’s deportation crackdown, but it got tangled up in backlash over the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” the administration unveiled Monday, which sets aside $1.776 billion for people who say the government came after them politically and which critics have blasted as a “slush fund” for Trump’s allies (with particular fears that Jan. 6 attendees who assaulted police could collect payments). Shit really hit the fan Thursday morning, when Senate Republicans hauled acting Attorney General Todd Blanche into the Capitol to grill him over the fund.

A striking number of Republicans went public with their objections. Former GOP leader Mitch McConnell said, “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” Sen. Thom Tillis called the fund “stupid on stilts,” while Sen. Don Bacon said Trump had “lost some support in the Senate,” noting that “he’s the plaintiff and the boss of the defendants. So just on the surface, it smells.”

Democrats had set the trap by announcing they would force amendment votes to block the fund or bar payments to Jan. 6 offenders, and as it became clear those amendments could attract enough Republican support to pass, GOP leaders pulled the bill instead of risking it.

The fight also folded in Trump’s earlier push to attach up to $1 billion for a new White House ballroom and security upgrades (despite his prior promise it would be privately funded), which the Senate parliamentarian had already ruled didn’t qualify for the fast-track budget process Republicans were using. Trump lashed out at his own party in a Wednesday post, urging Republicans to fire the parliamentarian, renewing his calls to end the filibuster, and warning that Republicans need to “get smart and tough” or “you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!”

Asked Thursday whether he was losing control of the Senate, Trump replied: “I really don’t know. I can tell you — I only do what’s right.” The revolt has been amplified by Trump’s ongoing purge of his own party, with senators like Bill Cassidy (fresh off a primary loss) and Lisa Murkowski now freer to break ranks. “Maybe he doesn’t think he needs us,” Murkowski said. “Last I checked, the laws don’t just appear before his desk to be signed.”

This all comes as House Republican leadership separately canceled a planned Thursday vote on a war powers resolution that would have forced Trump to seek congressional approval for the Iran war (delaying it until June), with Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, accusing Republicans of dodging a vote they were set to lose. “We had the votes without question, and they knew it.”