Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is wrapping up his second month in what’s supposed to be a temporary job. But after a week spent infuriating Senate Republicans (and just about everyone else), President Trump doesn’t seem to be in any rush to name Blanche’s permanent successor. That raises a serious question for our country: How long will Trump let Blanche squat in the attorney general’s office? The odds of Trump nominating a new attorney general are at an all-time low after Blanche’s botched effort to sell Republican lawmakers on Trump’s $1.8 billion government weaponization fund — a scheme so brazenly self-serving that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called it a “slush fund to pay people who assault cops,” referring to its potential use to compensate the violent offenders in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) derided it as “stupid on stilts.”
So Trump can probably count those two out of any vote to confirm his next top cop. The dysfunction at the Justice Department is a grim echo of the chaos at the end of Trump’s first term, when loyalists took over key roles and public trust in the nation’s attorney general collapsed. With Blanche, Trump is speedrunning those failures again. Republican senators, fearful of losing control of the upper chamber because of Trump’s toxic choices, think they can stave off disaster by exerting more control on Trump’s next attorney general pick.
What the Senate Republicans don’t realize — or won’t admit — is that Trump has no interest in giving them any control at all. Blanche is limited to serving 210 days in his current role, meaning Trump must find a successor by Oct. 29, which falls just before the heated conclusion of this year’s midterm election. That would tee up Democrats to humble an unpopular Trump by dragging his nominee into a live confirmation hearing that would almost certainly include the words “Jeffrey Epstein” and “cover-up” on a near-constant constant loop. With Trump facing his lowest approval ratings ever, it is no surprise that even the so-called master salesman would want to avoid a bruising fight he’s sure to lose.
So now Trump is leaning on his team of legal hacks to find a way around the confirmation process entirely — even if it means changing how the White House interprets established federal law. According to one unnamed official, the White House is already exploring novel legal loopholes that would allow Blanche to serve as the acting attorney general indefinitely, effectively circumventing the Senate’s constitutional role in approving Cabinet officials. Blanche seems game for whatever keeps his paychecks coming, regardless of how it affects morale and effectiveness at the Justice Department. Last month Blanche expressed his willingness to serve in the AG role permanently, whether he was nominated and confirmed or not.
Even a guy as self-involved as Blanche must realize his odds of being confirmed by this Senate are zero, especially after the shameful display he put on for senators last week. “Fiery does not begin to cut it,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said of Blanche’s unfortunate meeting with Senate Republicans over Trump’s $1.8 billion fund. “My guess is there are probably 45 senators in the room, at least half of them were blasting the attorney general, and they were pissed. There were multiple senators yelling at the attorney general, saying this feels like self-dealing.” In the bizarre settlement that led to Trump dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, the Justice Department took the unprecedented step of personally insulating Trump, his family members and his businesses from future tax fraud investigations. That was too much even for loyalists like Cruz, a man famous for swallowing all manner of Trumpian humiliations and personal attacks on his wife over the last decade.
Lawmakers wanted to know the legal grounding for this deal, which turned out to be a question Blanche was either unwilling or unable to answer to anyone’s satisfaction. Instead, Blanche invoked a play popular with Trump himself: appeals to lawmakers’ individual self-interest. Republican senators should remember, Blanche said, that they could file monetary claims with Trump’s government weaponization fund, too. In other words, Republicans should swallow their moral and ethical concerns in favor of raiding the taxpayer piggy bank for their own personal gain.
As anyone with even a shadow of political sense would imagine, that argument did not go over well in a room full of Republicans already terrified about their rotten public image with voters. As usual, Trump wants what he wants and expects his Capitol Hill colleagues to deal with the inevitable fallout. But Republicans are getting sick of being radioactive, and they certainly aren’t interested in losing their jobs in order to cape for a noxious MAGA flunky like Blanche. In service to their own self-interest, the Senate Republicans are finally learning how to say no to Trump’s radicalized Department of Justice.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
