Now I have the full picture. Let me write the column.
Funny how the biggest swamp-drainer in American history keeps filling the swamp back up with his own guys. Todd Blanche spent two years as Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney. Now he’s running the Justice Department. And Trump is threatening to pull Blanche’s nomination for the permanent job rather than give two Republican senators a piece of paper saying a $1.776 billion slush fund for his allies is actually dead.
Ryan M. Biller, U.S. Department of Justice (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsAsk yourself who benefits from that. The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” was supposed to compensate Trump loyalists, including potentially violent January 6 rioters, until bipartisan outrage forced the Justice Department to scrap it. Blanche says it’s dead. Trump still talks about it fondly. And the White House won’t put its death in writing. You don’t need to be a dot-connector to see what that means. They want the option to revive it when nobody’s watching. The only reason you refuse to write something down is that you plan to do it later.
But that fund is the sideshow. The main event is the tax audit immunity deal, which a federal judge already denounced as self-dealing. The settlement says the U.S. government is “forever barred and precluded” from scrutinizing or prosecuting Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization’s tax examinations. Forever. Read that word again. Not “existing audits.” Not “this specific dispute.” Forever. The president of the United States arranged for himself and his family to be above the tax law, and he used the Justice Department, an agency that is supposed to work for you, to do it.
Now Trump is floating the idea of withdrawing Blanche’s nomination and resubmitting it after Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis leave office next year. Convenient. Cornyn already lost his primary after Trump turned on him. Tillis is retiring. So the plan is to wait until the only Republicans asking questions are gone, then ram through the guy who made the whole problem possible. That’s not governance. That’s patience.
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsAnd here’s the part the establishment press barely touches. Even if Trump pulls the nomination, Blanche stays. He can run the Justice Department as acting attorney general or as deputy attorney general, a post he was already confirmed for last year. The confirmation fight is theater. Blanche has the wheel regardless. The Senate vote is a show for the rubes, a procedural drama to make you think there’s oversight. There is no oversight. There’s a man who was paid to defend Donald Trump in court now deciding which laws get enforced and against whom.
Enter Ty Cobb, another former Trump lawyer, who went on Mehdi Hasan’s show this weekend and said what every insider already knows. When asked whether Blanche would stand up to Trump if asked to manufacture evidence of voter fraud in the midterms, Cobb said two words: “We’re screwed.” He said there’s “no circumstance” under which we shouldn’t expect Blanche to seize ballots and voting machines. He noted that Blanche has already echoed Steve Bannon’s line about putting ICE agents at polling places. Cobb predicted the administration’s current level of ignoring court orders is “nothing compared to what we’re about to see.”
International Film Service (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThis is where the dot-connecting gets ugly. You’ve got a president who floated canceling the midterms outright. You’ve got an AG who was his personal lawyer and who talks about immigration agents at voting locations. You’ve got a settlement that makes the president’s family immune from tax scrutiny in perpetuity. And you’ve got a Senate confirmation process that is designed to look like a check on power while changing nothing about who actually holds it.
The little guy gets audited. The little guy gets his ballot challenged. The little guy gets ICE at his polling place. And the president gets “forever barred and precluded.” Funny how that works.