There is a particular species of institutional collapse that does not announce itself with crashing walls or fleeing bureaucrats. It arrives, instead, through a man in a well-tailored suit sitting calmly on a Sunday morning television program and explaining, with the practiced patience of someone who has rehearsed this in his head many times, that there is nothing whatsoever unusual about the president of the United States directing the activities of the Department of Justice. Todd Blanche, sworn in Monday as attorney general after a 50-49 Senate vote, told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press that the president’s interest in the Justice Department is, in his words, the president’s “right” and “his duty.” One would like to say this is a scandal. It is not. It is a symptom.
Let us be precise about what has happened, because precision is the only defense remaining against the rhetorical fog that surrounds this administration. Blanche is not a career civil servant who drifted into the president’s orbit. He left his law firm in 2023 to represent Donald Trump personally against criminal cases, including two brought by the Justice Department under the previous administration. He then became deputy attorney general, then acting attorney general after Pam Bondi’s firing in April, and now attorney general. The trajectory is not ambiguous. He was the client’s lawyer. Now he is the client’s prosecutor.
During his tenure as acting AG, Blanche oversaw the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, a man Trump has publicly despised for years. The Justice Department under Blanche’s leadership has pursued investigations of “numerous Trump foes,” in the Associated Press’s careful phrasing. One does not need a doctorate in constitutional theory to recognize the pattern. One needs only a memory that extends to last week.
BeijingBlues (BY-SA) via wikimediaWhat is instructive, though, is the $1.8 billion detail. Blanche’s nomination nearly collapsed over a proposed fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they were wronged by the Justice Department. Let that settle for a moment. The attorney general of the United States was nearly not confirmed because the administration had planned to use the Justice Department to pay damages to the president’s political associates. Blanche survived only by confirming in writing that the plan was being rescinded. The fact that it existed at all, that someone in this government drafted a proposal to convert the federal prosecutorial apparatus into a compensation vehicle for the president’s circle, tells you everything about the operating assumptions of this administration. The rescission was a concession extracted under pressure, not a principle discovered through reflection.
Two Republican senators, it should be noted, voted against confirmation, citing concerns about politicization. They are correct, and one wishes their colleagues had mustered the same clarity. But the structural problem predates Blanche and will outlast him. The norm of Justice Department independence, never codified in statute with the force it deserved, rested for decades on a shared understanding that presidents would not directly involve themselves in individual prosecutions. That understanding was always thinner than its defenders admitted. It depended on restraint that could not be legally compelled. Trump has simply declined to exercise it, and Blanche has provided the intellectual framework for the refusal.
Emil Bove, another former Trump defense attorney, now a federal appeals court judge, administered the oath of office at the White House. The scene was, in its way, perfect: a president’s former lawyer swearing in the president’s former lawyer as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, while employees of a hollowed-out Justice Department lined the entrance to cheer. One imagines the applause was sincere. The people who remain are, presumably, the people who wanted to remain.
The literature on democratic backsliding is extensive and, at this point, largely descriptive. We are well past the stage where naming the phenomenon constitutes analysis. Blanche’s Meet the Press appearance was not a gaffe or a misstatement. It was a doctrine, stated plainly, by a man who now has the power to implement it. The president’s interest in the Justice Department is his “duty.” The attorney general sees “no problem” with it. The problem is not that he said this. The problem is that he believes it, that he was confirmed anyway, and that the institutions designed to resist exactly this arrangement have, with a few honorable exceptions, chosen not to.