Todd Blanche made a fatal error — and it will punish him

As I write these words, Todd Blanche is cruising toward being confirmed as Attorney General for the United States. What looked improbable just a few days before quickly became, essentially, a done deal after Blanche did the bare minimum to assuage the concerns of lame-duck Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC).

We pretend that Blanche’s approval was ever really in doubt. It wasn’t. Sufficient smoke and mirrors were always going to be employed to satisfy the senators.

They initially said they wouldn’t vote to confirm unless Donald Trump’s former (current?) personal lawyer met with several Epstein survivors. So, he did. He went into a room with them, let them know he had no use for them, cared not at all about them, wouldn’t so much as look at them. He told them to “hurry up” and “get to the point” and to take their complaints to the FBI.

This is what passes for a productive meeting in the Republican Party circa 2026.

That requirement apparently satisfied, the senators stipulated that, after long refusing to do so, Blanche must put in writing the fact that the nearly $1.8 billion slush fund – you know, the one designed to financially reward felons for destroying the Capitol and subverting democracy – was officially dead.

Blanche did that too, though the one-page document he wrote up stipulating to drop the fund was signed only by Blanche. In other words, literally every other person in the country could potentially resurrect it in some form, in particular the man who calls himself president. It wouldn’t stand up in court. It’s the equivalent of swearing something with your fingers crossed behind your back.

Yet that was good enough for Cornyn and Tillis, since Blanche also wrote up something about Trump’s immunity from the IRS for himself and his family and all of their businesses was now merely retroactive rather than in perpetuity. So, it’ll only save Trump $100 million or so for his and his family’s sins of the past.

And the Republican Senate was once again one big happy family. The end.

Not to harsh on anyone’s mellow here, but this is all just more of the same rubber-stamping of transparent corruption. Not only does it further dismiss and diminish the Epstein victims; it drives home the point that the Department of Justice is essentially Trump’s personal law firm operating entirely in his interests.

I’ll also be counting the minutes after Blanche’s ultimate confirmation until his sole client is helped to successfully resurrect the slush fund. We’re now down under three months until those midterms, so there isn’t a moment to lose to get those payoffs out to the pardoned January 6 felons.

Yes, these would be the same cop-beating, window-smashing, feces-smearing hoods who did their damnedest to overturn the 2020 election by force when the judicial system failed Trump. Blanche’s job is to sufficiently assist Trump in distributing the payoffs before November and motivate the troops to do their dirty work of intimidation in tandem with ICE.

The hope is, of course, that the vote will be such a blue tidal wave at least in the House, if not the Senate, that no amount of voter suppression or rigging will overturn the will of the voters. But that naturally remains to be seen.

Having Blanche in place as his guard dog in the AG seat is designed to be a fallback, along with the hopelessly crooked Supreme Court, in case direct violence and bullying aren’t quite enough. I’m convinced that the courts aren’t the front-burner strategy anymore, but instead a just-in-case. That, and whatever Elon Musk might be planning to do with his satellites and potential electronic chicanery.

The one strategy Trump isn’t seriously considering is winning the midterms outright. He’s acting less like a man who’s desperate than one who doesn’t care, who thinks it’s already in the bag one way or another. How else to explain the administration doing away with a Medicare prescription drug coverage subsidy program so close to the election, as they did last week.

Between that and the ongoing Iran War and runaway gas and grocery prices and bringing back tariffs at full throttle, Trump seems to be doing everything in his power to assist the Democratic cause.

The reality of the moment is that an entire political party is play-acting that Blanche isn’t shady to his core and that this “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is really dead.

I can just hear Blanche now at the coming hearings.

“Oh, you thought I meant it was dead dead?” he would reason with faux sincerity. “No, it was always only sorta-dead, like a patient in a coma waiting to be revived.”

“Do you mean like Mitch McConnell, Mr. Blanche?”

“Oh no, never quite that dead.”

To this Republican Party, the immoral ends justify the unethical means. And when it comes to Blanche, though he’s skilled at flashing a hangdog poker face that makes him look innocuous, he carries not a shred of remorse in doing all of Trump’s bidding. He sold his soul for a title, and I’m not talking about something so lofty as AG. He peddled it for the handle of “Mr. Trump’s Errand Boy.”

How else to explain his providing for the deplorable Ghislaine Maxwell a transfer to a country club lockup despite her being one of the most monstrous convicted enablers of sex trafficking in world history.

Make no mistake, Todd Blanche is a master of deception and manipulation without an ounce of integrity. That naturally makes him both a perfect fit for Trump and poisonous for the United States. He is, remarkably, the worst imaginable person to be put in charge as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, like assigning a fox to preside over an egg farm.

The sad part is that he imagines loyalty from a man who knows none. That, sooner or later, will prove to be his punishment.

(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)