The sheer stupidity and blind ambition of Todd Blanche had him thinking proximity to Donald Trump would lead him to the promised land. Instead, Blanche is headed to the depths of nullity.
On Thursday, Donald Trump said he may pull Blanche's nomination for a full-time attorney general post, not because he lost faith in his little errand boy, but to try to maneuver around and outlast two Senate Republicans, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, who won't confirm Blanche without written guarantees that a controversial $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund is truly dead.
It now appears that Trump will keep Blanche in the acting role, let Cornyn and Tillis exit Congress in January, then resubmit the nomination to what he hopes will be a friendlier Senate. Cornyn wasn't having it, firing back that he and Tillis aren't the only Republicans uneasy about the settlement.
Trump clearly has his head buried in the sand of flattering sycophancy because it appears no one has told him the Senate could very likely fall into Democratic hands after the midterm elections. And if that happens, Blanche's rise to the top will quickly become a slippery slide to the bottom.
Blanche's days at the helm of the Justice Department are now dictated by the calendar. Under DOJ succession law, Blanche's authority as Deputy Attorney General lets him run the department as Acting AG without a Senate vote, but only for so long — 210 days.
Which means that sometime in February 2027, Trump is betting he can use that window to wait out his critics. If Republicans control the Senate in January, Trump would presumably re-nominate Blanche. If Democrats win the Senate, well, Trump will have to bid adios to Blanche.
And if the latter happens, Blanche doesn't fall back on a distinguished legal career. He falls back on nothing. Where does someone like Blanche go? Because if he's been this compliant to Trump so far, Katy, bar the door, as my grandfather would say, for what's about to come in the next 210 days.
Blanche, with nothing left to lose and a boss demanding loyalty, fealty, and lawsuits, can be more dangerous than he's been so far.
Blanche already has a track record that makes him unsellable once he leaves the Justice Department. A federal judge, Kathleen Williams, tore into the IRS settlement he orchestrated for Trump, which includes the anti-weaponization fund, calling it basically a sham designed to manipulate the courts.
And she didn't stop there.
She sent her ruling to the New York State Bar, where Blanche is licensed, adding another demerit to an ethics complaint already filed by more than 100 former federal and state judges who accused him of running the DOJ like Trump's personal law firm.
He should also have an ethics complaint filed against him for his woefully inept and, I feel, illegal oversight of the Epstein files. Illegal because he violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which, to me, is only a starting point. The cover-up is always worse than the crime, as the old axiom most likely holds true in the Epstein saga.
And just as a person, he proved to be a real slimeball by alienating the Epstein survivors, who said he was short-tempered and dismissive when he was forced to meet with them.
As a professional slimeball, he's pursuing retaliatory investigations against Trump critics like James Comey, the civil rights organization the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the silly criminal subpoenas to New York Times journalists in retaliation for a critical investigative piece detailing severe security concerns regarding Trump's new Air Force One. The case was, of course, withdrawn.
Sorry to say, but Blanche's unethical, illegal, and crazy behavior is likely only to get worse, because this guy has got to know he's finished after his acting stint. He will basically be at the beck and call of his client, Donald Trump.
That's what makes the next 210 days rather scary. If Blanche's new motto is, "There's no coming back from this anyway," then the incentive is to go all in on whatever Trump wants. We haven't seen anything yet.
And when this ends, whenever and wherever it ends, where exactly does Blanche go? Big law firms don't want partners under active bar investigation backed by more than a hundred judges. Can you imagine? Corporate clients don't want the lawyer who got a federal judge to refer him for disciplinary review.
If Blanche thinks he's somehow going to come away from this with a bright future, he only needs to look at what happened to the other attorneys who hitched their wagons to Trump: Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Alina Habba, to name a few. Does anyone know what they're up to? Exactly.
Once celebrated attorneys, they're now examples of how bar licenses and reputations become casualties of the same sycophancy Blanche is wrapped up in now. His warped mentality probably has him thinking that serving Trump personally is somehow also serving the country professionally.
Even Pam Bondi, whom Blanche replaced, didn't escape Trump's legal curse. There is no version of this where the loyalty pays off. Trump is a loser, and if you tie yourself to him, you lose too.
Maybe Blanche believes he's different. Maybe he believes his prosecutorial record and law firm pedigree will insulate him where they didn't insulate the others. Just kidding. The man has to be smart enough to realize he's in the process of digging his own grave, so he might as well give it all he's got.
Oh, and if the Democrats do take the Senate, Blanche will be a target, and so will the judicial system, because Blanche has broken the law.
Blanche's legacy is already shattered. And the next 210 days will be a water slide into irrelevance.