Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal lawyer, has built his reputation as someone willing to do anything Donald Trump wants, no matter how absurd, unethical, or unjust. When Trump fired Pam Bondi as Attorney General in April—reportedly out of frustration that the department was not moving fast enough to prosecute his enemies—it was commonly understood that Blanche’s performance as acting AG was simply an audition for the full-time role.
The Guardian, after listing a series of aggressive actions Blanche oversaw as acting AG—vacating the Proud Boys’ seditious-conspiracy convictions; charging the Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigates and exposes hate groups and is a thorn for the MAGA right, with wire fraud; reviving a case against former FBI director James Comey; and personally signing an agreement giving Trump and his family immunity from tax audits—explains:
All of those actions have left little doubt that Blanche and the justice department will do whatever it takes to serve Trump’s interests.
“Todd Blanche has never stopped acting as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. He has used his high position at the department to enter into a corrupt deal with the president and his family, advance vindictive prosecutions, illegally fire career employees, smear whistleblowers, and attack the judiciary,” said Stacey Young, a former justice department lawyer who now leads Justice Connection, which advocates on behalf of former department attorneys. … “A vote to confirm him as attorney general represents a rejection of the rule of law.” …
“As to whether or not I want this job, I did not ask for this job. I love working for President Trump, it’s the greatest honor of a lifetime,” he said in April, shortly after being named the acting attorney general. “If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’ I don’t have any goals or aspirations beyond that.”
As in any autocratic regime, sycophancy and a complete lack of personal or professional ethics in following the leader’s orders is the fast-track to career advancement. Blanche’s suck-up act has placed him one step closer to what he so clearly wanted, and it is probably too much to hope for enough Senate Republicans to find a backbone and oppose his nomination.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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