President Trump has nominated Todd Blanche as the permanent United States Attorney General, according to Al Jazeera and confirmed by Guardian reporting. Blanche has been serving as acting Attorney General since April, when Trump dismissed Pam Bondi. Before that role, Blanche was Trump’s personal defence attorney — the lawyer who represented him during the federal criminal prosecutions that preceded Trump’s return to the White House. Senator Adam Schiff has called on the Senate to “vigorously oppose” the nomination. The nomination requires Senate confirmation. Blanche had originally been appointed acting AG in controversial circumstances; his elevation to the permanent role will now require a public confirmation process that his opponents will use to scrutinise his record, his relationship with the president, and the implications of having the nation’s chief law enforcement officer be someone who, until recently, was paid to keep that president out of prison.
The received wisdom
The liberal argument against the Blanche nomination is essentially complete and, stated in its own terms, unanswerable: the Attorney General of the United States is supposed to represent the interests of the American people, not the personal legal interests of the sitting president. The Department of Justice is not the president’s law firm. The appointment of one’s personal criminal-defence lawyer to oversee federal prosecutions, including prosecutions of political opponents and decisions about which of the administration’s political allies to investigate, is a structural corruption of the separation-of-powers framework that the DOJ exists within.
The historical precedent invoked is Robert Kennedy as John F. Kennedy’s Attorney General — a nepotism appointment that produced, in practice, a Justice Department that pursued labour racketeers with genuine vigour but could also be weaponised toward the administration’s political enemies. Kennedy at least had prosecutorial experience and independent standing. Blanche’s entire recent professional identity is defined by the task of protecting Trump personally.
This is a coherent and serious argument. The norm that the Attorney General should have meaningful institutional independence from the president is not a technicality. It is load-bearing.
A different read
Here, though, the right-of-centre analysis has to do something uncomfortable: it has to grant that the norm matters, and also ask whether the norm has already been so thoroughly compromised by the left’s own behaviour that the Blanche appointment represents continuity rather than rupture.
The DOJ’s institutional independence was not a pristine institution before Trump. Eric Holder famously described himself as Obama’s “wingman” — a characterisation that would, in any other context, have been treated as disqualifying for the holder of that office. The Russia investigation’s origins, as scrutinised by the Durham report, involved DOJ and FBI officials acting on political assumptions that benefited one administration while damaging another. Loretta Lynch’s tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton during an active investigation of Hillary Clinton was not an isolated lapse.
None of this means the Blanche appointment is acceptable. It means we are arguing about the wreckage of an institution that was already cracking, not a pristine one being desecrated for the first time. The progressive argument that Trump uniquely corrupted DOJ independence has always been somewhat dishonest about the pre-Trump baseline.
What the Blanche appointment represents, at a structural level, is the logical conclusion of the personalisation of executive power that has been accelerating for decades. Presidents began treating the AG as a political ally rather than an independent officer long before Trump. Trump’s contribution is simply to remove the fig leaf of pretence. Blanche’s presence in the role will make explicit what was previously deniable: the AG serves at the pleasure of the president, and — now — previously served for the president as a matter of record.
The Senate confirmation process will be telling. Republican senators who are inclined toward institutional conservatism — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and their diminishing cohort — face a choice between party loyalty and the constitutional norms their conservatism supposedly exists to protect. The temptation will be to vote for confirmation and issue carefully worded statements about the importance of DOJ independence that will satisfy no one. If confirmed on a party-line vote without meaningful pushback, Blanche will govern accordingly: as someone who knows exactly what the president needs and has no institutional incentive to refuse him.
The rule of law is not a statement of principle. It is a set of practices sustained by incentives, norms, and occasional acts of political courage. The Blanche nomination is a test of whether enough of those incentives remain functional to generate any meaningful resistance. Early signals, as Al Jazeera and Guardian reporting suggests, are not encouraging.
What to watch
- Senate confirmation vote arithmetic: whether any Republican senators break from the party line will be the decisive signal about DOJ independence for the remainder of Trump’s term.
- Blanche’s early prosecutorial decisions: which ongoing investigations does he accelerate, which does he quietly close? The first six months will define the institution for years.
- Civil society legal challenges: the confirmation itself may be challenged on conflict-of-interest grounds in federal court. Whether courts have appetite to engage with executive appointment disputes is genuinely uncertain.
- The Schiff-led opposition strategy: Democrats have limited procedural tools in the current Senate configuration; whether they use confirmation hearings as a platform or a fight will shape public understanding of what’s at stake.
— J