Trump Blanches At Blanche Confirmation Impasse, Will Take His Blanche And Go Home
He might try again after the two Republican Senate holdouts retire ... let's elect Democrats to their seats instead!
Donald Trump on Thursday said that since Republicans in the Senate don’t have enough votes to confirm his personal lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general, he may withdraw the nomination and submit it after the midterms, leaving Blanche in place as (acting) AG until Trump gets his way. Two lame-duck Republican senators, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said they can’t support Blanche’s confirmation unless Trump accepts limits on the sweetheart tax immunity deal Blanche announced in May as part of Trump’s fictional “settlement” of his bogus lawsuit against himself.
Cornyn told reporters Wednesday that Trump refused to put in writing a commitment to really kill a $1.776 billion slush fund for January 6 criminals and other “victims” of “weaponization,” and to clarify the details of the tax immunity deal. Cornyn said that he wants written agreement that the immunity would only apply to current IRS audits of Trump, his family, and his billion or so front companies, and wouldn’t prevent the IRS from looking at future tax criming by Great Leader.
In a pissy little post to his personal Twitter knockoff Thursday, Trump whined that “Todd Blanche is a STAR” and that Cornyn and Tillis are just big meanies who are retaliating against Trump for throwing them into the cornfield not endorsing them for reelection.
Trump wrote that he had “no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office,” which assumes that Republicans will still hold the Senate after the midterm elections.
We’ll just note here that a new Fox News poll shows former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) nine points ahead of Republican Michael Whatley in the race to fill Tillis’s seat. And in Texas, Democrat James Talarico has a five-point polling lead over corrupt creep Ken Paxton in the election for Cornyn’s spot. Wouldn’t electing both — and flipping at least two other seats — be the funniest way to make Trump mad?
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Cornyn responded to Trump’s online tantrum with a Twitter message saying that Trump would be “mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis,” completely ignoring the objective fact that Blanche is a STAR and you’ll all be sorry you got in his way.
That point was echoed Thursday by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who told reporters she was “hopeful” that discussions with the Justice Department might result in a written deal to curb the bullshit “settlement” of Trump’s grifty lawsuit. She said that when she met with Blanche, she’d told him, “I have real concerns about this. What can you do to narrow the scope of the IRS settlement? How can you give us assurance that this anti-representation fund is truly dead?”
Murkowski didn’t say how Blanche replied, but we suspect it may have involved grunting.
With typical circumlocution, the New York Times tut-tutted (gift link) that this is all most unseemly and without precedent, my word:
That the fate of an attorney general would be jeopardized by the administration’s apparent determination to keep in place a tax deal offering a sitting president enormous financial advantages illustrated a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump’s second term: a president’s personal interest, along with public interest, is now a factor in governing.
Yes, that is somehow still surprising.
Just to underline how committed he is to keeping his tax deal and throwing $1.8 billion to his pardoned rioter brownshirts, Trump began Friday morning by insisting on his Lie Social site that the slush fund is definitely still a thing (link to Joe.My.God) and he will reward the “great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration,” et cetera, ad infinitum.
Cornyn, who in his final months of power seems to at least enjoy stirring the proverbial shit, was a little skeptical of Trump’s brilliant plan to simply bring Blanche back after the midterms. Trump, Cornyn said, “has a unique way of negotiating,” he said, and we will assume he pantomimed the universal hand gesture for “jerking off.” Cornyn continued, “He may think that, you know, he’s got us where he wants us, but the fact is, there’s no guarantee who the senators are going to be to replace Senator Tillis and myself, and he may have a weaker hand next year than he does now.”
He did not, however, follow that by adding “You know what? Fuck him. Y’all should vote for that Talarico fella, he’s way better than that asshole Paxton.”
[NYT (gift link) / AP / NYT (gift link)]
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I'M SO FUCKING TIRED OF ALL THIS SHIT!!!
MAKE IT FUCKING STOP!!!!!
O/T: The librarians within the Wonketariat will get a kick out of this: a library book that was 150 years overdue is returned to an Australian library:
https://apnews.com/article/australia-library-book-overdue-kiama-f4dc126f4eecd345f27f24fdb2742800?