At 4:31 a.m. on Saturday, August 8, under the cover of darkness, the U.S. Senate confirmed Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche as the permanent attorney general. The vote was 50 to 49, with all Democrats plus two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voting “no,” and the rest of the Republicans who were present voting “yes.” Mitch McConnell of Kentucky missed the vote due to illness.
The confirmation did not directly increase the powers exercised by Blanche. He had added the position of acting attorney general to the post of deputy attorney general held since the beginning of Trump’s second term when the president fired then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in April. Trump axed Bondi for not prosecuting his political enemies with sufficient aggressiveness.
Nevertheless, the formal elevation of Blanche to head the Department of Justice marks a significant further step in the consolidation of a personalist presidential dictatorship in the United States. It is the latest and perhaps most consequential in a series of moves to staff the top levels of the executive branch with Trump acolytes and purge the government of any and all office holders suspected of harboring doubts about Trump’s policies of escalating war abroad and destruction of democratic rights at home.
On June 29, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that the president of the United States has absolute authority over all agencies of the executive branch, including those explicitly established by Congress with limited independence. Trump can legally hire or fire all federal office holders at will. The court thus upheld the far-right theory of a “unitary executive,” for all intents and purposes transforming the president into a budding Führer.
The collapse of democratic forms of rule is not the product of the megalomaniacal mind of Donald Trump. The elevation of this criminal representative of the New York real estate and gambling mafia to head of state is itself the result of a crisis of American capitalism that has produced a financial oligarchy with unheard of wealth at one pole and an increasingly desperate and rebellious working class at the other. Trump is the agent of this oligarchy, which increasingly supports dictatorship. Democratic forms of rule are incompatible with these underlying social relations.
During his confirmation hearing last month before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Blanche repeatedly espoused the “unitary executive” conception of presidential powers, essentially reducing the Justice Department to a direct arm of the White House. When Senator Chris Coons (Democrat-Delaware) asked Blanche whether the department was “independent from the White House,” Blanche replied, “Article II of the Constitution gives the power of the executive to President Trump.”
But Blanche’s personal subservience to Trump goes even beyond this general principle. Asked by another senator whether he and Trump were friends, Blanche replied, “I’m his lawyer,” a damning slip of the tongue. He quickly corrected himself, saying, “I was his lawyer.”
In 2023 and 2024, Blanche served as Trump’s lawyer in three cases. In the New York “hush money” case involving a 2016 payment to Stormy Daniels, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Blanche defended Trump in two cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, both of which were dismissed following Trump’s reelection. The first was the federal classified documents case stemming from Trump’s retention of government records at Mar-a-Lago. The second was the federal election obstruction case, in which Trump was charged over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
As deputy and then acting attorney general, Blanche has shielded the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) murderers of pro-immigrant protesters Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as well as the ICE killers of immigrant workers, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, refusing even to charge them.
He has implemented Trump’s NSPM-7 (National Security Presidential Memorandum-7) order declaring left-wing protesters to be “Antifa” terrorists, as seen in the savage sentences, a combined 556 years, handed down against anti-ICE protesters in Prairieland, Texas, the prosecution of 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota and the prosecution of eight anti-genocide protesters at the University of Michigan.
He has aggressively pursued investigations ordered by Trump against former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan and Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide from the first term who testified against him in Congress. He has also overseen attempted prosecutions of congressional Democratic critics of Trump.
Blanche has defended Trump’s pardon of the fascists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden. Under him, the Department of Justice has been populated with election deniers, including several who worked to overturn the 2020 result.
He has aggressively pursued Trump’s efforts to manipulate or overturn the upcoming mid-term elections. The Justice Department under Blanche has sought voting records from dozens of states, and Blanche has endorsed the deployment of ICE agents outside polling locations.
Ex-Attorney General Bondi put Blanche in charge of the cover-up of the Epstein scandal, and he has diligently fulfilled this task. Compelled by congressional legislation, reluctantly signed into law by Trump, he released millions of pages of files, heavily redacted and carefully scrubbed to remove all evidence of Trump’s involvement in the sex trafficking of teenagers and to conceal the names of corporate oligarchs and politicians serviced by Epstein. At the same time, information was released identifying many of Epstein’s victims.
In July 2025, Blanche interviewed Epstein’s chief accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, over two days, publicizing her denials of any involvement by Trump. Roughly a week later, without any explanation, Maxwell was transferred from her low-security federal prison to a more comfortable minimum-security prison.
At Blanche’s hearing, a number of Republicans who threatened to oppose his confirmation focused on Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate his allies, including the January 6 insurrectionists. They demanded that Blanche supplement his verbal statements that the fund would not go forward with written assurances, which he ultimately supplied. These, however, are not legally binding, and Trump refused to sign them, meaning he could revive the slush fund at any time. Meanwhile, an addendum remains in place barring tax and financial investigations into Trump, his children and his businesses—placing the president’s immediate circle above the law.
The Democrats focused almost entirely on Trump’s slush fund and the Epstein cover-up. They were virtually silent on the trumped-up prosecutions of anti-ICE and anti-genocide protesters and the savage sentences against the Prairieland 22 defendants. They said almost nothing about the violent rampage against immigrant workers, including the ICE and CBP murders, and said just as little about Trump's preparations to rig, block or overturn the upcoming elections. They thereby sought to politically disarm the population and downplay the erection of a presidential dictatorship.