Trump Is Playing a High-Stakes Game of Chicken with Todd Blanche’s Confirmation

Unhappy with the crop of Senate Republicans he currently has to deal with, President Trump is making a risky bet that, come January, he’ll have more pliant lawmakers willing to put their concerns about corruption aside and confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.

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The Senate adjourned this week as a high stakes game of chicken continues to play out between Trump and Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, who are refusing to back Blanche’s confirmation absent a written guarantee that the administration will kill once and for all its so-called anti-weaponization fund and limit a settlement agreement that gave Trump and members of his family immunity from future audits by the IRS.

Both senators sit on the Judiciary Committee, and a “no” vote from either one of them would keep Blanche from advancing to the floor. They are betting that they can flex their muscle to demand concessions from the administration in exchange for their votes.

Trump, meanwhile, is betting that, since both lawmakers, whom he drove out of politics earlier this year, are in the final months of their Senate careers, he can simply wait to confirm Blanche until next year when Tillis and Cornyn are gone. To that end, he has threatened to temporarily pull the nomination of Blanche, who has already been confirmed as deputy attorney general and is serving as the acting head of the Justice Department.

The clash between Trump and the two holdouts is the latest squabble the president has engaged in with members of his own party in the Senate, and this one has highlighted the perils of his toppling fellow Republicans and removing their primary incentive to bow to his wishes in the legislature.

As the Judiciary Committee neared a vote to advance Blanche scheduled for Thursday morning, Tillis and Cornyn gave positive impressions of their negotiations with the nominee. They characterized the situation as both parties agreeing on the objective and disputing only the language of the written memorandum the senators are seeking.

However, with the holdouts and the administration still short of an agreement on Wednesday night, the committee was forced to postpone the vote on Blanche until the two senators could get to “yes.” By Thursday morning, negotiations seemed to have taken a turn for the worse.

“I thought we were pretty close to landing the plane last night, but this morning there’s been some more complications,” Cornyn told reporters. “I think if this were just between me and Todd Blanche, we would have worked this out. But, apparently, he’s getting some pushback from higher-ups at the White House.”

Both he and Tillis said they were unsure exactly who was the source of the obstruction, but Trump later gave a clue as to who was responsible.

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In a Truth Social post, the president insinuated that Tillis and Cornyn were holding out on Blanche due to bitterness over his not endorsing them for reelection and threatened to simply wait them out on the nomination. “I have 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,” he wrote.

But that strategy comes with risks. Although the two holdouts will be gone next year, there is no guarantee Trump will have a more favorable Senate after the midterm elections. While the current map makes it difficult for Democrats to take the chamber, they are likely to win seats and reduce the GOP’s 53-47 majority.

“There’s no guarantee who the senators are going to be that’ll replace Senator Tillis or myself, and [Trump] may have a weaker hand next year than he does now,” said Cornyn.

What’s more, Democrats may not be the only ones who could object to Blanche on the same basis as the holdouts. In response to Trump’s post, Cornyn tweeted that the president is “mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis.”

While other Republican senators have not taken the same stand as Cornyn and Tillis have against those provisions, they have indicated that they are not fans. Months ago, the anti-weaponization threatened to blow up the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies until Blanche later testified that the fund was gone.

On Thursday, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters she had concerns with the settlement and that she brought them up to Blanche.

“I made it very clear where my concerns were,” she said. “And when it came to the anti-weaponization fund, when it came to the IRS settlement, I said, ‘I have real concerns about this. What can you do to narrow the scope of the IRS settlement agreement? How can you give us the assurance that this anti-weaponization fund is truly dead?’”

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