President Trump said Thursday he may temporarily pull Todd Blanche's attorney general nomination instead of granting concessions to Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, and wait until both Republicans leave office next year to resubmit it.
The Senate Judiciary Committee had planned to vote Thursday on advancing Blanche, Trump's acting attorney general and former personal lawyer, to the permanent post. That vote never happened. The committee postponed it after Cornyn of Texas and Tillis of North Carolina refused to support the nomination without additional written guarantees from Blanche tied to a controversial IRS lawsuit settlement.
Trump responded within hours on his social media site, framing the move not as a retreat but as a refusal to negotiate. He called Blanche "a STAR" and made clear he intends to keep him running the Justice Department regardless of whether the Senate confirms him.
"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."
The logic is blunt. Both Cornyn and Tillis leave the Senate next year. If Trump pulls the nomination now and resubmits it after they are gone, neither senator would have a vote on the matter. Blanche would face a committee that no longer includes the two members blocking him.
In the meantime, Blanche stays in place as acting attorney general, running the department day to day with or without a confirmation vote. Trump loses nothing operationally. The senators lose their leverage.
That calculus explains why Trump sounded unbothered. He was not conceding defeat on Blanche. He was telling Cornyn and Tillis that their objections have an expiration date, and he is willing to wait them out. Trump's earlier warnings about shelving the nomination signaled this approach was under consideration for some time.
The dispute centers on a settlement Trump's own Department of Justice negotiated to resolve the president's lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. That deal gave Trump and members of his family protection from IRS tax audits. It also created what has been called an "Anti-Weaponization Fund" and included potential payouts for Trump allies.
Cornyn and Tillis want Blanche to provide written assurances that the Anti-Weaponization Fund will be permanently shut down. Without those assurances, both senators have refused to advance the nomination.
Neither senator has been quoted publicly explaining why written assurances from Blanche, rather than the terms of the settlement itself, are the sticking point. And Blanche has not responded publicly to their demands or to Trump's Thursday statement.
The standoff is unusual. Republican senators blocking a Republican president's cabinet pick over the terms of a lawsuit the president himself filed is not standard intraparty friction. It is two members of the president's own conference using their committee seats to extract conditions on a legal settlement that benefits the president personally. Both senators voted to confirm Merrick Garland as attorney general under Biden, a fact that makes their current resistance to a Republican nominee harder to explain as a matter of principle.
Trump originally tapped Blanche for the permanent AG post after Blanche had already been serving in an acting capacity. The nomination was meant to formalize an arrangement that was already in place. If it stalls or gets pulled, the practical effect is minimal, Blanche continues leading the department.
That is the structural reality Cornyn and Tillis face. Their holdout does not remove Blanche from power. It does not change DOJ operations. It does not unwind the IRS settlement. It simply delays a Senate vote that Trump has now signaled he is happy to delay indefinitely.
Several questions remain unanswered. The precise dollar amounts in the Anti-Weaponization Fund and the potential payouts for Trump allies have not been disclosed in the available reporting. The specific family members covered by the tax audit protections are also unclear. And it remains uncertain whether Trump's social media post represents a formal decision to withdraw the nomination or a conditional warning aimed at pressuring the two senators to fall in line.
Tillis has also raised separate concerns about DOJ leniency in January 6 cases, adding another layer to his resistance beyond the IRS settlement dispute.
When two senators from the president's own party use their last months in office to hold up his attorney general pick over a lawsuit settlement they had no hand in crafting, it is fair to ask whose interests they are protecting, and whether the answer is anyone's but their own.
