{"id":3414,"date":"2026-07-16T07:36:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T07:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3414"},"modified":"2026-07-16T07:36:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T07:36:02","slug":"conservatives-laugh-at-goofy-maga-senator-who-just-sunk-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3414","title":{"rendered":"Conservatives laugh at &#8216;goofy&#8217; MAGA senator who just sunk Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>President Donald Trump is trying to push through acting attorney general Todd Blanche to be his actual attorney general \u2014 but, as some conservatives are mocking, Blanche\u2019s cause was undermined on Wednesday by a member of his own Republican Party.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3412\">MAGA melts down after Republican gloats about \u2018loser\u2019 Trump<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201c[Sen. John] Kennedy [R-LA], in his weird kind of goofy way, as you say, caused much more trouble for Blanche then these Democratic lawyers asking their fine-tuned legal challenges,\u201d conservative commentator William Kristol explained during a podcast for The Bulwark. Kristol was referring to how Kennedy asked Blanche if he considered himself to be Trump\u2019s friend, only for Blanche to reply that he considered himself to be \u201cTrump\u2019s lawyer.\u201d Legally, the attorney general represents the American people, not the president himself.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOf course, he does think of himself as Trump&#8217;s lawyer, and that is a core point which underlies &#8230; a lot of the particularities of the decisions he&#8217;s made in terms of prosecutions and pardons and &#8230; Obviously the slush fund, right? So Kennedy, in his weird kind of goofy way, as you say, caused much more trouble for Blanche, these Democratic lawyers asking their fine-tuned legal challenges,\u201d said Kristol.<\/p>\n<p>Sam Stein, Kristol\u2019s co-host, then broke down whether Blanche has enough support to get confirmed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLet&#8217;s talk about math here,\u201d Stein wrote. \u201cSo Mitch McConnell&#8217;s out, which means there&#8217;s 52 senators. The late Senator Lindsey Graham&#8217;s sister is in, so it stays at 52, which means that it would take three Republicans to vote against Blanche to torpedo his nomination. I guess also the committee is at 11 Republicans, 10 Democrats. So if they can&#8217;t get a majority in the committee, he doesn&#8217;t get out of the committee.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Yet even though Republicans may have enough votes to bring Blanche to the floor, they do not have the 65 votes to break a Democratic filibuster against Blanche\u2019s permanent appointment.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don&#8217;t know the particularities of this,\u201d Stein concluded. \u201cSo anyways, there are ways to defeat him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Later in the same broadcast, Stein and Bulwark contributor Will Saletan laughed at footage of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) interrogating Blanche.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3410\">Trump\u2019s \u2018hodgepodge of vanity projects\u2019 is exhausting federal workers<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWho rejected the 25 defenses the IRS had to this sham lawsuit?\u201d Schiff asked Saletan. \u201cWho rejected them? Who said that these defenses, we&#8217;re not going to accept, we&#8217;re just going to go with the president&#8217;s agreement and the slush fund, and this immunity?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When Blanche tried to deflect by saying there was a lot of internal conversation, Schiff pointed out that Blanche \u201cmade the decision to not defend the IRS and the Justice Department. You made the decision instead to sign this slush fund agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Blanche confirmed, \u201cWe made the decision to settle the case, correct, yeah.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Schiff replied, \u201cAnd in doing that, you basically decided that you were going to be the lawyer for the president and the lawyer for the IRS and the Justice Department.As the court found in this case, there was no adversarial relationship. The court found it was a sham. It was a collusive relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At this point, Saletan and Stein both snickered.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat I don&#8217;t understand, Todd Blanche, [is] what happened to the Todd Blanche who was a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York?\u201d Schiff asked in the hearing. \u201cWhat happened to the prosecutor people had respect for? What happened to the prosecutor who once respected the rule of law? What happened to the prosecutor who said that there wouldn&#8217;t be a whiff of political partisanship and then prosecutes the president&#8217;s enemies over seashells, over making a video stating the plain law and constitution?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Schiff is referring to the $1.8 billion slush fund that Trump and Blanche created \u2014 and which they claimed was dead, although they have not proven this \u2014 to settle the president\u2019s lawsuit against the IRS. Trump accused the IRS of violating his rights when an independent contractor leaked that he had not paid taxes for many years and had a number of previously undisclosed business failures. Even though no one has ever received monetary compensation for having their tax returns leaked, and it was unclear whether Trump even had the standing to sue the IRS he controls, Blanche controversially refused to defend the IRS and instead settled with Trump for the $1.8 billion slush fund for Trump supporters and Trump-affiliated agencies, as well as to never audit the president or his family again.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this week U..S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams voided the settlement in a 56-page order in which she characterized the settlement as self-dealing on the basis of the fact that a sitting president sued an agency he controls, then settled with himself.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3409\">George Will delivers blistering rebuke of Trump\u2019s most \u2018unstable\u2019 loyalist<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Donald Trump is trying to push through acting attorney general Todd Blanche to be his actual attorney general \u2014 but, as some conservatives are mocking, Blanche\u2019s cause was undermined on Wednesday by a member of his own Republican Party.\u201c[Sen. John] Kennedy [R-LA], in his weird kind of goof&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Conservatives laugh at &#039;goofy&#039; MAGA senator who just sunk Trump - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3414\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Conservatives laugh at &#039;goofy&#039; MAGA senator who just sunk Trump - Next Address America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"President Donald Trump is trying to push through acting attorney general Todd Blanche to be his actual attorney general \u2014 but, as some conservatives are mocking, Blanche\u2019s cause was undermined on Wednesday by a member of his own Republican Party.\u201c[Sen. 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