Letters from an American - August 3, 2026

Just before midnight last night, news broke that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had rescinded the order of May 18, 2026, establishing a $1.776 billion slush fund for those who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had persecuted them. The fund was widely perceived to be a way to pay off those convicted of crimes related to their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

What Blanche’s order did not do was to change the terms of the nonprosecution order providing that the Department of Justice would not prosecute Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, or their associates for crimes related to tax returns filed before May 19, 2026. Last night, Blanche reiterated that the nonprosecution order applies “only retroactively,” but that was always the case.

At stake is at least $100 million it appears Trump owes to the American people from previous tax shenanigans that turned up in audits. It’s possible there are other irregularities, but if so, under this order, we would not know: the order says that the IRS will not audit the tax returns of Trump and his associates before the May 19 date. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “Pretty convenient that Trump gets immunity from IRS audits for the year where he made, by far, the most money of his entire life in shady deals all over the globe.”

And, as legal analyst Barb McQuade noted, even the promise to kill the slush fund is hollow. Last week, the Department of Justice paid $1.2 million to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted in 2024 of violating the FACE Act, which bans “force or threat of force or… physical obstruction” that “intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with… any person… obtaining or providing reproductive health care services.” While Vaughn claimed he was arrested for praying, in fact he blocked the doors of a reproductive health care clinic in Tennessee.

Vaughn’s payoff shows that the Department of Justice will simply give out “individual settlements instead of one designated fund,” McQuade wrote.

Nonetheless, Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, who sit on the Judiciary Committee and were openly opposing Blanche, this morning issued a joint statement saying they will now support Blanche’s nomination for attorney general, allowing the nomination to move out of the Judiciary Committee to the full Senate.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that “[i]n their statement, Sen[ator]s Cornyn and Tillis refer to this one pager as a ‘binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury.’ But this isn’t an order nor does it bind anyone.”

The top-ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin of Maryland, released a statement titled “Blanche’s Empty Promises Do Nothing to Kill [the] Slush Fund, Stop the Flow of Money to Convicted J6 Felons and MAGA Allies, or End Trump Family Super Pardon.” He called for “six patriotic House Republicans” to join with House Democrats to pass a discharge petition that would force a vote on stopping the “unconscionable” deal.

Now the rest of Republican senators have to decide whether Blanche’s fig leaf gives them enough plausible deniability of support for paying off violent Trump supporters and Trump’s IRS immunity to confirm Blanche’s nomination to become the attorney general tomorrow. While the focus has been on Tillis and Cornyn, Semafor’s senior Washington editor Elana Schor told MS NOW on Sunday that other Republican senators were quietly cheering Tillis and Cornyn on. “If the Senate voted on this fund today there would be almost 60 votes to kill it, maybe 70,” she said.

In The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa, counterintelligence scholar Rangappa suggests the Republican senators have gone so far down the road of enabling Trump that they will simply rubber-stamp Blanche. If “you’ve confirmed Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem, you’ve funded ICE, you’ve stood by while Trump hollowed out the [intelligence community], fired thousands of people, drained the U.S. Treasury, hijacked the country’s semiquincentennial, trashed the White House lawn for a WWE event, and drained the reflecting pool. Twice…. Is Todd Blanche really going to be THE LINE?” she asks. “Come on.”

Rangappa is probably right that Senate Republicans will vote to confirm Blanche. But the cost of enabling Trump has risen as his job approval ratings have tanked. Only about a third of Americans approve of his job performance, numbers that rival those of President Richard M. Nixon just before he resigned. Confirming Blanche, who clearly works for Trump alone, carries with it the fact that Blanche appears to have been the person most responsible for ignoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act. According to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, Blanche essentially admitted he had violated the law when he failed to address allegations brought by independent journalist Katie Phang, who sued for access to documents she claimed were unlawfully redacted.

The judge is now reviewing those documents to see if the redactions were proper. If not, their exposure after Republican senators have put Blanche in the position of the top law enforcement official in the country would make the senators appear complicit in the Epstein files cover-up. While that issue has fallen out of the headlines since Trump began his war on Iran, it is an issue MAGA Republicans elected Trump to expose and could easily reignite.

And then there is the increasingly erratic behavior of Trump himself. This morning, he posted: “My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been, and why wouldn’t they be with the biggest tax cuts and employment numbers EVER, the biggest outside Investment in America in World history, a totally secure Border, a giant Victory in Venezuela, the Denuclearization of Iran, unparalleled respect and success throughout the World, and much more? Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt, just like the Country Destroying Dumocrats are Crooked and Corrupt. VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR GREATNESS IN AMERICA!”

This version of Trump’s America is as fantastical as his post yesterday of an AI image of himself writing on a map of the U.S. with presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or of himself dressed as a svelte Elvis the day before.

Indeed, Saturday was quite a day of posting on social media for the president of the United States. In addition to portraying himself as Elvis, he posted a flattering picture of himself with the caption: “President Trump ages in reverse!,” himself as a Continental Army officer, a split portrait with his face as one half and George Washington as the other, and a “Trump 2028” poster.

Trump has given Republican senators little reason to give him cover. He has been openly feuding with Republican senators over things he wants Congress to do for which Republican leadership can’t find enough votes.

Those include the SAVE America Act, which would dramatically rework voting in the U.S. and which Trump seems to think would enable Republicans to win the 2026 midterms. But even if the Republicans nuke the filibuster so they could pass it without any Democratic votes—something they don’t want to do—it’s not clear they have enough votes for a simple majority. To get his way on the SAVE America Act, Trump hamstrung Republicans by refusing to sign a popular housing bill, which had to become law without his signature, hurting Republicans’ ability to claim credit for the measure.

Trump also wants a major supplemental funding bill for the enormously unpopular Iran war, which the Republicans would prefer not to pass before the midterms.

Manu Raju and Sarah Ferris of CNN reported yesterday that Trump is barely communicating with Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) except through the media. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on July 23 that Trump’s “patience is running out” with Thune, and Raju and Ferris note that Senator Lindsey Graham’s death on July 11 hampered communication as the South Carolina Republican was close to both Trump and Thune.

Now the infighting appears to be getting worse. “We need to be talking up the wins, talking about how crazy Democrats are, and instead we are knifing each other,” a Republican senator told the CNN reporters.

The infighting between Trump and Republican senators was muted this weekend compared to the fighting between Trump and cabinet members. After U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss criminal charges against David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian the Justice Department indicted for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, both Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to social media to challenge her.

Trump repeatedly posted on social media that “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro” and posted a video of the reflecting pool in broad daylight, with the workers skimming algae in it and people around it, focusing on what seemed to be a young man briefly kneeling by the pool as “proof” the “material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!” Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious with Pirro and is considering firing her.

Pirro blamed the Interior Department for the mistaken indictment, and Burgum fought back, supporting Trump’s version of events. He posted that the “evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera.” Unlike Pirro, Burgum did not have to defend his statements in a court of law. He did, though, get corrected by community notes, which pointed out that the Department of Justice had stated that damage to the pool came from a “botched contractor installation.”

And the fight between cabinet members paled in comparison with the extraordinary fight playing out between Republican federal lawmakers from Ohio, where Representative Max Miller on Sunday took to social media to post a twenty-minute video he apparently thought would exonerate him from well-supported stories that he abused his baby daughter and wife. The video delivered such eye-poppingly classic examples of abuse that it seemed to prove his guilt rather than his innocence. Documents he posted to accompany the video also supported the stories.

After Miller released the video, his former father-in-law, Senator Bernie Moreno, who had remained silent about the stories, finally made a public statement on social media calling Miller’s behavior “increasingly erratic and dangerous” and saying the representative—who is running for reelection—“needs serious psychological help” and “should not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Miller responded with what seemed to be a reference to stories that MAGA Republican Moreno is gay: “You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus,” Miller wrote. “This is all political.”

By Heather Cox Richardson

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Notes:

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU10/20241218/117765/HHRG-118-JU10-20241218-SD005.pdf

https://cbs4local.com/news/nation-world/pro-life-protester-targeted-under-biden-gets-settlement-with-trump-justice-department-tennessee-abortion

https://apnews.com/article/senate-blanche-trump-justice-fund-a38decfc7f20e4f73a181914d53111da