By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Last November, after Democrats clobbered the GOP in
off-year elections, I floated a
theory to explain the results.
“Simply put, [Donald] Trump has welshed on the devil’s
bargain he offered” in 2024, I wrote. “Give me a free hand to govern as I
like, without accountability, the president implied, and I’ll bring back
the economic glory days of 2019, starting with restoring the pre-pandemic cost
of living.”
Americans accepted his offer and reelected him, the
crowning achievement in the career of one of history’s most successful con
artists. Since returning to office, not only has Trump plainly not given a rip about reducing the cost of living, he has
chosen to make the problem worse by starting one foolish war and then another. Voters got snookered and they know it. They’re not
happy.
My theory implies that the average joe’s tolerance for
Trump’s corruption is a moving target tied to policy failures. The more
disgruntled Americans are about inflation, the more irritated we should expect
them to feel at the president’s ethical, er, “lapses.” From their perspective,
the devil’s bargain I described might be summarized as Trump is free to
self-enrich as long as we get rich too. At the moment, he’s getting very,
very rich and they very, very much are not.
So go figure that they’re growing more sensitive to his
sleaziness. In February, 49 percent of Americans said the word
“corrupt” applies to the president; a month later, 54 percent told YouGov that it applies
“a lot” while another 15 percent conceded that it applies “a little.” A third
poll released last week found 59 percent now believe Trump is using
his office for personal gain versus 30 percent who disagree. Among
independents, the split was 64-20.
The backlash is also showing up anecdotally. Take Megyn
Kelly, who knows a thing or two about devil’s bargains.
As a Fox News anchor, Kelly famously opened the first
Republican presidential primary debate in 2015 by pressing Trump about
misogynistic comments he’d made. Nine years later, having reinvented
herself as a culture-warrior podcaster, she rallied with him a few days before
the 2024 election and pronounced a guy facing more than two dozen allegations of
sexual misconduct a “protector of women.”
Kelly has now soured on Trump over the Iran war. It’s anyone’s guess whether she’s an
earnest dove or merely playing the part that the Tucker/Candace audience she’s cultivating demands of her, but
I took note last week when her foreign policy disagreement with the president
spilled over into ethical grievance.
“I didn’t expect the corruption to be quite as, you know,
widespread as it’s been. And, like, the self-dealing and the lining of his and
his family’s pockets,” Kelly complained in an interview. “You look at, like, across the board at the
Trump family, I’ve never seen a family get so rich off of the presidency.” She
went on to remind the audience that the president
is also a notorious philanderer whose first wife accused him of rape (a claim
that the first wife, Ivana Trump, later retracted when he ran for president).
Which Megyn Kelly already knew, I assume, when she
endorsed him as a “protector of women” in 2024.
Here again we have someone whose sense of betrayal over
policy has made Trump’s rotten character less bearable. He promised Kelly an
end to endless Middle Eastern wars; she was snookered, so she’s grown less
willing to indulge him and his family in the rampant looting in which they’re engaged. That creates
a strategic question for the out-party: If Americans like her are growing more
sensitive to Trump’s corruption due to their disappointment with him on policy,
shouldn’t Democrats capitalize by making corruption a bigger issue in the
midterm campaign?
Specifically, should they zero in on Todd Blanche and the
Justice Department’s sociopathic
new slush fund?
The case for impeachment.
They should, journalist Josh Barro argued in a piece on
Friday. More to the point, they should impeach
the acting attorney general for abetting the theft of
taxpayer dollars to enrich Trump’s most loathsome cronies.
Impeaching Blanche is an elegant, if imperfect, solution
to the problem of right-wing cultishness. Trump also deserves
impeachment for this attempted grand larceny, needless
to say, but targeting him would render Trump-leaning voters instantly deaf to
the merits of the case. To have a chance of persuading anyone about how
garishly corrupt the fund is, you must lower the political stakes. That means
going after Blanche, not his boss.
“Democrats don’t have the votes,” you might reply. Don’t
they? Barro reminds us that the margins in both chambers are tight and getting
tighter by the day as angry GOP lawmakers fed up with an unpopular president’s
grotesque crookedness go
their own way. One House Republican from a swing district has already sent
a letter
to Blanche demanding answers about the fund; in the
upper chamber, Mitch McConnell, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn are
or soon will be lame ducks with axes to grind against the president.
House Democrats can force a vote on impeaching Blanche
via a privileged resolution. That resolution could plausibly pass thanks to a
few moderate Republicans and vengeful Trump enemies like Rep. Thomas Massie.
Once it does, it has a nonzero chance of progressing to a trial in the Senate
thanks to the lame-duck faction I mentioned, which might not heed the
president’s inevitable demand to bury the matter by tabling the articles of
impeachment. Democrats should do it, Barro insists.
Is he right?
It’s true that they’ll never get the 67 votes they need
in the upper chamber to remove Blanche, but so what? Declining to pursue a
warranted impeachment—which this is—because the majority party is too
corrupt to punish an impeachable offense would amount to rewarding that party
for its corruption. Democrats shouldn’t validate Republicans’ moral nihilism by
letting it influence their own behavior.
And lord knows, they shouldn’t spare Mike Johnson and
John Thune the humiliation of having to explain why Blanche should remain in
office after making himself an accessory to larceny. “Democrats should … force
a trial of Blanche that elevates this issue—the president stealing billions
of dollars of your money at a time when you can’t afford gasoline—in the
2026 campaign,” Barro writes, “and ultimately forces every Republican senator
to render a verdict on whether the president can simply steal whatever he wants
from the Treasury.”
Absolutely. McConnell and his conference eviscerated the
constitutional logic of impeachment after January 6 when they contrived an
excuse not to convict Trump for the worst thing a president has ever done.
Filthy hyperpartisanship means impeachment is no longer a realistic tool for
removing unfit officials from office. But it can still be used as a form
of extreme censure that focuses voters’ attention on egregious corruption by
throwing a media spotlight on it. That’s what Barro means by “elevating” the
slush fund.
Don’t you want to watch ol’ Susan Collins sweat it out on
whether to support a trial for Blanche and, if one is held, whether to convict
him? No matter which way she votes, many voters in Maine will be furious with
her. If impeaching Todd Blanche improves Democrats’ chances of flipping
Congress in November, it will achieve its goal of deterring corruption over the
last two years of the president’s term—even if Blanche is acquitted.
The slush fund is an ideal issue for impeachment, too.
Ask a liberal to name a high crime that the president and his Cabinet have
committed and they’ll rattle off a dozen offenses: waging unauthorized war on
Iran, bombing suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, turning ICE
into a secret police force populated by under-trained goons, etc etc. But those
matters all involve political disputes between the two parties and would be
relatively easy for Republicans to parry on policy terms. Pursuing an exercise
as futile as impeachment is worth it only if it forces Trump’s party to defend
something that’s truly indefensible.
That’s the
slush fund. Last week, according to Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican senators
resorted to “screaming” at Blanche in protest
during a hearing over the brazen self-dealing involved in the fund. But
self-dealing is the least of it: The money is obviously designed to induce
future mob behavior on Trump’s behalf à la the insurrection by making MAGA
supporters believe they’ll get a check if they join in. Meanwhile, it tees up
Democrats to remind voters this fall of just how unsavory some of the
degenerates are who’ve already benefited from the president’s largesse.
Worst of all, as Barro notes, the fund is a poisonous
counterpoint to the cost-of-living crisis that’s poised to sink the GOP. If I’m
right that policy grievances tend to make Americans less tolerant of Trump’s
corruption, an issue like this one that fuses the two may be unusually potent.
Bad enough that the president would disappoint voters on affordability while
making himself rich; imagine how much more disgusted they’ll be watching the
January 6 cretins also get rich off their own tax dollars while they struggle
to pay for food.
The slush fund is so irredeemable that if Democrats do
move forward against Blanche, I suspect the terms of the fund will be hastily
reworked and/or the acting attorney general will step down to short-circuit the
process before momentum for action builds. Hakeem Jeffries might as well get
things moving by filing articles of impeachment, no?
The case against impeachment.
Maybe not.
My worry is that impeaching Blanche might lead swing
voters to believe that Democrats have the wrong priorities. Anything that the
party does between now and November that isn’t aimed squarely at addressing the
cost of living risks causing persuadables to wonder whether the out-party will
betray them the way Trump himself did.
The president promised them that he would prioritize
inflation and the price of groceries. They elected him, and he promptly
prioritized everything else. Jeffries and his caucus targeting Blanche in the
thick of the midterm campaign could inadvertently signal that, for all their
supposed concern about affordability, Democrats will use their new
congressional majority next year to pick up where they left off in Trump 1.0.
It’ll be nonstop “witch hunts” against a president they despise. Even if one of
those witch hunts is justified, how does that help people pay for gas?
Our righteous moral outrage over the slush fund should
not blind us to the lesson of the devil’s bargain. Americans aren’t mad at the
president for behaving corruptly; they don’t care about that, and voted
accordingly two years ago. They’re mad that he promised to make it worth
their while to ignore his corruption and then did not.
Most aren’t burning to see Democrats hold the
administration morally accountable. (Well, people like me are, but who cares
about us?) They simply want Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to bear down on
affordability and make Democratic control of Congress worth their while.
To say that they’re skeptical of the party’s ability to
do so would be an understatement. A Quinnipiac
poll published last week placed congressional
Democrats’ job approval at 20-72, if you can believe it, several points worse
than congressional Republicans’. And when asked whether the party should be
doing more to stand up to Trump or to work with him, the split wasn’t as
lopsided as you might assume—just 50-42, suggesting a less-than-ravenous
national appetite for a partisan impeachment brawl.
What seems more likely to boost Democrats’ approval? An
all-out messaging commitment to helping Americans pay their bills, or “Trump Is
Bad, Part 8,000”?
Impeachment might also help the president politically by
providing him with a partisan foil, something he’s lacked in his second term.
An “us and them” demagogue like Trump always benefits
from having a robust “them” to rally against, and would really benefit
right now. His approval among Republicans in two recent polls is down to 80 percent, off his usual cultish heights, and one
of those surveys had his support among so-called non-MAGA Republicans down to
54 percent. With Democrats in Washington a nonfactor and Trump’s conflict with
Iran of his own making, he and his party have no one to scapegoat for his
problems. They’re languishing, and their sense of unity is suffering for it.
Maybe the slush fund is so obnoxious that
Democrats “elevating” it by impeaching Blanche would weaken Trump’s right-wing
support further. But given how much the right enjoys a fight with the left and
how slavishly they show up for the president whenever he starts babbling about
“witch hunts,” I can imagine an impeachment fight over the acting attorney
general shoring up Trump’s right-wing approval, particularly once he leans into
it in his daily rhetoric.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,”
Napoleon allegedly said. Trump and his party are making lots of mistakes
lately. Why would Jeffries and his caucus want to interrupt them?
Meanwhile, I’m not so sure that Senate Republicans would
be as willing to proceed with an impeachment trial for Blanche as Barro and I
imagine.
What’s their incentive to do so? Getting back at Trump by
embarrassing him and his acting AG would be enjoyable for the GOP’s
axe-grinding lame ducks, no doubt—but at the expense of their friend Susan
Collins and other Republican congressional candidates. Every right-winger on
the ballot this fall will face painful questions about Blanche and the slush
fund as long as this scandal persists in the news. Old-school partisans like
McConnell and Cornyn might decide that protecting the party down ballot by tabling
the impeachment articles matters more than sticking it to the president by
taking up the matter.
Besides, they have precedent they can use for cover. In
2024 the Democratic-run Senate tabled the Republican House’s articles of
impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security at
the time, instead of holding a trial. That too was an election year, and the
impeachment grounds—dereliction of duty in failing to enforce immigration
law—reflected an important popular grievance against the administration. Senate
Democrats killed the process anyway and paid no price for it as far as I can
tell. The aborted Mayorkas trial mattered not at all to the campaign that fall
despite immigration’s salience as an issue.
Why would the aborted Blanche trial matter this November
despite the salience of affordability and corruption as issues?
In fact, I’m not confident that impeaching Blanche would
hurt him politically more than it would help him, or compel him to behave more
ethically going forward.
In a sane world, a failed impeachment of the acting
attorney general would shame him or her and convey to the president that the
DOJ urgently needs new leadership. But in that world, neither Donald Trump nor
Todd Blanche is within a thousand miles of power. As it is, my guess is that
Blanche would welcome impeachment: Nothing would endear him to the president
more than being “martyred” by Democrats for the sin of defending Trump’s
repulsive slush fund, and therefore nothing would better ensure that he stays
on the job for as long as possible as weathering this storm would.
As for shame: Todd Blanche is not a
man who shames easily.
If anything, beating the impeachment rap might “liberate”
Blanche to be an even bigger thug on the president’s behalf than he’s already
been. It would mean that he had passed an acid test of personal loyalty,
the sort of no-questions-asked devotion that Trump has craved in a “fixer”
since the death of his
friend Roy Cohn, and he might feel obliged to live down to that reputation
afterward as acting AG. His reputation is already destroyed; he might as well
lean all the way into Trumpism’s
alternate morality and make himself a hero by being
the most enthusiastic goon he can be.
***
In the end, I land here: I would vote to impeach Blanche,
but without the faintest expectation that doing so would achieve anything
useful.
He should be impeached because he deserves to be
impeached. He’s facilitating the embezzlement of taxpayer money to remunerate
criminals for breaking the law on behalf of a fascist. No attorney general has
betrayed his duty so egregiously. In five years, I hope he’s disbarred and/or
in prison.
But I’m skeptical that impeaching him would make morally
inert Americans any angrier about the affordability crisis than driving past
their local gas station every day does. In a culture warped by a decade of
Trumpian evangelism about “looking out for number one,” the lesson of the slush
fund to most might not be that it’s a civic abomination, but that they should
have joined in on the “rigged election” nonsense in 2020 so that they might
stake a claim now.
Maybe that’s too cynical with respect to swing voters.
But among right-wingers, there’s no doubt that the newly surfaced qualms about
Trump’s corruption will submerge again by Election Day to serve the eternal
imperative of choosing “us” over “them.” Ask Megyn Kelly, who’s made
that devil’s bargain too.
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