The Todd Blanche nomination mess in the Senate is truly one of those pass-the-popcorn moments for Democrats and liberals. One can sense that John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, the two outgoing Republican senators who have suddenly developed the backbone to maybe vote against the attorney general nominee now that they’re not facing their voters again, represent a far more broadly (if privately) held view in the Senate GOP that the man is manifestly unqualified.But this fracas is more than mere entertainment. It’s a full-blown scandal, as President Trump’s real interests here have become clearer, notably via a Truth Social message he posted late Thursday morning. It’s raw sewage even by his standards, and if the Democrats retake the House, this matter has now jumped to the top of my list of grounds for impeachment. It should provide the basis for the first article Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and his Judiciary Committee draw up.It all has to do with the slush fund. The fund, you’ll recall, was the result of a settlement in a mind-bending legal proceeding in which Trump sued himself: That is, the president of the United States sued the Internal Revenue Service, seeking $10 billion for the (admittedly illegal) leak of some of his tax returns back in 2019. In May, Trump’s Justice Department, led at the time by Blanche as the acting attorney general, settled the suit between Trump the president and Trump’s IRS by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, whose moneys were to go to parties Trump deemed to have been wronged by the deep state—starting of course with Trump himself. It also included a shocking clause granting Trump, his family members, and his companies immunity from prosecution for any tax-related crimes they may have committed before the date of deal.In other words: Blanche created a nearly $2 billion slush fund for Trump to steer money to anyone he wants—and granted him and his kids broad immunity from potential federal prosecution. One observer called it “a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system.” Raskin put out a 10-point memo on why the deal is “unconstitutional, illegal, and a fraud on the court.” In June, a federal judge blocked the fund’s creation, so it’s on hold for now and probably headed, one supposes, to the Supreme Court.Around that time, amid the public outcry, Blanche said that the fund would not go forward. He told Congress that the department would put that in writing. But it never has. That’s the holdup with Cornyn and Tillis. If they get it in writing, presumably they would still vote for Blanche.So that’s when Trump stepped in Thursday morning, when it looked like Blanche’s nomination might be dead, and “truthed” (and boy, it was the truth for once, all right): “Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it! He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time. However, John Cornyn, of Texas, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, both of whom I refused to Endorse, and whose political careers have been ended by my action, are refusing to vote for this Great Nominee, who will remain, in any event, as Acting. Remember, both Cornyn and Tillis voted for Merrick Garland, and others, too numerous to mention. 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.”What Trump is saying here is obvious. The slush fund and probably especially the immunity are far more important to him than Blanche is. And anyway, Blanche, whose servile lickspittleism makes predecessor Pam Bondi look like a paragon of independence, can stay in the job more or less indefinitely as acting A.G.This morning, around 7 a.m., Trump “truthed” again. The fund isn’t for me, he insisted. Rather, it’s for the people who raided the Capitol and banged cops’ heads in; it’s for “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration.… Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history.” He’s almost surely lying about himself. But even if he’s not, sending $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars, received in the corrupt manner this money was received, to convicted January 6 insurrectionists is without question a high crime in and of itself.Once again, as with so many other things Trump has done, it’s inconceivable to imagine any other modern American president even thinking this up, let alone doing it. Suing himself; then installing a spineless yes-man—his former personal lawyer, no less—as acting attorney general, who then agrees to a settlement including nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money plus an immunity grant; then being willing to sacrifice said A.G.’s confirmation in order to preserve the fund and the immunity claim. It defies belief.It’s hard to say how many articles of impeachment the Democratic House might come up with. Indeed, Raskin and his committee’s biggest challenge will be deciding which high crimes and misdemeanors not to pursue. There’ve been dozens, hundreds, and they just can’t plausibly bring an indictment of 100-plus counts. They’re going to have to keep it to some number that the public can digest and buy into.But the slush fund and immunity grant sure look like count number one to me. Unless of course five members of the you-know-what decide it’s all legal. If that happens, the House Judiciary Committee might look at impeaching them, too.This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Some wars start big. World War I is the paradigmatic example. Europe was more or less at peace, the Balkans excepted, all those inbred cousins lolling in their palaces as various ethnic and proletarian resentments built among their people. Then, boom, one event—the assassination of a Hapsburg potentate—exploded the powder keg, and within weeks, millions were mobilized into a war that said cousins blithely thought would last a few weeks but ended up leaving an entire generation of young European men physically and psychologically strafed.But most wars start small. They’re incremental. Even the most destructive war in human history started this way. Of course, Adolf Hitler was lying to the world about his ultimate aims, when he kept saying—after the Alsace, after Austria, after the Sudetenland—that he had no further territorial claims on Europe. But chronologically, the war proceeded in small, incremental steps, and even if Neville Chamberlain has gone down in historical shame, it’s also true that the broader public could have been forgiven for thinking, even after Munich, that world war was hardly inevitable.In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for the mighty United States. But somehow they rarely are. Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing. The neocons were imploring him to march on to Baghdad. He said no, you people are crazy. Then his dumb son got to the White House, and he put the crazies (led by Dick Cheney) in charge, and they launched a war based not on one specific goal but on a theory—that regime change in Iraq would help spread democracy throughout the Middle East.Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.So now, Trump is frustrated, like a little boy whose Christmas toy won’t work. That frustration is key here, and much, sadly (I hope not tragically), hangs on it. Will he be content to keep launching strikes that aren’t accomplishing much? Eventually, it seems, the odds are that he’ll get tired of that, and he’ll need to teach those “scumbags and lunatics” a real lesson.And that’s how little wars grow. There’s a chance that he has enough sense to know that if he doesn’t get out of this soon, it could crescendo into a disaster that will spin out of his control. That’s what happened to LBJ—he knew every step of the way as he asked Congress for more money and troops that he was marching the country to defeat and destroying his own legacy, but he did it anyway. And he was much smarter than Trump will ever be.I remember well when Syria’s Bashar Al Assad was massacring his own people by the thousands, dropping those cluster bombs on his own people. Some were screaming at Barack Obama: Do something! We’re the United States, how can we allow this to happen?I think it would have been good if we’d been able to do something. On the other hand, I’m sure Obama thought that the last thing in the world he wanted was to go into a country we don’t really know with a sanguinary tyrant and ancient enmities and think we can smooth it all out before Americans lose their patience; Syria was not going to be his legacy. All those deaths were horribly tragic. But at least, against the charge of typical American hubris, Obama can plead not guilty.Whatever happens in Iran, Trump is already guilty on that count. The launching of this completely unnecessary and unjustified war was an act of supreme hubris. Now it’s starting to really hit home with him that he may have been wrong. But he’s never wrong; incapable of shouldering blame, he will transfer it onto someone else. If that doesn’t worry you, you aren’t paying attention.THE NEW TNR BLUE BOOK! I hope maybe you’ve noticed that we launched a new newsletter this week, The TNR Blue Book. It’s a morning inside-dope newsletter, sort of like some of those that already exist, except with this difference: We will focus exclusively on what Democrats are doing on Capitol Hill and around the country; we’ll leave the Mikey Johnson dramas to others. In addition, we’ll provide news about what the progressive advocacy groups and think tanks are up to. The idea, in other words, is to cover (and in some sense help build) a community of people working to fight authoritarianism and defend the republic. All that, plus a little humor and political trivia. We send it out four days a week, Tuesday through Friday, around 8:30 in the morning. I really think you’ll like it. BUT: You DO need to sign up for it. That’s how we sell advertising for it (and no, not the Petroleum Institute; our first advertiser is the American Federation of Teachers). So please follow this link and opt in. It takes about seven seconds and is free. Thank you. This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.Latest From Politics