George Will is a respected voice of conservatism, not MAGA, but the thoughtful conservatism that once was Republican philosophy. Thoughtful conservatives were fiscally prudent and careful about their public language. They looked carefully before engaging in new policy. They viewed innovation with suspicion. They demanded honesty and integrity from those who held the Presidency. They did not tolerate Presidents who ignored the Constitution or who engaged in profiteering.

George Will is that kind of conservative.

Here is what he wrote about Todd Blanche, who has been nominated by Trump to serve as the Attorney General of the United Dtates.

What benefit of norms is owed to someone who disdains norms? There are many sufficient reasons to oppose confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general. Presidents generally are owed some deference in selecting Cabinet members, but “some” implies limits, lest the Senate’s advice-and-consent duty be drained of responsibility. And not all presidents are equally owed. Today’s president is owed little, given his contempt for the unwritten rules of civility that can lubricate a congenial society’s governance. 

Eight days after the 2024 election, Donald Trump set the tone of his second term by announcing his beau ideal of an attorney general: Rep. Matt Gaetz. This insult lasted eight days, until Gaetz withdrew as nominee. He had resigned from the House earlier, reportedly to prevent release of the House Ethics Committee’s report on his alleged drug use and sexual misconduct, which a woman said included sex with her twice when she was 17.

Trump settled for Pam Bondi as attorney general, with Blanche as her deputy. While Blanche was the Justice Department’s second-in-command, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, a Justice appendage, sought criminal indictments of six congressional Democrats, all with military or intelligence backgrounds. They had made a video. 

Made while Trump’s administration was killing people on boats (in international waters) suspected of carrying drugs, the video said what the Uniform Code of Military Justice says: Do not obey illegal orders. A grand jury did something vanishingly rare in criminal cases. It refused to indict the six.

Blanche was acting attorney general when the Justice Department took seriously Seashellgate. His department secured a second indictment of former FBI director James B. Comey, this time for posting a photograph of shells arranged on a beach to read “86 47”; “86” is slang for “remove.”Trump is the 47th president. Blanche’s DOJ pretended to regard Comey’s infantile gesture as a prosecutable threat.

Republican senators now have demanded Blanche’s assurances that the proposed $1.776 billion slush fund, for compensating persons Trump designates as victims of Biden administration persecution, is dead. But this grift was incubated in Blanche’s DOJ.

Blanche, who serves at the pleasure of the president, signed a memo pledging that the IRS is “Forever Barred” from “examinations” of Trump, certain members of his family, the Trump Organization and “related or affiliated individuals.” This “negotiated” — try not to snicker — settlement between the president and the executive branch he heads exemplifies the administration’s sludge of self-dealing. 

Trump sicced Blanche’s compliant Justice Department on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, ostensibly about fictitious criminality in construction spending, actually to pressure Powell to resign. With Blanche as deputy, then acting, attorney general, the Justice Department (per the Economist) gave courts inaccurate information “nearly 100 times in Mr Trump’s first 14 months.”

In April, Blanche became acting attorney general when Trump fired Bondi. “Nobody has any idea why,” said Blanche. Plausible reports said Trump considered Bondi insufficiently aggressive about prosecuting his enemies. Blanche has said, cloudily, that “some” Justice Department prosecutions “involve men, women, and entities” that Trump “has had issues with. … That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning, to lead this country.”

Blanche said it is “completely false” that the president targets political enemies. Trump merely “wants justice.” Blanche said he was not “celebrating” Trump’s pardons of almost all the approximately 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters when, to a gathering of Trump supporters, he praised the “generous” pardons as one of the administration’s accomplishments. 

If at most four Republican senators had, in committee or floor votes, behaved as independently as the Founders thought senators would, Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others would not have been confirmed to offices far above their competences. Children probably have died of measles, and of hepatitis B passed from mothers to infants, because of vaccine hesitancy promoted by Kennedy, who lied when he promised not to indulge in such quackery if confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services. 

Now comes Blanche. He received this embarrassingly backhanded endorsement (in the Wall Street Journal) from former attorney general William Barr: Blanche “will run the department as effectively as anyone could under President Trump.” Is this sufficient reassurance for Republican senators? Or will, at last, a nominee trigger their gag reflexes?

Once, when someone noted that Sen. Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat, had “served under” six presidents, Russell bristled, saying he “served with” six. It will be a pleasant surprise if, concerning Blanche, a few Republican senators become similarly sensitive about those prepositions.