Trump White House cabinet meetings are always opportunities for his appointees to humiliate and prostrate themselves before Dear Leader, but they usually keep the spectacle inside the West Wing. Last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche brought the full Theater of Servility to the Justice Department, at a press conference that was supposed to be about fighting fraud (conveniently timed as the number of allies, donors and others convicted of fraud that President Trump has pardoned approached 70 and taxpayer repayment losses neared $2 billion).

Discussing his role as temporary – or quite possibly permanent – replacement for Pam Bondi, the aptly named Mr. Blanche (blanch is, fittingly, another word for whiten) used the occasion to publicly declare his devotion.

“As to whether or not I want this job, I did not ask for this job. I love working for President Trump,” he said. “If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’”

I love you sir.

I am something of a student of Mr. Blanche, having pored over some 500 pages of the insane softball interview he did with sex monster Ghislaine Maxwell before rewarding her with a transfer from a high-security penitentiary to a puppy and cupcakes Camp Fed.

The heartfelt “I love you” struck me as worthy of further research.

What, exactly, would provoke a smart man with a law degree and a decent reputation to this level of public self-abasement?

A little digging turned up what looks like Todd’s Rosebud.

Blanche was born in 1974, a solid Gen X guy, son of a preacher man. When he was about ten years old, his father, Rev. Richard Blanche of Faith Bible Fellowship International, lost his church building and started hosting his flock at the family’s split-level ranch on a suburban cul-de-sac in Colorado Springs.

Three or four times a week, Rev. Blanche would set up folding chairs for 60 to 70 people in his living room and preach. Faith Bible International is a Pentecostal church, a “charismatic” sect, where speaking in tongues and other emotional noise-making is encouraged.

Soon enough, neighbors complained. Since the area was not zoned for such gatherings, the City of Colorado Springs ordered him to stop.

The order is somewhat surprising, given that Colorado Springs is a locus of hyper-Christianity – home to NORAD and the US Air Force Academy (about seven miles away from the Blanche home), totally proselytized by evangelical Christians to this day.

The presence of so many religious wackos around the tip of the fearsome nuclear spear is one of the great symbols of the American superpower.

Todd’s dad did not take the city’s orders lying down. He resisted, got a six-month prison sentence and multiple fines. Rev. Blanche’s case was no minor pro se zoning defense — it escalated into organized constitutional litigation with lawyers from the nascent (now powerful) national religious-liberty legal groups.

Eventually, he became something of a minor cause célèbre. The conservative Rutherford Institute was the first to step in, followed by the Christian Legal Association, which used the case to mount a deliberate constitutional confrontation over religious land use.

For context: In the 1980s, religious proselytizers warned that American secularism was on the verge of using state power to crush believers and drive them into secret meetings in basements, as had supposedly happened in Soviet Russia. The paranoia of the American Christianity with which we are so familiar today – the persistent claim of being “under assault” – was just ginning up.

In 1986, Liberty University’s The Fundamentalist Journal published a lengthy article on Rev. Blanche’s travails. In it, he claimed the stakes were extremely high: “A prayer before a meal or devotions among family members could constitute religious activity,” he warned – and could be banned.

We can surmise a few things about the effect this might have had on Todd in his formative years, growing up in a fervent white Protestant Pentecostal family with in-home churching.

Psychologists and sociologists have long documented a persistent link between sectarian Protestantism and authoritarian parenting ideologies. In its more rigid expressions, Christian nationalist parenting produces a certain type of adult in whom obedience to authority, including submission to – if not a deep need for – a powerful daddy figure, is thoroughly embedded.

As a boy, Todd witnessed the spectacle of state power crushing his dad’s freedom to worship in their home. Despite the Christian legal community’s best efforts, eventually the liberals won.

The Blanche family eventually moved to Florida. Todd went off to a four-year military high school in New Mexico, then bounced through LSU, Beloit and American University (he was a stellar athlete). Unsurprisingly, given his youthful exposure to the legal system, he chose to go into law. No Ivy League for this preacher’s son… he took classes at Brooklyn College of Law at night, while grinding as a paralegal during the day.

Blanche eventually worked his way into Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, one of Manhattan’s whitest white-shoe law firms. He was reportedly in the running for a federal judgeship, but those hopes were dashed when Sen. Chuck Schumer announced that he would not be appointing white males for a while – a DEI affront Blanche has never forgotten.

During Trump 1.0, he defended some Trumpworld denizens, including Paul Manafort, who was serving a 47-month federal sentence for bank fraud, tax fraud, and failure to disclose foreign bank accounts. Blanche managed to prevent New York prosecutors from bringing state charges (brought specifically to fend off an expected Trump pardon) and Manafort soon walked.

From there, he moved up the food chain: Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani pal Igor Fruman, and other figures from the extended underworld. All that success caught Trump’s attention and Blanche left the firm to become the Big Man’s personal lawyer. That decision, he has said, was made in part out of disgust with the New York legal community’s supposed unwillingness to defend Trump (though Trump’s litigation probably kept plenty of lawyers well-fed for years).

Blanche now plays Tom Hagen to Trump’s Godfather – the indispensable chill consigliere, the one non-blood-related member of the trusted circle. He ran defense in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, the Georgia election scheme, and Mar-a-Lago classified documents mess.

As Deputy Attorney General, Blanche has continued to prioritize defending Client Number One over the American people. He sat by while his boss pardoned more than a thousand J6 criminals and dozens of fraudsters. After the DOJ pulled a thousand FBI agents off of crime-fighting duties to scour the Epstein files for mentions of Trump before the releases began, Blanche spent two days in a Tallahassee women’s prison gently and obsequiously interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell before she was transferred to a low-security facility with puppies and a comfy room for family visits where prison staff provide snacks.

And last summer, as DOJ panic over the Epstein files release demands reached a fever pitch, Blanche ordered the FBI to place images from the sealed trafficking cases – including material related to Epstein’s jail death – on a thumb drive, then somehow “lost” it, provoking a frenzy of concern. The end result? Nothing was released.

Blanche appears to have found his life’s calling – using state power to defend an autocrat who provides him and the rest of the MAGAs with a Big Daddy to cower to, venerate and obey.

During the Stormy Daniels trial, Blanche subjected himself to withering abuse. According to Jonathan Karl’s book, Tired of Winning, Trump at one point accused Blanche of making decisions that would destroy his chances of a second term (blaming a lawyer rather than the entitled decisionmaking that created the crisis in the first place… of course).

“You little fucker!” Trump shouted in Blanche’s face, according to Karl’s source. “You are going to cost me the presidency!” He went on to lash out against other lawyers on his team, saying: “They want me to be indicted! That’s in the middle of the primaries! If I lose the presidency, you are going to be the reason!”

One of the first things Blanche did after replacing Bondi was to declare the Epstein case over and done with, with no more releases planned – despite three million pages of documents still secreted in the vault. Tomorrow, Todd Blanche is scheduled to be questioned by the House Oversight Committee in a closed-door session.

Fear not, oh Donald, my liege; the Epstein cover-up is in good hands.

Mr. Whiteout is on the case.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow