The New York Times cut right to the chase yesterday, warning readers in its lead sentence: “President Trump on Monday nominated his former personal lawyer Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general, elevating a loyal and trusted ally who as the acting attorney general has shown a willingness to execute Mr. Trump’s maximalist demands.”

Trump did indeed nominate the 51-year-old Blanche to have the “Acting” removed from his current title yesterday, and he did so with remarkably un-Trumpian terseness. The entirety of the White House announcement reads as follows: “NOMINATION SENT TO THE SENATE: Todd Blanche, of Florida, to be Attorney General.”

Yes, Blanche did indeed work for Trump, and we all know it. He was there, day after day, steadfastly at Trump’s side during that sham hush-money trial in New York City, in which a hack DA pieced together a Frankenstein bookkeeping case that not even the Trump-deranged Biden DOJ would touch, and whose charges were never even made clear, and whose deeply conflicted judge had donated to radical leftist causes such as “Stop Republicans,” and whose daughter’s company had raised millions for leading Democrats, and whose jury was pulled from a city that had voted for Joe Biden by an 85-15 margin. So, yes, Blanche defended Trump through all that. And, yes, to no one’s surprise, he lost that rigged case.

The doomsayers at the Times also seem to think that being a “loyal and trusted ally” of Trump is somehow disqualifying, but I can’t seem to lay my finger upon any handwringing mention by the Times of that time when Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, pronounced himself Obama’s “wingman” and called the president “my boy.” Nor can I find all those times in which the Times held up Bobby Kennedy as the gold standard for presidential cronyism — indeed, nepotism — in picking an AG.

Finally, if by “maximalist demands,” the Times means “law-enforcement demands,” well, then, I’ll concede that the paper is onto something. But if its hacks are trying to hold up that recently scuttled $1.8 billion compensatory fund for those harmed by the weaponization of government as some sort of unique and corrupt Trumpian arrangement, well, I’d remind them that anonymous Americans like Matthew Perna and Rebecca Lavrenz and Michael Houck were indeed harmed by an overzealous Department of Justice, and they deserve to be made whole again.

As for the Beltway Bugle, otherwise known as The Washington Post, it too is concerned about Blanche’s nomination: “In just over two months on the job,” the Post ominously reports, “he has moved aggressively to steer the typically independent department toward Trump’s demands and, at times in doing so, drawn bipartisan criticism from lawmakers.”

With Leftmedia organs like these, who needs an opposition mouthpiece? “By nominating Blanche,” said DNC Chair Ken Martin, “Trump is set on installing a personal fixer at the highest level of government who will protect Trump, his family, and his rich and powerful friends — at the expense of civil rights, the rule of law, and keeping our country safe.”

By the way, that ol’ “independent” canard is routinely trotted out by leftists when they want to smear the attorney general within a Republican administration. It doesn’t matter who the AG is, doesn’t matter if it’s a tried-and-true establishment type like William Barr — it only matters that he works for a Republican president. And besides, as National Review’s Michael Fragoso reminds us, “The Department is not ‘independent.’ It is part of the executive branch, and like all of the executive branch it reports to the president. This was the core of Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s monumental dissent in Morrison v. Olson.”

Fragoso adds, “There are political customs surrounding DOJ, in particular when it comes to prosecutions, that are designed to insulate it from political pressure from above — because, as a general matter, political prosecutions are bad for a republic.”

True enough. But just because those “political customs” exist, it doesn’t mean that the Trump DOJ can’t rightly prosecute a clearly corrupt former FBI director like James Comey. Still, the president would do well to refrain from Truthing about people and cases that are likely to be referred to the Blanche DOJ because when Trump calls Comey a “dirty cop” or a “sleazebag” or an “untruthful slimeball” or a “proven LEAKER & LIAR,” it only makes Blanche’s job harder.

Which brings me to Trump’s hard-earned dislike and distrust of the DOJ as a deep state apparatus, and his understandable desire to put someone he trusts in charge of it. Here, Fragoso, who once served as chief counsel to Trump-deranged Senator Mitch McConnell, concedes the obvious: “He thinks — with quite a bit of justification — that the Department spent eight years in the business of ruining his life. His relationship with the DOJ was always going to be fraught.”

Blanche, then, who was a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and who attended law school by night, seems like an ideal candidate for Trump. His somewhat bland and dour demeanor doesn’t suggest hyperpartisanship in any way.

Still, the legacy media is itching for a tough confirmation hearing, in which establishment Republican senators hold Blanche’s feet to the fire. But as Blanche told the New York Post, “I will work with the senators. I have a good relationship … with the Senate on both sides. I don’t say no to phone calls. I’ll meet with anybody that wants to meet with me.”