Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s path to full Senate confirmation advanced this week after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved his nomination in a 12-10 party-line vote, with all Democrats, including Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) (pictured above), opposing. The move came after President Donald Trump’s onetime personal attorney quelled GOP anxiety over his nomination by sharing two documents over the weekend: one purporting to limit IRS immunity for the president and his immediate family, the other emphasizing the end of Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for Jan. 6 Capitol rioters. But while Blanche may have cleared a significant procedural hurdle in the Senate, his “confirmation is not a done deal,” said Politico. 

Despite his having “cut a deal” with Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) to make it out of committee, Blanche is “not in the clear yet,” said Politico. He still needs to get through the full Senate, where lockstep Democratic opposition means he can only lose two Republican votes. It “remains to be seen” whether the Senate will take up Blanche’s full confirmation “before it leaves for its August recess at the end of the week,” said Forbes. Blanche is nevertheless “able to remain acting attorney general in the meantime regardless of whether the vote gets delayed.”

Trump himself “complicated the negotiations” over the weekend when he “threatened to keep Blanche as acting attorney general and revive the fund,” said Axios. Blanche will “likely be approved” by a full Senate vote, said Chris Brennan at USA Today, and then will “get back to work, reviving Trump’s slush fund because that’s what Trump wants.”

“For years,” Trump’s Truth Social platform has been his “money-losing megaphone,” said Axios. Now, the president is charging Wall Street firms millions for a “split-second edge” on his Truth Social posts “that can — and frequently do — jolt global markets.” Launched on Aug. 1, Truth API costs clients anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000 per month for access to Trump’s “real-time feed” that delivers Truth Social posts “directly to institutional clients in milliseconds.” The program is designed to “give institutional investors a leg up” in financial markets where an “advantage of a few milliseconds can mean the difference of millions of dollars,” said NPR. 

“I can say for myself and 200 of my friends in finance, we’re not getting anywhere near this,” said one Wall Street executive who “requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration” to the outlet. “In another administration, this would be considered criminal.”

Broadly, Wall Street’s reactions to Trump’s social media posts are “more measured now than earlier in his term,” including when his tariff reversal “sent the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite up 12% in a single session,” said The Wall Street Journal. But “fast movers” can still “take advantage of the moves he drives in individual stocks and the overall market.” 

Some traders see the offering as a “must-have technology in the industry” and predict “many firms will sign up to keep pace.” It’s a “defensive cost, not even necessarily alpha,” said David Boole, the managing director at options brokerage BayCrest, to the Journal.

Markets scramble as ‘forward guidance’ disappears