Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee has signed away the $1.8 billion fund designed largely to enrich people convicted over the January 6 Capitol attack, but the order killing it may be worth less than the paper it’s printed on.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on 2 August that he was rescinding his own order made in May creating the “anti-weaponization fund,” which grew out of Trump’s settlement of a lawsuit over the 2019 leak of his tax returns.

Written confirmation

The cancellation was the price of his confirmation in office: Republican senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis had blocked Blanche’s nomination in committee, demanding the fund’s death be confirmed in writing first.

Both Cornyn and Tillis are lame ducks; Cornyn lost his primary after a Trump endorsement against him, and Tillis is retiring after a Trump threat. So, ironically, Trump’s moves against them gave them the freedom to block the confirmation.

It worked, and the Judiciary Committee confirmed Blanche by 12 votes to 10 along party lines on Tuesday, with the full Senate then confirming him as attorney general.

But even then, it wasn’t plain sailing. Susan Collins of Maine broke ranks to vote against Blanche, and Lisa Murkowski had pledged the same, leaving Republicans having to muster every other available vote to get him through.

Every committee Democrat opposed him, too. Richard Blumenthal was blunt about why, dismissing Blanche’s cancellation document at the committee vote as “a sham and a fraud on the Congress.”

The fund’s purpose was never disguised. Trump has called it compensation for people “abused” by a “weaponized” Biden administration.

But congressional Republicans were fearful it would reach individuals convicted over January 6, including some accused of assaulting police officers and some he pardoned on his first day back in office. And that turned even Senate Republicans against Trump.

Whether the cancellation or ‘rescission’, as it’s known, actually stops those payments is doubtful.

Legal experts have questioned the order’s force, and Mike Howell of the Trump-aligned Oversight Project dismissed it as something that “can be undone after Tuesday” once confirmation was secured, adding that “the anti-weaponization fund is great.”

Trump himself, in the days before the deal, told reporters at Camp David the fund “is dead, but you know…”

Our butt handed to us

The political dismay inside the GOP has been unusually candid. Tillis called the fund “horrible policy” and “horrible politics,” warning it had become “a yoke” around Republican candidates’ necks. Polling shows it is a major concern of Republican voters in the run-up to November’s midterms.

West Virginia’s senator Jim Justice was even more blunt: without ditching it, he warned, Republicans would “waken to the midterms with our butt handed to us.”