The moral cadavers in the crypt that is the U.S. Senate have confirmed Donald Trump’s personal attorney Todd Blanche as our next Attorney General. Raising their pale, bony hands in unison, they gifted Donald the lawyer of his dreams, a man he expects to finally fill the shoes of his great mentor in mob-style lawlessness, Roy Cohn.

Blanche began his new job as Chief Epstein Coverup Officer on an appropriately macabre anniversary. On August 10 seven years ago, Epstein was found hanging in his New York jail cell, leaving countless trafficked victims without justice, untold numbers of johns and habitual pedophiles shaken to the core and in danger of exposure, and a web of conspiracy theories that have powered whole political movements, including Donald Trump’s.

Blanche has already proven his eagerness not merely to preside over the Epstein Files Coverup, but to personally engineer it – from executing an apparently illegal quid pro quo with sex monster Ghislaine Maxwell, to overseeing the redaction of names of rich predators in the files, to publicly promising to flout the Epstein Files Transparency Act entirely and withhold millions more pages of evidence that Congress has demanded be released.

His primary purpose appears to be to protect the men.

That is the main concern of a White House that has more mercy for men accused of domestic violence and roofie rape than for raped preteens with unwanted pregnancies. After stating that he was aware of three million more pages of documents, Blanche claimed, “There’s not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding. We’re actually not withholding anything.” And he later told journalists: “This review is over.”

Lawyer and journalist Katie Phang, in her lawsuit against the DOJ over the Epstein coverup, is trying to force the department to explain who each redacted person actually is – victim, law-enforcement officer, etc. – and exactly how the statute permits their concealment. Congress authorized the protection of victims, not the protection of men from embarrassment or scrutiny. The judge in that case so far appears to be siding with her, making the Justice Department prove its case rather than simply taking Trump regime lawyers’ word for it.

Blanche is willing and able to play the role, but he is not really Trump’s Roy Cohn. He lacks the whiff of infernal sulphur that trailed his greatest predecessor in Trump’s long and sordid legal history.

Blanche is his “Boy Cohn.” And Boy Cohn has an origin story.

He is the son of a preacherman who – as we broke in a previous Freakshow – fought the law for years, trying to win the so-called “religious liberty” to host a twice weekly holy hoohaw in his suburban home. There, little Todd watched as his family split-level living room was transformed into a rave of dozens of falling-on-the floor, glossolalia-babbling, moaning and sobbing, God-orgasming Pentecostals.

The heavenly caterwauling bothered the neighbors. The city had an ordinance about such gatherings and told Todd’s father to stop. He called on “religious liberty” theoreticians in the nascent national Christian legal community. And off to court they went, for years.

This was in the 1980s, when the Christian right was just mustering its legal squadron for what has since become a full-on assault on American society. Little Todd was a preteen, watching it all from the corner of the living room. Or, who knows, maybe falling down in a Lord-struck stupor with the adults. More likely he was staring wide-eyed, absorbing the kookiness – and, behind closed doors, his father’s anguish at being denied what he considered to be his God-ordained right to host a revival in his suburban home whenever the lightning of the Lord pierced his head.

Decades later, Boy Cohn gets to avenge his actual daddy’s legal defeat by playing hero to an even Bigger Daddy who also considers himself a victim of the law.

It should come as no surprise that “Boy Cohn” Blanche, whose worldview was formed in a clash between religious fanaticism and secular law, plans to go well beyond advancing Trump’s Epstein coverup. He is now the preeminent legal defender of a Predatory Man’s White House: a regime that profited financially and politically off the pimp-pornographer Tates, is headed by a serial sex offender, and employs a roofie-rape accused “War Secretary.”

And Blanche has promised to go after the remaining rights of American women as well.

Just before his confirmation, Blanche was on a “White House Faith Office” call promising anti-abortionists “religious”liberty” for their cherished scheme to criminalize women from New York City to Baton Rouge and beyond. For Trump and his political strategists, the alliance with the god squad is just Politics 101. Trump couldn’t care less about the Bible or abortion. But for the regime’s White Christian nationalists like Russ Vought, the end goal is much bigger than denying Epstein survivors justice: it is putting 150 million women and girls on the back foot.

These religious liberty for me but not for thee fanatics now have a cool customer on their side: an experienced Manhattan federal prosecutor whose primary motivation is serving a Big Daddy who sees himself as a victim. On the Faith Office call, Blanche promised activists that DOJ, HHS, FDA, and the White House were working on “permanent solutions” to prevent states and organizations from circumventing state abortion bans, and making Dobbs “permanent in every single state.”

What did women ever do to these men to deserve to be put on the back foot en masse like this? Maybe nothing, other than being a large and potentially powerful oppositional force to fascism. Maybe a lot more, having found autonomy and self-reliance preferable to the domination that Trumpism demands of men.

Historian of autocracy and friend of the Freakshow Ruth Ben Ghiat has written extensively about the link between controlling women and the rise of autocracy. “In an authoritarian state,” she has written, “women are as much the enemies of the strongman as the press, prosecutors, and the opposition.”

I recently met the brilliant writer and Nazi-era historian Rebecca Donner, author of a bestselling book about an American woman hero in the German resistance who stood up to Hitler. In an excellent Nation essay before the 2024 election, “Project 2025 in the Original Language,” Donner pointed out the parallels between the blueprint for Trump’s second term and the Nazi regime when it comes to women. Just four months after Hitler took power, women lost their reproductive rights and abortion was criminalized. And that was just the start. Women’s clinics were shuttered and 19,000 women who held positions in regional and local government offices were abruptly fired. Women lawyers were barred from serving as judges or public prosecutors, and female doctors were thrown off government-sponsored insurance plans.

Hitler shrieked: “We do not think it proper for woman to invade the world of man, to enter his territory; instead, we think it natural for these worlds to remain separate.” Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels echoed: “The first, best, and most suitable place for the woman is in the family, and her most glorious duty is to bear children.”

Third Reich comparisons aside, as 21st Century Americans, we can still maintain our faith that accountability is coming for this claque. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are lower than any president’s in polling history. His MAGAs are cracking up over the Epstein “hoax.” He might have SCOTUS-granted immunity for himself, but that immunity doesn’t extend to an appointee – even one sitting at the top of the justice system, who brazenly moved a sex monster to a friendly Camp Fed in exchange for lies and who is flouting a statute.

Boy Cohn is riding high now.

Every dog has its day.

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