Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer-cum-thug who once represented celebrities, politicians, mobsters and Donald Trump, has long held a special place in the president’s heart. “You know how many lawyers in New York represent organised-crime figures?” Trump noted during an interview in 1997 after I asked him about his relationship with Cohn. “Does that mean we’re not supposed to use them?”

The president was willing to overlook Cohn’s shortcomings because he provided a valuable service, Trump told me when we revisited the subject in another interview eight years later. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy. He brutalised for you.”

Trump has searched for new brutalisers ever since Cohn’s death in 1986, especially when he’s landed in a tight corner. After former Attorney-General Jeff Sessions recused himself from overseeing a federal investigation into Trump’s possible intersections with Russians attempting to sabotage the 2016 presidential election, the president fretted no one knew how to run interference for him. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he complained, according to TheNew York Times.

So it’s tempting to identify a Cohn proxy at each turn of Trump’s two White House tours. Everyone from Bill Barr and Michael Cohen to Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Miller have been trotted out over the years as Trump’s new consigliere. The comparisons are descriptive, of course, and even useful, but not entirely apt.

Cohn was an unusually predatory and corrupt abettor who openly consorted with criminals. However wayward, unlawful or brutish Trump’s Cohn stand-ins have been, they haven’t fully measured up to the original. The lesson in all of this, though, isn’t that Trump can’t find his new Roy Cohn — it’s that there’s an endless supply of lawyers and others willing to cosy up to him by trying to play the part. And that brings us to Acting Attorney-General Todd Blanche.

Blanche, too, has attracted his share of Cohn comparisons. The two men couldn’t be more outwardly different. Cohn looked and feasted like a grizzled, balding vulture. Blanche presents as an earnest and well-meaning Boy Scout. When Blanche is questioned about his handiwork for the president, or various Trumpian financial conflicts of interest, his eyebrows furrow and his eyes widen as he methodically describes Trump’s fundamental transparency and honesty.

“There's nothing unprecedented about the Trump Organisation going out and trying to make investments that basically all will come back to the American people and jobs in this country,” he told ABC News in February when asked about the confluence of Trump’s new-found crypto riches, national security and semiconductor deals with the United Arab Emirates. “And so this idea that there's something untoward or unprecedented is just a repeated story that isn't true.”

The truth is that Trump’s flagrant monetisation of his presidency is entirely untoward and unprecedented. But Blanche, the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general at the time of the ABC interview, was auditioning for a more muscular role in Trump’s ecosystem. After the president concluded that Attorney-General Pam Bondi wasn’t carrying enough of his water and fired her in April, he appointed Blanche as the new steward of the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency.

The Justice Department and its attorney general are meant to operate independently of any Democratic or Republican president, simply to ensure that the law is applied fairly. Trump has never seen it that way, however, and has tried using the agency as a retribution juggernaut, with Blanche at the helm. Blanche routinely demurs when asked about the open politicisation of the Justice Department, insisting that such critiques are “simply false”.

My colleague Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor, described last week’s establishment of a $1.8 billion, taxpayer-funded piggy bank that Trump can dip into to reward purported victims of federal “lawfare” — including the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists — as a “grifter fund”. Blanche, who will help oversee this jackpot, dismissed “outrage” over the fund as ignoring the reality that it “is completely legal, allowed under our laws, and has been done before”.

The creation of the fund also came with a special benefit that Blanche orchestrated for Trump, his business and two eldest sons: permanent immunity from federal tax audits. The Trumps may have been facing as much as $100 million in Internal Revenue Service payments associated with an apparently continuing audit of write-offs associated with a Chicago condominium project. That audit will now presumably disappear.

One tax specialist described Blanche’s get-out-of-audit-free card to Bloomberg News as a “breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system”. Blanche would have none of that. “The fact that the Internal Revenue Service is settling a case and not moving forward with an audit is not unusual,” he told CNN.

Despite Blanche’s insistence that he’s administering the law dispassionately and with respect for legal norms, a federal judge in Tennessee slammed him when he dismissed one of the Justice Department’s high-profile criminal cases last Friday. He said Blanche’s conduct in the prosecution, involving a defendant named Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, “taints the investigation with a vindictive motive”. Blanche pursued the case, the judge ruled, to buttress the “Executive Branch’s decision” to deport Abrego Garcia, an immigrant, to El Salvador. When Abrego Garcia challenged his deportation, the court said, Blanche helped engineer a criminal case against him in retaliation.

“The evidence before this court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” the judge observed. The Justice Department said it planned to appeal the order and described it as the work of an “activist judge” who “placed politics above public safety”.

Blanche may not be a perfect replacement for Roy Cohn, and the president may continue to feel deprived. That doesn’t really matter, however.

What is essential is that the malfeasance and corruption clinging to Trump and his presidency continue because he is surrounded by enablers. Blanche is at the top of his class in that regard, and he’ll remain in the president’s good graces just as long as he follows orders.

If Trump grows weary of Blanche, he’ll easily find a replacement. For while there may be only one Roy Cohn, the ranks of Trump enablers are legion.

• Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for The New York Times, he is author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald