WATCH LIVE: Todd Blanche back for Day 2 of attorney general confirmation hearings

Two days of hearings and the man is still standing, which tells you something about how thin the opposition's material actually is. Todd Blanche spent day one getting grilled on everything from his past representation of Trump to how he'd run the department, and by all accounts he handled it the way you'd want an attorney general nominee to handle it: calmly, without flinching, without the theatrical outrage that's become the Judiciary Committee's default setting.

What's notable is how the "gains more GOP favor" framing keeps showing up in the coverage. That's not spin, that's the actual dynamic in the room. Republicans went in with some real questions about a defense lawyer stepping into the top law enforcement job in the country, and instead of finding reasons to worry, they seem to be finding reasons to trust him. That's what a confirmation hearing is supposed to do. It's supposed to test someone, not just provide a stage for senators to perform for cable news.

Contrast that with how these hearings usually go for Trump nominees, where the goal from the other side isn't information, it's exhaustion. Wear the guy down over two days, hope he says something clumsy, clip it, run it. Blanche hasn't given them that clip yet, and the longer that holds, the more this turns into a story about Democrats not having a case rather than a story about Blanche having a problem.

None of this means the job ahead is easy. Running the Justice Department after the last four years of it being used as a political instrument is its own mess to clean up, and Blanche will be judged on what he actually does there, not on how he performed in a hearing room. But surviving two days of hostile questioning without cracking is a decent first data point, and it's fair to say it.