04.03.26
Bye-bye Bondi
Yesterday, Trump canned Attorney General Pam Bondi and replaced her with Deputy Attorney Todd Blanche, who will serve until a permanent Justice Department head is confirmed. Bondi turned the DOJ into the president’s personal law firm and political hit squad, forced out every honest, law-abiding, experienced person on staff, and bollixed up the release of the Epstein files so thoroughly that she earned rare bipartisan consensus on her loathsomeness.
Stacey Young, founder of a group of former Justice Department employees called Justice Connection, “said that Pam Bondi had taken a ‘sledgehammer’ to the department and its workforce, causing damage that could take decades to rebuild,” reported the New York Times. “But she said she believed President Trump had dismissed Bondi only because ‘she didn’t go far enough.’”
Bondi also performed badly on TV, an impermissible failing in the eyes of the reality-TV-star-in-chief, according to CBS. As for the botched Epstein files rollout, it wasn’t that she obfuscated and delayed, redacted the powerful men’s names and left visible those of their accusers. It was that the clumsy process brought more attention to Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged sexual abuse of at least one girl, rather than successfully covering it up.
Young called on Congress to replace Bondi with someone competent and “apolitical.” That is not likely to happen, even though the next nominee will face tougher scrutiny from Congress as to whether they will serve as the American people’s attorney and not the president’s. The nominee will promise to be impartial and respect the Constitution and then go ahead and deploy the DOJ at Trump’s bidding — or face the same fate as their predecessor.
In the meantime, expect Blanche simply to be a slicker Bondi. He was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, representing him in cases involving the hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election; the theft of classified documents from the White House after his first term and refusal to give them back; and the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Blanche will continue to work for his client.
Bondi is the second Cabinet-level woman, after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, to be dismissed or (in Noem’s case) demoted and replaced by a man. There are rumors that Trump is about to fire National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard. Again, this is not because she failed to assess the global security risks of attacking Iran but because she shielded a former deputy who publicly disagreed with the president’s idiotic non-assessment of those risks.
It is icky, yet also almost amusing, to watch both women and men abject themselves to their tempestuous leader in hopes that they will be the one whose loyalty is rewarded. But I find the performance of female abjection unsavory in general, and particularly unsavory in Trumpworld, where it is matched by both real and performative cruelty couched in proto-feminist confidence.
Along with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, there one high-level woman who’s in no danger of dismissal. That is propaganda minister Karoline Leavitt. Having taken the job at only 27, she is a prodigy of mendacity, nastiness, and sycophancy. Being blonde doesn’t hurt either.