Pam Bondi Was Bad. Trump’s Next Attorney General Will Be Worse
Trump gets rid of Cabinet members for one reason: He’s decided that his interests would be better served by an even more obedient loyalist.
On Thursday morning, NBC News reported that President Donald Trump was giving serious thought to replacing Attorney General Pam Bondi, with whom he’d grown “frustrated” for not “executing on his vision” as well as he’d hoped. He officially fired Bondi several hours later.
On Truth Social, Trump praised Bondi as a “loyal friend” who had “faithfully” served him as attorney general. He is right about the faithful part: In the years leading up to her appointment and throughout the 14 months she held the job, every decision Bondi made was driven by her professional need to remain in Trump’s good graces. She served on Trump’s first impeachment defense team, and after the 2020 election, she frequently appeared on cable news to support his efforts to overturn the results, sometimes with so much unbridled enthusiasm that even Fox News talking heads thought she was laying it on a little thick.
Four years later, Trump made clear that he’d seen her audition tapes and was pleased with her performance. “For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans,” Trump said when he nominated her in February 2025. “Not anymore.”
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Under Bondi’s leadership, the Justice Department’s primary targets can be fairly summarized as “whomever Trump was most upset with at that particular moment.” She lashed out at federal judges, asserting that they had “no power” to block Trump’s orders and accusing them of “meddling” in “our government.” She attempted to extort Democratic-controlled states for access to their voter rolls, and continued to push Trump’s stolen-election lies, forever in search of smoking-gun evidence of massive voter fraud that does not exist.
Whatever the issue, Bondi always understood that the most important aspect of her job was playing the part in public, no matter how stupid or ridiculous she looked. During a televised Cabinet meeting in 2025, for example, Bondi asserted that fentanyl seizures during Trump’s first 100 days in office had saved 258 million lives. The math here suggests that she believes that if not for Trump, fentanyl would have wiped out three-quarters of the U.S. population in three months. At a congressional hearing in February, when pressed over her refusal to comply with a federal law requiring her to release the Epstein files, Bondi alternated between insulting Democratic lawmakers and praising Trump for the stock market’s performance.
Even so, as hard as Bondi tried, Trump made no secret of the fact that he thought she should be punishing his enemies even more aggressively. Which means that as bad as Bondi was, Trump’s next attorney general will almost certainly be worse. Over the course of both of his presidencies, Trump’s motivation for firing members of his Cabinet has always been his desire to replace them with even more pliant supplicants. In 2018, for example, he fired Jeff Sessions, who’d recused himself from the investigation into Russian election interference. Sessions’s replacement, Bill Barr, had garnered Trump’s attention for his expansive views of executive power, and for publicly praising Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director Jim Comey as “the right call.”
Where Sessions came up short, Barr delivered: Today, Barr is best known as the author of a four-page letter, published in March 2019, that downplayed the then-forthcoming Mueller report’s conclusions about Trump’s alleged criminality. By the time Mueller’s actual report became public, and showed that the summary in Barr’s letter was a mendacious collection of selective quotes and clumsy half-truths, Trump had spent weeks publicly celebrating the report as a “complete and total exoneration.” What Barr showed is that he did not care about enforcing the law, in any meaningful sense; he cared about defending Trump from its consequences.
On Thursday, Trump announced that he would replace Bondi on an interim basis with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer. The New York Times says he is considering Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin as Bondi’s full-time replacement. Zeldin, a former Republican congressman and longtime Trump ally who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, appears to have practiced law for two or three years before entering politics. His confirmation as attorney general, as far as I can tell, would make him the first attorney general in U.S. history who has roughly as much legal experience as I do.
In the end, what doomed Bondi is the basic reality that for Trump, the law is nothing more than a tool for destroying his rivals, protecting his wealth, and keeping him out of prison. People who use the law to do those things are useful to him; people who do not do so to his satisfaction are not. All of Bondi’s stunts were attempts to please an audience of one, and it worked until the moment he decided that he’d seen enough, and that his interests would be better served by someone who is even louder, more shameless, and more obedient.
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