Bluesky

The second Trump presidency has been a through-the-looking-glass parody of executive-branch accountability, from its brazen agenda of self-enrichment to its lawless war making and campaigns of civilian murder. But Trump’s ouster of Attorney General Pam Bondi represents an especially grim moment in the White House’s backward-spooling approach to compliance with the law. In prior modern presidencies, attorneys general flamed out in office after touching off major scandals—such as Alberto Gonzales’s now quaint-seeming bid to hand over US Attorney gigs to political hacks. In nobler circumstances, they might have resigned in protest over Oval Office tampering with the Justice Department’s independence, as Elliot Richardson did during the Nixon White House’s Saturday-night massacre. Bondi, by contrast, was cashiered for failing to slow-walk and downplay the raging Epstein files scandal to the president’s satisfaction—while also, in a betrayal of Trump’s model of government by retribution, allegedly tipping off Democratic California Representative Eric Swalwell to the release of materials from the long-closed FBI investigation into his purported relationship with a Chinese spy.

In other words, Bondi lost her job for displaying insufficient fealty to her Oval Office boss—even after going to enormous lengths to transform the Justice Department into an outlet of MAGA agitprop, from firing DOJ attorneys who had prosecuted January 6 rioters to pursuing shoddy and baseless prosecutions of Trump’s political enemies, to threatening hate-speech prosecutions of people who didn’t mourn Charlie Kirk’s death to the administration’s satisfaction. Yet the larger irony is that Trump’s vanity and his demands for cringing loyalty have always been unquenchable; Bondi’s trespass wasn’t so much a function of her seeking to assert her own independence—as any minimally competent attorney general should—as of her inability to appease Trump’s demands telepathically.

The debacle of the Epstein files’ release is the purest illustration of her flailing courtiership. During his 2024 reelection campaign, Trump pledged to support the full release of the federal files on the late pedophile sex trafficker as a sop to the Q-pilled wing of the MAGA base. But after Trump won reelection, his interest in going public with the sick predations of his former South Florida crony plummeted—most notably after Bondi briefed him that he was a frequent presence in the files. The White House went rapidly into overdrive in an effort to downplay the scale of the Epstein scandal; FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino both issued statements asserting that, despite the extremely suspicious circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death while in custody, he had taken his own life. Patel also walked back Bondi’s initial claim that the files contained “thousands” of shocking videos showing Epstein with underage sexual partners and child pornography. (Meanwhile, Elon Musk, then on the outs with the Trump White House over its massive tax and spending bill, took to X to proclaim that Trump was suppressing the full release of the files because he was all over them.) Through it all, the president shrugged off disclosures relating to his close friendship with Epstein—including the gross and salacious entry he evidently composed for a book commemorating the pedophile’s 50th birthday.

It was Bondi’s misfortune to directly botch the rollout of the Epstein files’ release: When the administration first made a tranche of documents available to the public, it turned out mostly to be material that was already available. And after Bondi touted the existence of a full roster of Epstein’s clients in a Fox News interview—one that is “sitting on my desk right now to review right now,” as she put it—the administration then walked that claim back as well. A memo from Bondi’s own DOJ proclaimed that its “systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”

This incompetent-to-incoherent message is indeed the calling card of someone who had no business being anywhere near the Department of Justice, let alone in charge. But more than that, Bondi’s flagrant mishandling of the Epstein disclosures underlines the untenability of the prime directive of all Trump White House flunkies: to appease both the whims of the king and the restive spirits of MAGA conspiracy-mongering. Trump has managed throughout his career to direct his following to disregard the plain evidence before their senses with the elan of Obi Wan Kenobi masking the presence of embattled droids in the Empire’s sights. But the Epstein scandal simply occupies too great a space in MAGA’s mindscape for management by Trump’s conventional strategy of grandiosely changing the subject. And as we now know, it’s simply impossible for any of Trump’s appeasers—even one with the lickspittle credentials of Pam Bondi—to keep up with the flailing directives of the MAGA monarch.

So just as the fork in the road abruptly arrived for former DHS Director Kirsti Noem when she seemed to show the temerity to actually blame Trump for his own actions and decisions in her testimony before Congress, it was all but foreordained that Bondi was on the path to defenestration when she proved unable to square all the many circles leading back from the Epstein files to Trump’s well-documented history of ugly sexual predation. The ironies here, too, are hard to adequately describe: Bondi came into the job, after all, only after Trump’s first pick, ex–Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, proved too toxic on the basis of charges stemming from his own alleged sexual fraternization with underage partners.

Meanwhile, the reported front-runner to replace Bondi is EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who Senate Democrats charge has lied to them under oath about the cancellation of climate grants. Zeldin also was the House’s most vocal defender of Trump during his first impeachment, and voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election. There is, in short, no Trump-authored lie too big for him to swallow—which in this debased phase of the American imperial presidency, appears to be the chief requirement for the job.