Pam Bondi Fails Trump’s Loyalty Test

Pam Bondi did almost everything Donald Trump asked. It wasn’t enough.

Bondi’s ouster as attorney general Thursday continued a string of unceremonious departures for the occupants of Trump’s most perilous Cabinet post. All have one commonality: Failure, in Trump’s eyes, to sufficiently use the Justice Department as a shield from legal scrutiny and a sword against his political enemies.

Against that troubled history, the role will fall to another — perhaps EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin or Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — with the same Sword of Damocles dangling above. One of the crucial questions that person will face: How far will you go to avoid Bondi’s fate?

Trump’s second term has been marked by an unprecedented assertion of executive power. But that hasn’t translated into the cascade of criminal prosecutions Trump has long demandedagainst his enemies. That’s, in part, because the Justice Department’s work on criminal prosecutions is at the mercy of grand juries and the courts, which don’t answer to Trump.

Bondi went further than her predecessors to give Trump what he wanted. After Trump publicly pressured her in September, Bondi installed a hand-picked prosecutor to engineer criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. But a federal judge quickly dismissed both, finding that the maneuvering violated federal appointment laws.

Other cases that Trump has demanded — the prosecution of several congressional Democrats who urged the military to disobey illegal orders, charges against his longtime nemesis Sen. Adam Schiff and pardoned members of the Jan. 6 committee — have stalled or failed to get past the starting line.

Trump has openly vented about his Justice Department’s reluctance to bring more charges against his adversaries, worried that it damages his credibility with his MAGA base. His complaints echo similar frustrations he lodged against Bondi’s predecessors William Barr, who refused to countenance his false claims of election fraud, and Jeff Sessions, who declined to intervene in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s links to Russia.

Trump was kinder to Bondi on her way out, describing her as “a great American patriot and a loyal friend” before suggesting she would resurface in the private sector in the near future. But his praise for her was notably bereft of specifics other than noting that her tenure coincided with a drop in the national murder rate. The White House pointed to Trump’s statement when asked whether Trump’s frustration over the stalled prosecutions contributed to her ouster. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Bondi, who claimed the AG role after Trump’s first choice, Matt Gaetz, dropped out of the running over lack of Senate support, ingratiated herself to Trump by becoming an avid spokesperson against the criminal charges he faced in 2023 and 2024. She also defended him in the 2020 impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. But she never fully won over Trump’s MAGA base, a reality that kept her on tenterhooks for much of her tenure.

Bondi’s ouster wasn’t only about things she didn’t do. She also damaged her own cause: hyping the release of the Epstein files within days of her confirmation, only to pull back months later, saying the files would not be released, generating a fervor among Trump loyalists who have long clamored to expose the details of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

Trump opposed their release but reversed himself when it became clear Congress was going to force his hand — and he’s since endured months of relentless scrutiny about his relationship with Epstein, some details of which have been newly aired in the files.