After a Donald Trump-inspired mob stormed the Capitol and threatened to hang his then-vice president Mike Pence five years ago, one would think the president would struggle to persuade people to work for him. As it turns out, the MAGA movement is filled with mediocre people who are convinced that they are the exception — the one staffer gifted with the ability to manage the mercurial impulses of their erratic boss. This is such a consistent issue that one wonders if holding a position in MAGA leadership requires a delusional level of self-importance that would be diagnosable, if any of these people had the humility required to seek therapy.
The latest victim of her own hubris is Attorney General — or rather former Attorney General — Pam Bondi. The former Tri-Delt from Florida was fired Thursday by Trump in a spectacularly humiliating fashion. She was first subjected to an ego-bruising round of media speculation that this was coming, rumors egged on by anonymous White House sources. To rub a little extra salt in the wound, Trump told the New York Times that Bondi was “doing a good job” mere hours before firing her. Then he dismissed her with a Truth Social post where he used the praise once again, making it feel, especially if one were to read it aloud in his voice, like mockery.
This is on brand for the president. In March it was reported that Trump has gotten into the habit of buying oversized shoes for his male underlings, which they then feel obliged to wear, even though they look ridiculous. His motives are obvious: He’s a bully and it’s fun for him to watch people debase themselves to please him. What’s harder to understand is why anyone puts up with this, especially since, as Bondi learned, Trump could up and fire any of them at any moment, just because he’s grumpy.
The answer to that question is in the mediocrity that most of these people are trying to hide, often even from themselves. Trump has surrounded himself with people who had little to no chance of rising to high levels of power in Washington on their own merits, and certainly not in a traditional Republican administration. He has no use for expertise or talent; he prefers people who will grovel before him. But because most of Trump’s appointees are talentless hacks, they are disposable. Losing them causes no problems for the president, who can easily replace them with other mediocrities who may not know how to do the job, but are gifted at debasing themselves for the boss.
Bondi’s firing, though, is an especially brutal heave under the MAGA bus. As the former attorney general of Florida, the president’s adopted state, she has one of the longest histories of Trump staffer at pleasing him.
Bondi’s firing, though, is an especially brutal heave under the MAGA bus. As the former attorney general of Florida, the president’s adopted state, she has one of the longest histories of Trump staffer at pleasing him. Their history of joint corruption kicked off in 2013, when she briefly flirted with the idea of joining the state of New York in what was ultimately a successful lawsuit against Trump for defrauding students of his so-called “Trump University.” Bondi told the Orlando Sentinel in September 2013 that she was thinking about acting on complaints filed by Florida residents. Instead she personally solicited donations from Trump for her reelection campaign. After he cut her a $25,000 check — which wasn’t legal, as it came from what was supposed to be a charity fund — Bondi shuttered the fraud case against him.
She then spent years using her legal degree and high-ranking offices to lend credibility to Trump’s defense against various legal cases and accusations. Bondi served as a legal counsel during his first impeachment trial, defending him against accusations that he threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, refused to level false corruption allegations against Joe Biden, who was running for president. She was among the leading voices defending Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election, even joining his attorney Rudy Giuliani at an event where they called on Pennsylvania to stop counting votes and declare Trump the winner. Crucially, one of her first acts as attorney general was to kick off a lengthy effort to cover up the Epstein files, almost certainly because Trump’s name is all over the documents.
The Epstein files, which comprise millions of documents held by the Justice Department pertaining to the criminal case against the deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, proved to be Bondi’s undoing. During the four years between Trump’s two presidential terms, many in the conspiracy theory-addicted MAGA base got it in their heads that the files contained voluminous evidence that many, if not most, famous Democratic leaders were secret pedophiles. Inflamed by right-wing influencers, Trump’s loyal fans convinced themselves that releasing the files would lead to mass arrests of Democrats and possibly even destroy the entire party. For reasons that will likely remain obscure to history, these folks ignored the overwhelming photographic and video evidence that Trump himself was a very good friend of Epstein’s for years — and that what these two buddies share are staggering numbers of credible sexual assault accusations.
It’s also unclear why Bondi thought it was a good idea, early in her stint as attorney general, to tell Fox News that she had the Epstein files “on my desk,” and hinting they included the rumored “client list” imagined by conspiracists to contain all the Democrats they wanted imprisoned. But she quickly realized there was no way in hell she was going to release any new information on the case, which led her to attempt to trick the conspiracists by giving them binders labeled “Epstein files” that were nothing more than a collection of publicly-available evidence about the case.
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For Bondi, it was all downhill from there. The harder she tried to cover up the Epstein files, the more public interest in them grew. Between leaks, congressional subpoenas and, eventually, a law requiring the release of the documents, people finally got to see some of what the attorney general was so desperate to hide: the many, many and often disgusting mentions of Trump in the files, from a lewd birthday card he allegedly wrote for Epstein that spoke of having “certain things in common” to claims that Epstein “gave” a 20-year-old woman to Trump after he was done with her. There may be more, as Bondi continues to violate the law by holding back some files.
For all her service to the president and his dark agenda, Bondi got the boot. Which was predictable to outsiders who aren’t sucked into the strange, delusional faith Trump underlings have in his loyalty. Being a woman didn’t help. As former Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem recently found out, the president especially views women as disposable, and he has replaced them both with men. (In his post announcing Bondi’s firing, Trump said he was appointing Todd Blanche, her chief deputy, as acting attorney general.)
Bondi has also, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye has been carefully documenting, become the scapegoat for MAGA conspiracy theorists who are frustrated that their fantasy of mass arrests of Democrats on Epstein-related charges hasn’t materialized. These folks simply can’t allow that Trump is the likeliest reason Bondi is holding back Epstein files, so instead they’ve concocted an elaborate fantasy that she’s secretly working for Democrats.
If she weren’t such an indefensible character, Bondi’s efforts to save her job would be sad. At congressional hearings, she avoids answering real questions by yelling a lot and heaping embarrassing, disingenuous praise on the president. Trump has reportedly enjoyed these performances, but that’s all water under the bridge now. He had a bad day on Wednesday, where both his sit-in at the Supreme Court during arguments over birthright citizenship and his big White House speech on the Iran war backfired horribly. He needed a whipping post.
It doesn’t matter how hard Bondi worked as his acolyte and protector. She had a target on her back because of all the MAGA scapegoating, putting her in the firing line when Trump was feeling cranky and in need of a victim. Like Darth Vader, the president is a cartoonish villain, choking supporters because he’s annoyed and it amuses him. Bondi is just the latest to learn this, but she won’t be the last.
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