“Get in, loser. We’re hiding the Epstein files.”
Okay, okay — I can’t prove that’s what Attorney General Pam Bondi said to one of her fellow blonde aides that trailed her into last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. But her strategy appeared to be mimicking Regina George from 2004’s “Mean Girls” throughout the hearing. Like all Method actors, I assume she was in character before she even hit the stage. Can Rachel McAdams sue the attorney general for this half-baked theft of her iconic movie villain? The resemblance was too strong to be a coincidence: The ever-present sneer. The tantrums. The nasty personal insults. The petulant head motions. The embarrassingly effusive praise for men she’s using for power. She even brought a burn book.
Bondi’s resemblance to the blonde brat from millennial movie lore wasn’t just cringeworthy in a woman pushing 60. It also solves a mystery that’s persisted for months: Why President Donald Trump keeps Bondi around, despite her being MAGA’s favorite scapegoat for the administration’s growing pile of failures.
Bondi’s resemblance to the blonde brat from millennial movie lore wasn’t just cringeworthy in a woman pushing 60. It also solves a mystery that’s persisted for months: Why President Donald Trump keeps Bondi around, despite her being MAGA’s favorite scapegoat for the administration’s growing pile of failures. To the screen-obsessed president, a stereotypical mean girl is ideal casting to be his enforcer.
As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye has documented, in recent months MAGA influencers have grown increasingly loud in calling for Trump to fire Bondi. Their reasons are multi-faceted. They’re mad she won’t release the Epstein files, the voluminous documentation collected by the FBI into the criminal goings-on of deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. They can’t seem to grasp her reason, even though it’s obvious to everyone outside of the Trump cult: Her boss is reportedly in the files, and what’s documented probably doesn’t look good. MAGA commentators got mad at her when she expressed an openness to prosecuting “hate speech”, even though she was clearly talking about criticism of Trump and not the traditional bigotries over which the right is so defensive. But mostly, they’re mad because they were hoping that Trump’s opponents would be rounded up and imprisoned by now. In their eyes, the rule of law isn’t real.
“She stands in the way of our very urgent mission,” Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire said, “which is to dismantle left-wing terror cells, left-wing NGOs.”
“Terror cells” is MAGA-speak for progressive organizations that defend human rights and protect democracy. Translation: The organized left still exists. And it’s Bondi’s fault.
Trump himself is clearly feeling this pressure. On Sept. 20, he let loose a Truth Social post whining that Bondi “can’t delay any longer” in launching nuisance prosecutions against those who previously tried to hold him accountable for alleged crimes. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the post was, in fact, intended to be a private message, but it nevertheless served its purpose. Bondi subsequently installed Trump’s personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan, as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Since then, Halligan has been going down the list, indicting former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James on charges that seemed destined to be thrown out.
Bondi likely knows harassing innocent people isn’t quite enough to please her mercurial boss, thus her ridiculous performance in front of the Senate last Tuesday. Showing off her mean girl skills to Trump involved two adolescent tactics: Tantrums and insults. She was constantly feigning umbrage, often at the silliest moments. When Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said, “This is supposed to be an oversight hearing,” Bondi screeched, “Oversight!?” as if it was the dumbest word she’s ever heard.
“Oversight” is a function of the committee, but it hardly matters. Her goal was to simply grab random words and throw fits over them, to derail the proceedings with her spoiled princess routine.
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Bondi’s insults got the most press, because she would respond to any hard question by bringing up some irrelevant personal attack on whatever Democrat had her dead to rights. But let’s face it: compared to Regina George, Bondi was packing some weak sauce. When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked if she’s seen pictures of Trump with topless teenage girls, reportedly collected as evidence from Epstein’s estate, she deflected by squawking about some donor of Whitehouse’s that also knew Epstein. She said to Schiff, “If you worked for me, you would’ve been fired.” She implied that Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, is consorting with “antifa.”
Bondi’s tired put-downs were so bad that “Saturday Night Live” parodied them over the weekend, with guest host Amy Poehler playing the pouty attorney general. “Look at this honky! Even people in Connecticut go, ‘Damn, that guy’s white as hell,’” Poehler’s Bondi sneered at Mikey Day’s Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. As dumb as that was, it still managed to be funnier than Bondi’s real-life response when Blumenthal asked about whether she’s dropping federal cases against political backers. To avoid the question, she whined about a 2008 incident where Blumenthal exaggerated his military service. (He said he “served in Vietnam,” when he served during Vietnam. The right has been obsessed about that single word ever since, even though Blumenthal has apologized.) The sketch also featured Tina Fey playing Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem with genuinely funny jokes: “I’m the rarest type of person in Washington, D.C.: A brunette that Donald Trump listens to.”
Bondi got mad when Schiff pointed out her limp insults were “pre-canned,” but he was right. Photographers captured the giant “burn book” she consulted through the hearing, which contained pages of reminders of these lame taunts. She even recycled one of her prepared snipes, telling Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” and then later repurposing it for Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif.: “I wish you loved your state of California as much as you hate President Trump.”
Regina George would never stoop to such lame material. (It helps, of course, when your writer is Tina Fey.) Bondi should know better. She’s a former Tri-Delt from the University of Florida, but she can’t meet the minimum standards of Southern lady scorn to match that pedigree. The entire sorority system should disown her. Sadly, though, Trump is more interested in images than substance. Bondi probably wowed him with her snotty tone and histrionics, even as her wit left much to be desired.
The attorney general does much better with that other mean girl skill: Flattering the egos of dim but powerful men. Her skill at offering Trump lavish, hilariously false praise without batting a single fake eyelash is top-notch. During the hearing, she gushed that he’s “the greatest peace president of our lifetime, probably in our history.” (Even as he’s literally sending a military invasion into peaceful American cities to terrorize their liberal residents.) As POLITICO chronicled, this is typical of the ridiculous way she talks about the 79-year-old president — or any other man she perceives as being useful to her, regardless of how gross they are. She’s called Tesla CEO Elon Musk “a great man,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller an “unsung hero” and Vice President JD Vance “off the charts” and “remarkable.” For Trump, she frequently reserves words like “adore” and “amazing.” His alleged greatness, she has said, is such that she’s “never seen anything like it.” And unlike with her insults, Bondi rarely has to check her notes before slobbering over the imaginary perfection of men who can boost her career.
MAGA influencers have a lot of power over the White House. One reason Trump’s approval ratings on every major issue keep falling is that he is far more interested in pleasing conspiracy theorists and bigots than he is about the opinions of average Americans. So it’s noteworthy that he seems to be loyal to Bondi, even though a cheap way to excite his base would be to throw her overboard. As a cover-up artist, she can be replaced; there is no end of people who are happy to help Trump by concealing the FBI evidence collected in the Epstein sex trafficking investigation. But still he sticks with her. During this hearing, we got a sense of why.
He wants a mean girl to be his enforcer, someone who can bring sorority president energy to the task of lying and helping him break the law. When it comes to shamelessness, for Bondi, there’s no limit. And that’s what Trump loves about her.
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