Being the chief law-enforcement officer for a president who believes he defines the law and is given imperial powers by the Constitution is hard work. Minimal deference to constitutional and statutory limits on the presidency and some basic traditional norms of behavior eventually cost Jeff Sessions, one of Trump’s oldest supporters, and William Barr, a master at rationalizing presidential excesses, that same job (yes, both men technically resigned, but Trump badgered Sessions into quitting and Barr lost Trump’s confidence by objecting to 2020 election-denial efforts).

So the only surprising thing about the Grim Reaper coming for Pam Bondi is that she tried to do absolutely everything the Boss told her to do. If she ever cited the need for the DoJ to maintain some independence from the White House, it was kept a deeply buried secret. And she carried out not just the letter but the spirit of her instructions, as when she promulgated a breathtakingly broad doctrine of “domestic terrorism” to threaten Trump critics, or when she denied First Amendment protection for “hate speech” directed at the late Charlie Kirk.

But what appears to have doomed Bondi is that she did all these bad things very poorly and in a manner that did not look good on television. Her inept and erratic handling of the Epstein files was the most obvious example. She managed to turn a conspiracy theory that Trump had exploited for years, particularly among a slice of MAGA folk who believed he was fighting a secret war against pedophiles, into a major own-goal for the administration and a threat to his very base.

Just as damningly, Bondi eagerly followed Trump’s instruction to seek indictments to punish various high-profile enemies such as James Comey, Letitia James, and six Democratic congressmen who encouraged military leaders to disobey illegal orders. The president had probably heard the old joke about a competent prosecutor being able to get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich — making the DoJ’s repeated failures to get indictments or make them stick especially embarrassing. Worse yet, the vengeance he promised his supporters was denied.

Even more fundamentally, Trump, one of the most litigious people who has ever walked the Earth, has always treated his personal lawyers rather poorly, firing many, refusing to pay others, and abusing or at least second-guessing nearly all of them at one time or the other. Without question, he thinks of the DoJ as his personal lawyers. It’s no accident that Bondi’s immediate successor as acting attorney general is former Trump personal attorney Todd Blanche.

Bond has been on everybody’s list of Cabinet lame ducks for quite a while. Her doggy loyalty earned her the time she had in this crucial office, but clearly Trump saw her as expendable.

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