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The All Too Predictable Reason Trump Fired Pam Bondi

The president has surrounded himself with cronies and sycophants. But even they keep failing to meet the level of servility he demands.

President Donald Trump speaks to then–Attorney General Pam Bondi during a press conference on recent Supreme Court rulings in the briefing room at the White House in June 27, 2025.

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........

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