I Hold Pam Bondi in Contempt

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

I imagine Pam Bondi getting ready for one of her appearances on Capitol Hill by practicing in front of a mirror. She hones her glare. She perfects her sneer. She rehearses her lines, such as they are.

“Washed-up, loser lawyer!” That’s for Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. What the phrase lacks in poetry it makes up for in pithiness. It’s just four short words, two of them conveniently conjoined with a hyphen. Even Bondi can remember that much.

“Failed politician!” That’s for Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky. Two words. Insults are all about efficiency.

But it’s not Bondi’s script that matters most. It’s her voice, and the attorney general got the tone of it — the poison in it — just right when she spat those put-downs at those men during her, um, testimony before a House panel last week. She didn’t merely ooze contempt. She gushed it, so that all she communicated during more than four hours of nasty exchanges was how loathsome she found her interrogators. Which was obviously her goal. Her mission.

I can’t get it out of my mind. But then I never stopped thinking about her identical performance before a Senate panel last October. Both crystallized what is arguably the defining trait of the second Trump administration, a bearing and a bullying that cast a noxious haze over all public discourse, which was already plenty polluted. This crew — Bondi, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, President Trump himself — don’t want to win opponents’ favor. They don’t even want to win the argument. Why sweat the delicate art of persuasion when you can use the brute force of condemnation? Comity and conciliation are a slog. They’re for suckers. Contempt is victors’ ready, heady prerogative.

It’s also what the MAGA movement was supposed to be rebelling against. Many people who flocked to Trump in all his spite and willful destructiveness were protesting the condescension and derision of the Democratic elite, who, they felt, held them in contempt. They were responding to Barack Obama’s lament about embittered Americans who “cling to guns or religion.” They were reacting to Hillary Clinton’s gibe about the “basket of deplorables.”

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Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter.  Instagram  Threads  @FrankBruni • Facebook

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