The president surrounded himself with friends and courtiers. But even they still fail to achieve the level of servility he demands.
President Donald Trump speaks to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi during a press conference on recent Supreme Court decisions in the White House Briefing Room, June 27, 2025.
(Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Trump’s second presidency has been a through-the-looking-glass parody of executive accountability, from its beginning. cheeky personal enrichment program to his waging lawless war And campaigns of killing civilians. But Trump’s ouster of Attorney General Pam Bondi represents a particularly dark moment in the White House’s retrospective approach to law enforcement. In previous modern presidencies, attorneys general have collapsed after sparking major scandals, like that of Alberto Gonzales. now offers picturesque to entrust the missions of the American attorney to political hackers. Under nobler circumstances, they could have resigned to protest the Oval Office’s tampering with the Justice Department’s independence, as Elliot Richardson did during the presidential election. the Saturday night massacre at the Nixon White House. Bondi, on the other hand, was fired for failing to slow down and downplay the Epstein files scandal, to the president’s satisfaction – while betraying Trump’s model of governing through vengeance: California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell reportedly warned to the release of documents from the FBI’s long-closed investigation into his alleged relationship with a Chinese spy.
In other words, Bondi lost his job for showing insufficient loyalty to his boss in the Oval Office – even after spending considerable effort transforming the Justice Department into an outlet for MAGA agitprop, fire DOJ lawyers who prosecuted January 6 rioters to pursue shoddy and baseless lawsuits against Trump’s political enemieshas threat of prosecution for hate speech of people who did not mourn the death of Charlie Kirk to the satisfaction of the administration. But the irony is that Trump’s vanity and his demands for fearful loyalty have always been unquenchable; Bondi’s intrusion was not so much due to his desire to assert his own independence – as any less than competent attorney general should do – as to his inability to appease Trump’s demands telepathically.
The debacle of the publication of the Epstein files is the purest illustration of his turbulent court. During his 2024 reelection campaign, Trump pledged to support the full release of federal records on the late child sex trafficker, as a boost to the Q-pilled wing of the MAGA base. But after Trump was re-elected, his interest in publicizing the unhealthy predations of his former South Florida pal waned, particularly after Bondi. informed him that he was frequently present in the files. The White House moved quickly to try to downplay the scale of the Epstein scandal; FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino have both released statements asserting that, despite the extremely suspicious circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death in custody, he had committed suicide. Patel too returned to Bondi’s initial claim that the files contained “thousands” of shocking videos showing Epstein with underage sexual partners and child pornography. (Meanwhile, Elon Musk, then at odds with the Trump White House over his massive tax and spending bill, took to X to proclaim that Trump was suppressing full release of the files because he was all over them.) Despite all this, the president has ignored revelations relating to his close friendship with Epstein, including the crude and salacious entry that he obviously composed for a book commemorating the pedophile’s 50th anniversary.
It was Bondi’s misfortune to directly botch the release of the Epstein files: When the administration first made a series of documents available to the public, most of them turned out to be documents already available. And after Bondi touted the existence of an entire list of Epstein clients in an interview with Fox News— a document that “is sitting on my desk right now to review,” as she put it — the administration later backed away from that claim as well. A memo from Bondi’s own DOJ proclaimed that its “systematic review revealed no” list of incriminating clients. There was also no credible evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent figures as part of his actions.
This message from incompetent to incoherent is indeed the calling card of someone who had no business being near the Department of Justice, and even less at its head. But more than that, Bondi’s gross mishandling of the Epstein revelations underscores the untenability of the prime directive of all Trump lackeys in the White House: appease both the whims of the king and the restive minds of MAGA conspiracy theorists. Trump has managed throughout his career to trick his supporters into ignoring the obvious evidence before their senses with the elan of Obi Wan Kenobi. masking the presence of besieged droids in the crosshairs of the Empire. But the Epstein scandal is simply too big in MAGA’s mind to be handled by Trump’s conventional strategy of grandly changing the subject. And as we now know, it’s simply impossible for any of Trump’s appeasement supporters — even if he possesses Pam Bondi’s bootlicking credentials — to follow the MAGA monarch’s agitated directives.
So, just as the fork in the road came abruptly for former DHS Director Kirsti Noem when she appeared to be reckless in blaming Trump for his own actions and decisions in her testimony before Congress, it was almost predetermined that Bondi was on the road to defenestration when she proved incapable of solving all the many circles dating back to the Epstein files all the way back to Trump’s well-documented history of horrific sexual predation. The ironies here, too, are difficult to adequately describe: Bondi came to this position, after all, only after Trump’s first pick, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, proved too toxic based on accusations stemming from his own alleged sexual fraternization with minor partners.
Meanwhile, the favorite to replace Bondi is EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, whom Senate Democrats accuse of lied to them under oath on the cancellation of climate subsidies. Zeldin was also the House is Trump’s strongest supporter during his first impeachment, and voted against certifying the 2020 election results. In short, there is no lie written by Trump too big for him to swallow – which, in this degraded phase of America’s imperial presidency, seems to be the primary requirement for the job.
Chris Lehmann Chris Lehmann is the DC bureau chief for The nation and a contributing editor to The deflector. He was previously editor-in-chief of THE Deflector And The New Republicand is the author, more recently, of The Cult of Money: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Destruction of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).