Pam Bondi’s departure is meaningless — Tubby has a huge crabbucket of equally loathsome suckups and crooks and Todd Blanche ain’t exactly a step up. So I’m not taking any special pleasure from it, not even after seeing all the stories like how she begged for her job and how her USAG portrait has been stuffed in a closet.
(And I'm certainly not arsed on feminist grounds. Trump deliberately humiliated several women before laying a hand on masc incompetents like Pete Hegseth? You don’t say! I mean we knew he was a white supremacist but who could have guessed the convicted sex criminal was also a misogynist? Please. Bondi knew, and thought, as all such people do, that she would be the exception.)
No, Tubby’s treatment of Bondi doesn’t put me in sympathy with her — none of these people deserve any better. It only points up the dispensability of all his factota. He might as well train feral children in Skinner boxes to do these jobs. Stephen Miller falling down a manhole might change the particular character of some administration outrages, but if Trump had to swap in, say, Mike Lee or some demented county clerk from Oshkosh, atrocities would still be the order of the day.
Let’s not kid ourselves, as the New York Times did in February, that the Epstein mess was due to Bondi’s “incompetence.” (Hilariously, the rightwing Washington Examiner is taking that same tack now: “Trump’s chance to reestablish Justice Department credibility after Pam Bondi fired.”) She was put on the same mission that all Trump apparatchiks get — to turn every public scandal into a cudgel against Democrats and a shiny halo for Trump. But while Bessent, Lutnick, and those guys merely have to lie about the health of the economy — a fraud in which the market and the media have been helpful — and shield Trump from the actual results, Bondi had to pretend a pedo ring in which Tubby was balls deep was actually a Democratic scandal, a much harder job.
It must have felt great to wave those fake “Epstein Files: Phase 1” binders at the press last year, but Bondi knew she’d have to work fast to backfill (all while prosecuting Trump’s enemies and other crimes against justice) and the job just got too big for her; plus Congress got sick of being insulted by her and kept up the pressure. And the stink it raised, Trump couldn’t miss.
So farewell, worst USAG ever, soon to be eclipsed by one or more even worse. Blanche is doing his best to blow off the Epstein Files; lotsa luck, fucker. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking any possible replacement not ordered by an International Court of Justice consent decree could make a bit of difference.
Meantime Trump is clowning in our faces, saying out loud (and don't you believe the leak was inadvertent) that he'll pull money from Medicare and Medicaid to fund his idiot war. Would his stooges in Congress dare vote for such a thing? If not, maybe he'll use the government data snatched by his DOGE goons to just cybersteal the funds. Whether it's because he expects to drop dead shortly (fingers crossed) or to steal the election, he no longer even pretends to care what anyone thinks. Nothing will change that - not a new AG, Secretary of State, Speaker of the House, or anything else.
Speaking of performative cruelty: Our ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN free link this week is about Trump's visit to the Supreme Court. It's possible that he hoped to fluster some of the weaker wingnut justices like Boof Kavanaugh into asking what he imagines are the right kind of questions (probably along the lines of "what if a Messican raped your daughter"); it's also possible that he sought material for his inevitable post-decision tantrum (maybe SG Sauer will be his first penis-bearing dismissal). My guess is that he's just buried so deep in his fantasy world and thinks merely showing up at the scene of a decision affects it, like a governmental version of the King's Touch. Before this farce is over he'll have his major sycophants like Tim Cook and Musk carrying him around in a chair -- not worth all the democracy-destruction, certainly, but at least good for a laugh.
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