Pam Bondi: Less Terrible Than Matt Gaetz

We've entered the era of harm reduction.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s runner up attorney general, is a self-serving political creature. She will do whatever Donald Trump wants without question, up to and including prosecuting his enemies. Bondi spent the past five years shilling for some of the worst people as a lobbyist, and she parrots Trump’s lies about stolen elections and nefarious Democratic plots to weaponize law enforcement against the Dear Leader.

As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch notes, Bondi promises that in a second Trump administration, “The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” and “the investigators will be investigated.”

And still, she’s probably the least worst pick we were going to get for this job.

Gaetz Gets Got

On November 13, Trump announced Rep. Matt Gaetz would be his attorney general. It was an act of brazen effrontery to nominate someone with zero prosecutorial experience, credible allegations of sex trafficking, and whose only congressional accomplishment was defenestrating a popular Republican House speaker. Many commentators suggested that Trump was deliberately trying to break Congress by forcing it to knuckle under to his ridiculous demands in advance. And so it is perhaps heartening that, even with a 54-seat Republican Senate majority, Gaetz couldn’t get confirmed. Maybe Republicans won’t simply surrender their power and let Trump recess appointment a bunch of unconfirmable goons after all.

No sooner had Gaetz resigned from the House — conveniently avoiding the imminent release of an Ethics Committee report that would have revealed he had paid multiple women for sex, as well as an underage girl — then Trump pushed him overboard. (Although Gaetz is clearly eying the Florida governor’s race in 2026, where Trump’s endorsement might well make the difference.)

Bondi Boondoggles

Just hours later, Trump tapped Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, for the job. Bondi is actually a more traditional choice than Gaetz. She lacks federal experience, without so much as a judicial clerkship to her name — Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, and even Matthew “Mongo” Whitaker all did stints at the Justice Department before leading it. But Bondi was at least a Florida prosecutor for two decades, where she seems to have been merely the normal amount of corrupt, particularly when graded on the Florida scale. In one infamous episode, she dropped an investigation into Donald Trump’s scam-o-rama Trump University after his foundation cut her campaign PAC a $25,000 check.

And yes, of course Bondi is a garbage person. She once spent 16 months litigating against a Louisiana family whose dog she stole after Hurricane Katrina. Bondi adopted the St Bernard from a shelter after the monster storm, knowing that he’d been rescued from New Orleans. When Steve and Dorreen Couture, the pet’s rightful owners tried to get him back, Bondi accused them of neglecting the animal. After protracted litigation, she returned the dog and agreed to pay its medical expenses for life … but didn’t.

As state AG, Bondi filed litigation seeking to kill the Affordable Care Act, as well as the ban on insurers charging more for customers with pre-existing medical conditions. She also guest hosted Fox’s The Five repeatedly while in office, because IOKIYAR. (Gaetz himself also appeared as a guest host on Newsmax when he was a sitting congressman.)

After getting term-limited out, she joined Ballard Partners, the biggest lobbying shop in Florida. Ballard was a major Trump fundraiser, and Trump’s campaign manager-turned-chief of staff Susie Wiles also cycled through it. While on Ballard’s payroll, Bondi represented Amazon, GM, Uber, Major League Baseball, and the government of Qatar. She also had a side hustle at the America First Policy Institute, an astroturf group founded by high-ranking Trumplanders including Brooke Rollins, Linda McMahon, and Larry Kudlow. Her bio touts AFPI’s various legal interventions in support of Trump’s efforts to avoid criminal accountability, as well as multiple lawsuits and amicus briefs fomenting lies about noncitizen voting. As of this writing, it includes the peppy, girl power quote “Keep your heels, head and standards high,” attributed to fashion designer Coco Chanel, a noted Nazi collaborator in Vichy France. Which is perhaps a little too on the nose.

Bondi represented Trump at his first impeachment, where she dutifully spread the lie that Joe Biden and his son Hunter took bribes from the Ukrainian government, and thus Trump was absolutely right to extort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelinsky to announce an investigation of his political rival in the 2020 election. This was, of course, entirely false, but that’s never been a barrier for Bondi, who showed up at the Four Seasons total Landscaping rally to stand behind Rudy Giuiliani as he lied about the election being stolen in Pennsylvania. Bondi joins the ranks of Trump’s personal lawyers who have been nominated to positions in his administration, including his criminal lawyers Todd Blanche, for deputy AG and Emil Bove as principal deputy AG. If Trump gets his way, that means the top three officials at the Justice Department will be his own lawyers. And this time around, no one thinks there will be recusals when it comes to investigating their boss.

Pam the Bitter Pill

All of which is very much not what you want in America’s top law enforcement officer. And yet, the alternatives to Bondi were undeniably worse. Mike Davis — a pugilistic MAGA personality who has called himself Trump’s “viceroy” and threatened to jail the prosecutors who charged him — was reportedly nixed by Wiles for the AG spot, although he may yet find a berth in the administration. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, another name bruited about for the post, is only slightly less nuts than Davis, and far more dangerous. From his position as Texas’s top cop, he not only sued the Biden administration to block every policy that might make lives better for average Americans, he launched criminal investigations of parents and doctors of trans kids, organizations who register minority voters, and anyone who said mean things about Elon Musk. Where Bondi makes vague promises of retribution for Trump’s foes, Paxton opens a new harassing investigation every week into some perceived enemy of the state.

Paxton’s own legal problems, along with his habit of picking fights with other Republicans, might have made his confirmation path nearly as rocky as Gaetz’s; there’s certainly no love lost between him and Texas’s senior Senator John Cornyn. But if Paxton was out, his Missouri Mini-Me Andy Bailey was waiting in the wings, ready and able to do terrible things if handed the reins at the Justice Department.

As Missouri Attorney General, Bailey sued the State of New York to try and stop it from sentencing Trump before the election. The Supreme Court, which has original jurisdiction over interstate litigation, flicked him away like a speck of dandruff on their robes. But Bailey could still do a lot of damage if given a free (ham)hand with the apparatus of federal law enforcement. This is, after all, a guy who investigated Target for the crime of selling pride T-shirts. Both Paxton and Bailey launched criminal investigations of Media Matters for truthfully reporting that major brands’ ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi content on Twitter. There is no doubt that they would do much worse with the entire federal government at their disposal.

Thanks to Florida’s term limits, Bondi didn’t stick around Tallahassee long enough to get much experience using the government as an offensive weapon. And since she’s a woman who’s presentable enough to go on Fox, she hasn’t had to make a name for herself palling around with the incel shitposter demi-monde. Therefore, we must reluctantly accept that Bondi, with all her obvious flaws, is the best we could have hoped for.

Call it the “Harriet Miers Principle,” after George W. Bush’s chief of staff and former personal lawyer, whom he nominated to fill retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat. Derided as Bush’s “cleaning lady,” Miers withdrew her nomination amid fierce blowback from both the left and the right. That paved the way for Bush to nominate Sam Alito, who is far worse than Miers would ever have been.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t hold Bondi’s feet to the fire. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent and Empty Wheel’s Marcy Wheeler offer competing visions of how Democrats should handle her confirmation hearing (assuming Trump doesn’t recess appoint the whole lot of them to avoid letting his goons get beat up in public hearings). Sargent recommends cornering Bondi by asking her what she’ll do if and when Trump uses the federal government to reward his friends and punish his enemies, as he’s promised. Wheeler suggest that Democrats work to tie Trump’s nominees to the disastrous results of his/their policies.

Both strategies are important, and Democrats should throw as much sand in the gears of the Trump administration as they can. Take all the shots, and use the hearings to press the points that the Trump administration is lawless and its weaponization of the DOJ is entirely illegitimate. And then take the “L” on this one, because Bondi is probably the best we were going to get here.