Trump’s frustrations with Bondi boiled down to her failure in prosecuting criminal cases against his perceived political adversaries.
Less than a month after Kristi Noem got the boot, another cabinet official bites the dust.
President Trump’s decision to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday came as no surprise to administration officials, sources tell National Review. One White House official said Trump has been considering ousting the former Florida attorney general “for a while,” and ultimately, “he just wanted to make a change” inside the department. The decision wasn’t personal, and Trump still “loves” Bondi, this official added, but he simply “wasn’t satisfied” with her job performance.
This White House official added that “there have been lots of names thrown around” as her replacement already, “but there’s no urgency.” The president has faith in Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to serve as acting attorney general in the meantime until he settles on a pick, the person added.
Pulling the curtain back a bit, Trump has reportedly complained about Bondi to aides for months and even weighed firing her in January, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier Thursday. His frustrations with Bondi boiled down to her failure in prosecuting criminal cases against his perceived political adversaries, though her mishandling of the so-called Epstein files and the political drama that ensued certainly didn’t help. As one source explained the dynamic to me earlier today, Bondi simply didn’t have a long enough list of legal victories or successful pivots to dissuade Trump from cutting the cord.
As for the timing of her ouster: one smart source close to the administration pointed out to me that if Trump wants to chop off some weak limbs in his inner circle before the halfway mark in his second term, a pre-midterm spring cleaning is a good and natural time to do it. Republicans currently hold a 53-seat majority in the Senate, but it’s not entirely out of the question that Democrats will flip the upper chamber this fall.
And as for her replacement: The White House has been wary of adding more items to the executive calendar for a reason. Now that Bondi’s officially out, the obvious preference for Trump’s inner circle is to find a new attorney general nominee who can breeze through the Senate confirmation process. (Recall that former Representative Matt Gaetz [R., Fla.], Trump’s first pick for attorney general, had to withdraw from consideration because of Senate Republicans’ concerns about his temperament, character, and checkered personal history.)
But finding a consensus pick may be a tough balancing act, considering that one of the top qualifications for the job in Trump’s eyes is a ruthless desire to bring pain to the president’s political enemies. National Review’s Andy McCarthy said it best earlier today: “From the president’s standpoint, lawfare — the leveraging of the government’s law enforcement apparatus against political enemies and for partisan ends — is a strategy that must be used because it was used against him.”