A month ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump had “repeatedly” complained to White House aides about Attorney General Pam Bondi, privately deriding the nation’s chief law enforcement officer as “weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda.”
The message wasn’t subtle: If Bondi intended to keep her job atop the Justice Department, she had to do more to impress the president.
It was against this backdrop that the attorney general appeared before the House Judiciary Committee for a televised hearing on Wednesday, where she had a vested interest in being as combative, unprofessional and belligerent as possible in order to satisfy her audience of one.
And so she did exactly that.
I personally have been to many House Judiciary Committee hearings, and while I can think of contentious exchanges between members of competing parties, I’ve never seen a witness treat an official proceeding as if they were a tween engaged in a food fight in a junior-high cafeteria.
There wasn’t even a pretense of seriousness. Cabinet officials have traditionally at least tried to keep up appearances, acting with some sense of decorum, but Bondi didn’t bother, clashing with committee members in ways that were difficult to watch. MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig explained, “As somebody who’s covered hearings before, we know there is some performance. But this was a little bit like a wrestling match.”
A NOTUS report described the event as “a contender” for “the ugliest House hearing ever.”
Bondi refused to answer questions. She smeared members with prepared, prewritten insults. She shouted angrily at those who pressed her on issues she wanted to avoid. She talked over members. She even suggested one Jewish member, who lost family in the Nazi Holocaust, of being antisemitic.
In one especially memorable instance, the attorney general even insisted that committee members stop asking questions related to the Justice Department and start talking about the stock market.
Over the course of the proceedings, the attorney general treated Democratic members with disgust, while showing overt contempt for the process.
But most of all, Bondi wanted to make clear that she had undying, sycophantic adulation for the man who chose her for the job.
Trump, she declared, is “the greatest president in American history.” She proceeded to say, more than once, that she would not tolerate Democratic criticisms of Trump, all while making false claims about the scale of his 2024 election victory. Even her bizarre emphasis on the stock market dovetailed with the talking point the president has been excited about of late.
And it was at that point when the bigger picture came into focus: Bondi was setting her credibility on fire, and engaging in the kind of unprofessional antics that no other attorney general would’ve even considered, because she was desperate to make Trump happy.
It was the whole point of the mind-numbing theatrics. The attorney general didn’t need to impress voters, who don’t elect Cabinet secretaries, and she didn’t need to impress members of Congress, who’ve already confirmed her and lack the votes to throw her out of office. She did, however, need to impress the man who sees her as “weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda.”
So she acted the way Trump wanted her to act — and it worked.
“AG Pam Bondi, under intense fire from the Trump Deranged Radical Left Lunatics, was fantastic at yesterday’s Hearing,” the president wrote to his social media platform the morning after she humiliated herself.
For the attorney general, that one sentence represented a mission-accomplished moment.
