Pam Bondi’s firing won’t have the effect Trump desires | Moira Donegan

If the idea was to try to shed some of the liabilities of the Epstein scandal by firing Bondi, the move seems likely to backfire

It was only a matter of time. The writing has been on the wall for months for Pam Bondi, Trump's attorney general, who was unceremoniously fired on Thursday after 14 months leading the justice department. Trump was rumored to be unhappy with Bondi; frustrated and the slowness and failures of some of her prosecutions of his political enemies, angry that she could not make the Epstein scandal go away, and disappointed by her rather wooden performances on TV.

For a while, it looked like Bondi would be the first cabinet secretary that Trump fired in his second administration - something he has been much more reluctant to do since returning to office in early 2025. But in October, when she was called to testify before a Senate subcommittee, Bondi made sure to issue vicious insults to her Democratic interrogators in front of the news cameras; she made a similar performance in February at a House judiciary committee hearing, where she lobbed ad hominem attacks on Democrats, including calling Representative Jamie Raskin a washed up loser lawyer." These performances evidently endeared Bondi to Donald Trump enough that he decided to keep her around for a while; Kristi Noem, his onetime secretary of homeland security, became the first cabinet member to be fired in his second term. But the Epstein story persisted, and so did Trump's dissatisfaction with his own mounting unpopularity ahead of the November midterms. He is not capable of blaming himself, and so he looked around for someone else to punish for his own failures. Pam Bondi was there.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist