Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration as Donald Trump’s attorney general is unquestionably a big victory for the rule of law. But now that Trump has put forth Pam Bondi—the former Florida attorney general whose loyalty to Trump is almost as slavish as Gaetz’s—it raises a question: Why assume she’ll be any less wedded to his agenda of unleashing the Justice Department on his enemies and otherwise reducing it to a tool of his most corrupt designs and whims?
After all, a willingness to put Trump above the Constitution is a requirement for serving with him, especially in such a pivotal position. As Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz notes, Trump will wield the DOJ as “a centerpiece of his retribution, corruption and destruction jihad,” and his attorney general will be merely “the figurehead for that effort.”
That’s why Democrats should start thinking right now about the opportunity presented by Bondi’s Senate confirmation hearings next year. This will be a major occasion to unmask just how far she’ll gladly go in corrupting the rule of law and unleashing the state on all the “vermin” he has threatened to persecute.
“The attorney general will be the weaponizer-in-chief of the legal system for Trump,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, told me.
Bondi has been a very committed Trump loyalist through his most flagrantly lawless moments. As Politico reports, just after he lost reelection in 2020, Bondi immediately joined forces with Rudy Giuliani to sow doubts about the results, helping lay the groundwork for his insurrection attempt. Bondi also stood by him when he faced prosecution for his criminal hush money scheme and impeachment for extorting a foreign ally.
All this isn’t just ancient history. It raises questions about what kind of attorney general she’d be, in non-obvious ways—which is where the confirmation hearings come in.
For instance, how will a devoted election denier–turned–attorney general handle remaining prosecutions of people who assaulted the Capitol? Does Bondi view a pardon of all the Jan. 6 criminals as in keeping with the rule of law? One House Democrat points to an interesting wrinkle: If Trump does pardon them, he’ll have to decide between individual pardons and a blanket one. As this Democrat notes, Bondi should be asked: “What does she think of a mass pardon?”
Democrats can also press Bondi on how she’ll respond if Trump orders her to drop all remaining January 6 prosecutions. This is an opportunity for political theater: They can highlight specific cases of really heinous January 6 violence and ask Bondi if she’ll defend it when Trump pardons those good people.
“What happens if Trump pardons the Proud Boys leaders who were convicted for seditious conspiracy and instigating the violence?” said Tom Joscelyn, a lead author of the Jan. 6 Committee report, in suggesting lines of questioning for Bondi. “What about the dozens of defendants convicted of assaulting cops?”
Joscelyn adds that pardons for them would provide a major boost to violent far right extremist groups in this country and would “legitimize their cause.” Dems should confront Bondi with all of that. Make her own every last bit of it.
Trump has threatened to prosecute enemies without cause. How will Bondi respond when he demands such prosecutions? He has vowed to yank broadcasting rights to punish media companies that displease him and send the military into blue areas for indeterminate pacification missions. His advisers are reportedly exploring whether military officers involved in the Afghanistan mission can be court-martialed. Raskin says Bondi should be confronted on all of this: “Ask whether she thinks the First Amendment and due process are any impediment to what Trump has called for.”
Of course, the attorney general oversees law enforcement on a host of other matters; she’ll be asked about that as well. But it’s worth noting that Trump doesn’t have any genuine vision for the Justice Department beyond turning it into a vehicle for unshackled state persecution of designated enemies of MAGA. How far he gets will turn heavily on what his consiglieres are willing to do when the corrupt orders really start coming.
Unlike Gaetz, Bondi seems to want to retain a tenuous connection to the purportedly respectable conservative legal movement. During her stint as Florida attorney general, she engaged in questionable practices—such as refraining from joining a lawsuit against Trump University after Trump donated $25,000 to a political committee supporting her—but nonetheless, that’s a major law enforcement job in one of the biggest states in the country. Bondi has also engaged in traditional lobbying and typical conservative legal advocacy. It won’t be easy for Bondi to answer hard questions about what she’ll do as Trump’s Minister of Retribution.
And Trump will expect her to deliver on all of it. While no one should underestimate what Bondi is capable of, she’ll find herself at loggerheads with Trump eventually. “Trump turned against all his prior attorneys general when they retained a shred of respect for the rule of law,” said Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “He’s expecting Bondi to be an arsonist. It won’t end well for her. It will be even worse for the American people.”
There’s still another unsettling consideration here. If and when Trump pardons the January 6 attackers, media commentary will exude a strong push toward “turning the page” and “looking forward, not backward.” But as Brian Beutler argues, all this impulse really does is risk encouraging exponentially more right-wing degeneracy later. Indeed, this instinct toward absolution will be doubly absurd coming even as Trump is preparing to escalate the lawlessness and unleash sadistic persecution of an ever-expanding list of enemies within.
Yet let’s face it: Chances are it will be politically challenging to explain to the public why all those things from way back in the past should still weigh on us, and why we must resist a mass forgetting of them. By successfully ending prosecutions of himself and by pardoning the Capitol attackers, Trump will in effect be trying to make Jan. 6 disappear, and it will be hard to explain why it matters that Trump is effectively rewriting all of it as a massive historical lie.
Democrats need to start thinking through how they’re going to talk about all these things when this Great Rewrite begins, and the confirmation hearings for one of the chief authors of that rewrite are a good place to start. Senate Democrats: Make them count.
