Trump’s Purge May Be Just Beginning
· The Atlantic
After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others leaving the administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said that the timing is uncertain and that President Trump has not yet made up his mind. But what was once an unofficial motto of the second Trump term—“no scalps”—no longer applies.
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Trump had been reluctant to get rid of any of his top lieutenants, viewing firings as a concession to the Democrats and the media. Even in the past few months, there had been an edict that no Cabinet officials would be removed prior to the midterms, though a series of dismissals were planned for after Election Day. But the president’s declining support since he launched the Iran war has changed the political calculus. The odds of confirming replacements, advisers know, are only growing longer. One person close to the White House told us that Trump was buoyed by the reaction to his decision to remove Noem and that it made him more likely to move ahead with Bondi. (Still, an administration official cautioned that after Noem’s ouster, optics were a concern; officials worried that getting rid of Bondi would be viewed as jettisoning only the most “attractive” women, while keeping the men.)
During her 14 months on the job, Bondi tried so hard to do everything right. She titillated the MAGA base by appearing on Fox News and promising that the Jeffrey Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now,” awaiting her review for release. She relinquished all pretense of leading an independent Justice Department, going after Trump’s political foes and enemies, even when other prosecutors might not have brought charges. And to the president and his allies, she continued to project the perky, kind, warm Florida persona that had once earned her the girlish nickname “Pambi.”
Bondi did everything right—or, at least, everything Trump asked her to do—but in the end, it was not enough. For Trump, and for his succession of attorneys general, it is almost never enough. In some ways, Bondi’s official service to Trump seemed preordained to end the way it did, with a singular moment of crystalline humiliation, after weeks of low-grade indignities. The case of Jeff Sessions, her distant, first-term predecessor, is instructive here. In early 2016, Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump’s seemingly long-shot presidential campaign, and was rewarded with the nation’s top law-enforcement job when Trump became president. But after Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump viciously turned on his onetime loyalist, publicly and privately excoriating his attorney general until finally pushing him out in the middle of his first term.
“No one can succeed in this job,” someone close to the White House mused to us. “Why would anyone want this job?” Only someone with “unbridled ambition,” the person concluded, would aspire to be Trump’s attorney general of the United States.
Bondi was not Sessions. She would not recuse herself; she would not draw lines; she would not do anything other than loyally serve the president. Her relationship with Trump went back more than a decade and was far deeper than his relationship with Sessions. In 2013, the Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to a political group supporting her Florida attorney-general campaign. (Shortly after, Bondi, in her capacity as the state’s attorney general, declined to take action against Trump University, despite multiple complaints—launching the first of several controversies in which the two would find themselves embroiled.) She remained in his orbit thereafter, speaking at both his 2016 and 2020 conventions.
Bondi’s trouble as U.S. attorney general, however, started early, during the first full month of Trump’s second term. It was then that she—under pressure from Trump’s base to release the Epstein files—summoned a group of conservative influencers to the White House, handing them thick white binders labeled, in red, The Epstein Files: Phase 1. Those close to Bondi acknowledged that her comments on television that month suggesting that Epstein’s alleged client list was “sitting on her desk” marked her ownership of the entire debacle and her failure to adequately protect the president and those close to him who were friendly with Epstein. There was no client list, the binders contained no new revelations, and “Bondi must go” murmuring began in earnest.
[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]
The stunt further thrust the topic of Epstein—which Trump hoped to avoid—into the news. But that wasn’t what ultimately cost Bondi her job. Rather, it was Trump’s perception that she was a weak attorney general, unable to sufficiently prosecute his perceived enemies. Multiple people familiar with the president’s thinking said that the failed efforts to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, among others, were a particular source of anger. Bondi was perceived by the president as lacking “smarts and guts,” as one person told us.
The Department of Justice declined to answer specific questions but pointed us to Bondi’s post on X saying that she would “continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration.” Bondi characterized her tenure as “highly successful” and declared it “easily the most consequential first year of the Department of Justice in American history.” Multiple lobbying firms were trying to hire Bondi this afternoon, as they fielded calls from corporations and other clients with matters before DOJ.
Some Trump allies (and many of his critics) believe that he asked Bondi for the nearly impossible—to win convictions for seemingly unwinnable cases—and then blamed her when she earnestly attempted yet still fell short. But other members of the Cabinet and the administration have expressed frustration that Bondi’s apparent lack of involvement in the details of managing the Justice Department resulted in basic mistakes. “They are sending in idiots” to defend the Trump administration in court without sufficient experience, one official from another agency told us.
Those sympathetic to Bondi say that she was ordered to perform legal miracles with a deeply weakened Justice Department. The president’s demand for absolute loyalty among the department’s rank and file resulted in a profound loss of institutional expertise and a sharply reduced talent pool. Multiple prominent Republican attorneys told us that they’d considered joining the second Trump DOJ. But the requirement to take what they viewed as an oath of loyalty to the president—not the Constitution—was a step too far. “The president has a view that he is ultimately the head of the Justice Department, and the attorney general’s job is to carry out his orders,” one person close to the White House told us.
Officials in other departments told us that they regarded the Justice Department’s errors as harmful to the administration’s credibility with judges; they’d blown up what should have been easy wins for the president. “This has been festering across the administration for a while,” a second person close to the administration told us. “It’s the Epstein stuff, partly. It’s also the critiques of the indictments, like Comey. It’s a general sense of WTF—she’s not logging a lot of wins, not clocking a lot of good media.”
Bondi also enthusiastically enabled one of the president’s most fervently held beliefs: that the 2020 election had been “rigged.” Bondi directed multiple U.S. attorneys to pursue wide-ranging probes into election “interference” and “irregularities,” and her department has pursued lawsuits in 30 jurisdictions to obtain unredacted voter information that Trump’s legal critics believe are an effort to prevent significant numbers of Americans from voting in future elections. In perhaps a last-minute attempt to save her job, Bondi announced on X on Tuesday that she was elevating yet another U.S. attorney to “play a key role in ensuring the integrity of American elections.”
[Read: ‘The trust has been absolutely destroyed’]
When Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee in February, she came prepared with well-honed, pre-written insults for the Democratic lawmakers, in the hope that her fiery attacks would appeal to the only audience that mattered: Trump. But even that approach backfired; she was widely mocked for a non sequitur—“The Dow is over 50,000 right now!”—as well as for her pages of scripted invective. (It turns out that in Trump’s eyes, burns are cool, burn books less so.)
Now the defining image of Bondi’s tenure may be her testimony on Capitol Hill, specifically the image of her refusing to look at Epstein victims seated in the rows behind her, even when asked to multiple times by members of Congress. Weeks later—almost exactly a year after the initial Epstein flare-up—the buzz at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, where Bondi is a frequent presence, was that Trump was looking to get rid of her and hoping to have a replacement confirmed by the November midterms. Multiple people at the Justice Department and close to the White House familiar with Bondi’s tribulations told us that she has come close to being fired multiple times previously, including in the past few months. One thing that extended Bondi’s tenure, several people said, was her warm personal relationship with Trump and with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who both genuinely like her. “Pam and I have been friends for more than 15 years, and I think she’s one of the finest people I know,” Wiles told us in a brief phone call.
In response to our questions, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in an email that “Trump has the most talented cabinet and team in American history. Patriots like Kash Patel, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Dan Driscoll are tirelessly implementing the President’s agenda and achieving tremendous results for the American people.”
Despite the attorney-general role being among the most thankless in the Trump administration, there is no shortage of people eager to replace Bondi. Sensing the attorney general’s weakness, Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Jeanine Pirro, a television judge who is now Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, have been jockeying for the job, both directly to Trump and to his allies at Mar-a-Lago. So, too, have EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah.
Yet the two people close to the White House, as well as a top White House official, told us that Todd Blanche, the Bondi deputy who has now been elevated to acting attorney general, has long coveted the top job and will attempt to transform his interim role into something more permanent. “I think Todd will distinguish himself,” the White House official said, speaking anonymously to share internal thinking. “It’s sort of a trial for him.”
Tales of Bondi’s demise had been brewing since almost the beginning, and we asked the White House official: Why now? Why today? They responded that there was no particular “rhyme or reason” but that Bondi and Trump had “been talking back and forth for some time.”
“Ultimately, he was talked out,” this person explained, “and she was talked out.”
Isabel Ruehl, Jonathan Lemire, and Michael Scherer contributed reporting.