Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, arrives at the Fiserv Forum on the second day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 16, 2024. | Source: Tom Williams / Getty
In today’s episode of Donald Trump’s Rusty Cabinet Is Going To Need Some WD-40, the president-elect named his next nominee for attorney general Thursday night just hours after former Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration, because — oh, I don’t know — people were a little apprehensive about an underqualified accused sex trafficker under a House Ethics Committee investigation ascending to the highest legal office in the nation.
So, now that Gaetz is out, Trump has nominated Pam Bondi, who, to her credit, has decades of legal experience — but that’s likely not why he chose her.
So far, Trump has made it beyond obvious that in putting together his forthcoming administration, he has prioritized MAGA loyalty over experience, because meritocracy only applies when people who are supposed to be working “Black jobs” are out here getting white jobs, and DEI is fine as long as it stands for “delusion, egomania and idiocracy.” That’s why a WWE exec was tapped to lead the U.S. Department of Education, Dr. Oz was selected for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and a Fox News host with zero experience in national defense was nominated for Secretary of Defense.
But, again, Bondi is different. On paper, she’s perfectly qualified to be attorney general. In practice, however, she’s a so-called legal expert who, despite all of that knowledge and experience, at least pretended to believe Trump’s election fraud propaganda despite it being thoroughly debunked and ruled meritless by dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and supreme courts. Also, Trump and Bondi have a history of shady back-scratching that includes an illegal donation.
From The 19th:
Like Gaetz, Bondi is a longtime ally of Trump who has publicly defended the former president throughout his various legal woes and repeated false claims about election fraud in the 2020 election. Unlike Gaetz, though, Bondi has decades of legal experience and was a special adviser for Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment process. She became the first woman to serve as Florida’s attorney general in 2011, a post she occupied for eight years. Prior to that, she was an assistant state attorney in Hillsborough County, Florida.
In 2019, Trump was ordered by a New York state court to close his charitable foundation and pay $2 million in damages because of an illegal donation from the foundation to a political action committee supporting Bondi’s reelection campaign for Florida attorney general. The $25,000 payment occurred in 2013, just before Bondi’s office declined to pursue a lawsuit against Trump University concerning fraud allegations.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore,” Trump wrote in a statement on Truth Social. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”
Another way of stating that would be: “Pam will be tough on crime. Not my crimes though. Those crimes don’t even count unless you’re some kind of woke, reverse-Jim Crow lefty.”
If Bondi is confirmed, she’ll also be tasked with leading the Department of Justice as well as its Office for Civil Rights, which, of course, is the perfect job for someone who, as Florida’s attorney general, requested that the state’s supreme court overrule a lower court decision that found the state’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. Of course, Bondi changed her tune in 2016, after the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, which targeted the LGBTQ community and resulted in 49 deaths.
“Anyone who attacks our LGBT community, anyone who attacks anyone in our state, will be gone after with the full extent of the law,” she said at the time. “She has also voiced support for employment protections for LGBTQ+ workers,” the 19th noted.
Bondi’s MAGA-friendly dealings also include an effort to challenge President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act before the U.S. Supreme Court over its contraception coverage mandate, and her defense of a Florida law requiring women to wait 24 hours after meeting with a physician to receive an abortion. She also advocated for a bill allowing for the outright racial profiling of non-white people by allowing cops to ask for immigration papers from people they suspected were in the country illegally. Bondi also referred to Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse as “a little boy out there trying to protect his community” despite the fact that when Rittenhouse shot and killed two people and injured a third, he was not in his own community as he had crossed state lines to commit the killings.
On the other hand, the killing of Trayvon Martin was so obviously unjust that even Bondi found herself saying: Waaait a minute, somebody should probably look into this.
More from the 19th:
Bondi entered office as the Florida attorney general a year before the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager fatally shot while walking home from the convenience store in Sanford, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement. At the time, Bondi said she was “devastated and deeply troubled” over the killing. She and then-Gov. Rick Scott appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the death, who ultimately charged a neighborhood watch volunteer named George Zimmerman with second-degree murder. A jury found him not guilty.
So, Trump’s latest cabinet pick does not appear to be completely without her (small) share of redeeming qualities, but it’s still clear what kind of company the upcoming 47th president plans to bring into the White House.
The MAGA Avengers are assembling, and it’s going to be a long four years.
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