While Bondi is a Trump loyalist who will do real damage, she won’t be as dangerous as one of the Federalist Society ideologues who might have gotten the post.
Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi speaks before Republican presidential nominee former president Donald Trump at a campaign rally at First Horizon Coliseum, November 2, 2024, in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Alex Brandon, File / AP Photo)
Former Florida representative Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for attorney general last week. I’d like to say that he pulled out because he knew Republican senators would reject him because of the statutory rape allegations swirling around him, but that would give those Republicans entirely too much credit. These people uniformly support the adjudicated rapist president-elect, and almost all of them (including Senator Susan Collins) supported alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. They have also, almost uniformly, supported other, wholly unqualified Trump nominees, and will do so again. Republican senators are totally willing to support alleged rapists and proven buffoons; they just didn’t like Gaetz personally.
In any event, Trump quickly moved on to another nominee for the position: former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. Unlike Gaetz, Bondi has worked as a lawyer and prosecutor and is conventionally qualified for the job; she was Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019, which gives her more state AG experience than any US attorney general nominee has had in a while. Like Gaetz, Bondi is a Trump sycophant who will do whatever Trump asks her to do and will make sure that no law ever gets in the way of Trump, his yet-to-be-committed crimes, or his lawless agenda.
Bondi will likely be confirmed, easily passing whatever made-up test Republican Senators have contrived to make themselves feel like they have standards. Senator Lindsey Graham reacted to Trump’s new pick the way a parent reacts the first time their child poops in the potty. He said, “Picking Pam Bondi for Attorney General is a grand slam, touchdown, hole in one, ace, hat trick, slam dunk, Olympic gold medal pick.” Trump is a very big boy, you see.
I don’t want to relitigate the entire Bondi era in Florida (this article in The 19th does a very good job of that, if you’re interested). The Cliff Notes version is that Bondi is a longtime Trump ally, taking campaign contributions from him and refusing to investigate his fake charities even before he was president the first time. She was one of Trump’s defense attorneys during his impeachment. She’s virulently anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigration, and pro-gun. She’s a registered foreign agent of Qatar, which should make human rights aficionados shudder. She joined in with the “lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton back in 2016, but was opposed to the prosecution of Trump for crimes.
She has a provably worse record than Gaetz on issues within the Department of Justice’s remit, and she has more experience in bringing prosecutions than Gaetz did. She is likely to be more awful and more effective at being awful than Gaetz would have been, and she excels at parading her awfulness on TV—which is where I suspect she’ll be doing most of her work. The world will be worse than it is already with Pam Bondi as attorney general.
All that said, in the universe of potential Trump AG picks, I will take Bondi over many of the others. That’s because of the one thing she’s not: a Leonard Leo disciple. I’ll take a Trump stooge over a Leo stooge any day.
Lawyers devoted to Trump are like bank robbers. They waltz in, guns blazing, and take all the cash they can carry in their bags and pockets. They’re loud and brash and might shoot anyone who gets in their way, but they are fundamentally small-minded. They don’t really think past the next score.
Lawyers devoted to Leo are like bankers: They set up a system where they always win. They change the rules, and then force everybody else to play by them. They think creatively. Their goal is not a quick, smash-and-grab score but to build their own wealth over the long term. Once their ideas become entrenched, it’s incredibly difficult to undo what they’ve done.
Bondi, for all her considerable faults, is not a long-term Leo-like thinker; she’s a petty Trump supporter—and the other Leo-aligned people know it. After Gaetz bowed out of the process, and before Trump tapped Bondi, Mike Davis—the guy who ran judicial confirmations for Senator Chuck Grassley during Trump’s first term—tweeted that the following men would be the “best options” for attorney general: “Mark Paoletta, Christopher Landau, Mike Lee.” He quickly moved to support Bondi when she was put forward, but it’s important to know that she’s not a grand touchdown poop to people who are more serious than Lindsey Graham.
Any of Davis’s suggestions would have been worse than Bondi. Mike Lee is the noted Federalist Society senator from Utah. Mark Paoletta is a longtime Clarence and Ginni Thomas ally. (Those familiar with the ProPublica story about Thomas’s ethical malfeasance might remember the painting of Thomas, Harlan Crow, and Leonard Leo that featured in the article; Paoletta is in the painting too. He’s the guy manspreading at the base of the statue.) Christopher Landau was Trump’s ambassador to Mexico, and is a longtime FedSoc guy who clerked for both Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Mike Davis, a former clerk for Neil Gorsuch, was himself often mentioned as a potential AG pick, despite his consistently vile and often racist public postings and statements.
But Trump didn’t go with any of the guys who earned their stripes from Leo. He didn’t go with any of the Heritage Foundation legal stars, or the ones working with Stephen Miller at his “America First” group of legal terrorizers. Instead, he went with Bondi, who got her JD from Stetson University, clerked for nobody, and prior to assuming public office was mainly known (maybe just to me) as the lady who prosecuted former Mets star pitcher Dwight Gooden for violating his probation.
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Indeed, very quietly, Leo and the people who run with him are being shut out from the major legal positions in the second Trump administration at the Department of Justice. Trump is pretty much only picking lawyers who have defended him in the past. In addition to Bondi, Trump nominated Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general. The deputy AG is the person who runs the day-to-day operations at the DOJ. Blanche was, nominally, a Democrat before turning coat to represent Trump during his Stormy Daniels trial.
For solicitor general, Trump tapped John Sauer. The solicitor general is the person who argues the administration’s cases in front of the Supreme Court. Sauer successfully (somehow) argued the Trump immunity case and thus was able to help secure Trump’s kingly powers. Sauer is a FedSoc guy, you pretty much have to be in order to function as a Republican appellate lawyer in front of this Supreme Court (full disclosure: I overlapped with Sauer at Harvard Law School, though I do not remember him from there and highly doubt that he remembers me). But he’s not what I’d call a Leonard Leo ally. Sauer was the solicitor general of Missouri, appointed by then–Missouri AG Josh Hawley, before Trump raised him up to national prominence. Let me put it this way: Sauer as SG probably won’t do as much damage as Erin Hawley, Josh’s anti-abortion appellate lawyer wife, would.
Bondi, Blanche, and Sauer will be plenty bad if you think the president of the United States should not commit crimes—or that Joe Biden won the 2020 election or that people in the LGBTQ community should have rights. But it’s not the very worst lineup I can imagine. The very worst lineup would be something like: Mike Lee for AG, Mike Davis for deputy, and Erin Hawley as SG. That easily could have happened, but it did not. Sometimes when God closes a door, He opens a window and throws you out of it, and you are supposed to say, “Thanks, God, you opened the window as opposed to throwing me through the glass!”
Despite the shutout, I can’t imagine the Leo braintrust is too worried. At least not yet. The real test of the Federalist Society’s power over Trump is not at the DOJ but on the federal courts. We can assume that Leo will win most of the battles for lower-court appointments, because Trump just doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to fill those positions without the Federalist Society’s approval.
But I am now a little more hopeful about whom Trump might appoint for the Supreme Court—once Samuel Alito gives him the chance. Trump’s picks at the DOJ suggest that a nominee like Aileen Cannon is more likely than FedSoc stalwarts like James Ho or Neomi Rao, who have been campaigning for the opening for years now.
And yes, I said I am “hopeful” it will be Cannon because, 30 years from now, I think my children will be better off trying to overturn the pure partisan hackery Cannon brought to the bench than fighting against the absolute legal lunacy people like Ho and Rao would introduce as precedent. It would be a hell of an irony if Trump nominates a Harriet Miers type like Cannon to replace Alito, who only got the job because the FedSoc intelligentsia revolted against George W. Bush’s nomination of Miers.
To be clear, there are no “good” options in a second Trump administration. But if I can pick my poison, I choose to suffer the corrupt bootlickers who will let Trump get away with everything. That’s because I am no longer fighting against Trump, and I’m no longer under any illusions that he will be restrained or ever held accountable. Instead, I’m fighting against Trump’s legacy. Trump won the 2020s. I’m fighting for the 2040s and 2050s.
And from that perspective… Pam Bondi is fine. She will not bring about structural change. She will be awful, and then forgotten. That is the best legal outcome anybody can reasonably hope for right now.
Elie MystalTwitterElie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and the host of its legal podcast, Contempt of Court. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. His first book is the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, published by The New Press. Elie can be followed @ElieNYC.