“No scalps” was a favourite MAGA refrain during the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration, and a reference to his refusal to fire underlings. The many sackings of his first term were judged a failure of resolve and a pointless knee-bend to critics who, smelling blood, only wanted more. Yet now even the president cannot suppress his frustration with his lieutenants. His sacking of Kristi Noem, his director of homeland security, last month seems to have reignited an
“No scalps” was a favourite MAGA refrain during the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration, and a reference to his refusal to fire underlings. The many sackings of his first term were judged a failure of resolve and a pointless knee-bend to critics who, smelling blood, only wanted more. Yet now even the president cannot suppress his frustration with his lieutenants. His sacking of Kristi Noem, his director of homeland security, last month seems to have reignited an old habit. On April 2nd he fired Pam Bondi, his attorney-general. Todd Blanche, her deputy at the Department of Justice (DoJ), will take over on an acting basis.
Mr Trump soured on Ms Bondi over her failure to successfully prosecute his enemies and her bungling of the Epstein files. The first is an abiding obsession of Mr Trump, who views the DoJ as a personal law firm and has no truck with the idea that politics should stay out of law enforcement. He wants to see his opponents in prison; courts want to see solid evidence and plausible legal theories. And so his weaponisation of the law has been a bust, though the pressure to keep trying will bedevil Ms Bondi’s successor.
Last September came the starkest sign of the president’s impatience with his attorney-general. “Pam”, he wrote in a social-media screed. “They’re all guilty as hell.” Among those he was referring to were two of his longtime antagonists, James Comey, a former FBI director, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney-general. “We can’t delay any longer.” Within a month both were indicted. Weeks later one judge had tossed the cases; another chided prosecutors for their “fundamental misstatements of the law”.
Such was the throughline of Ms Bondi’s tenure: prosecutorial theatre—warrants, subpoenas, indictments—loudly trumpeted on social media but marred by ineptitude, bad faith and flimsy evidence. Cases against Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, and six Democratic congressmen have also fallen apart. Across the country dozens of indictments against people protesting against the president’s deportation campaign have been downgraded or tossed. Once-rare setbacks for federal prosecutors are now routine.
On the matter of Jeffrey Epstein, a dead paedophile and a fount of conspiracy theories in the MAGA-verse, Ms Bondi made her own unforced error by over-promising. In doing so she implicated her boss in the first real test of his presidency. Last year she whetted MAGA appetites by seeming to suggest on Fox News that Epstein had a “client list” and that it was sitting on her “desk right now”. Then she backtracked. Congress, in a rare display of bipartisanship, ordered the DoJ to release its Epstein files. It was a fiasco that made her boss look suspiciously like he had something to hide, and drove Republicans in Congress to subpoena Ms Bondi for a deposition. Her successor will face the same competing pressures between a president who wants the Epstein issue to disappear and a cohort of his voters whose hunger for Epstein content is insatiable.
In his goodbye missive, the president thanked Ms Bondi for her “tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country”. In truth she presided over a hollowing-out of the DoJ. Entire enforcement divisions prosecuting crypto and tax fraud, as well as corruption by public officials, have been gutted. Last year staff at US attorneys’ offices fell by 14%, compelling the DoJ to lower hiring standards and accept applicants straight out of law school. The upshot is that all sorts of crime in America is going unpunished. In the first six months of 2025, the DoJ dropped 23,000 criminal cases as it shifted to immigration enforcement, according to ProPublica, an investigative outlet.
Mr Trump’s first two attorneys-general were among the “scalps” of his first term. Both were pushed out over their perceived disloyalty: Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the probe into Russian election-meddling, and Bill Barr, for refusing to aid the president’s attempted subversion of the 2020 contest. No one could say the same of Ms Bondi. Even the president called her a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend” in his post announcing her departure. The problem is that, in this job, loyalty only goes so far.
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