Early in the first Trump administration, the legal journalist Benjamin Wittes coined one of the best descriptions of how President Donald Trump governs: “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” Trump, as Wittes originally wrote, often issued executive orders that were not vetted by lawyers or policy experts — and thus were vulnerable to lawsuits and often achieved very little. And this penchant for taking seemingly bold actions that fall apart once they are exposed to the real world pervades both of Trump’s administrations.
No one embodied Trump’s brand of incompetent malice more than outgoing Attorney General Pam Bondi, who, as Trump announced Thursday, “will be transitioning” to a “new job in the private sector.” In her 15 months as the country’s top legal official, Bondi flouted norms, stretching back to the end of the Nixon administration, which sought to insulate federal prosecutors from political control by the White House. But her actual attempts to use the Department of Justice to seek revenge against Trump’s perceived enemies frequently floundered on the shores of bad lawyering.
Bondi may be best known for saying, in a February 2025 interview with Fox News, that a list of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s clients was “sitting on my desk right now” — months before the DOJ later claimed that this list doesn’t exist. After she was asked about her mishandling of the Epstein files in a congressional hearing, she told lawmakers that they shouldn’t even be talking about Epstein because “the Dow is over 50,000 right now.” (As of this writing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average sits at 46,371.57.)
Consider, as well, the Trump DOJ’s attempts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, two officials who Trump loathes because they investigated allegedly illegal activity by the president. Both prosecutions were dismissed by a federal court, however, after a judge determined that Lindsey Halligan, the former insurance lawyer that this administration tried to install as a top federal prosecutor in Virginia, was never lawfully appointed.
Similarly, when the Trump administration ordered thousands of federal law enforcement officers to occupy the city of Minneapolis and to arrest many immigrants in that city, a competent attorney general would have recognized that these mass arrests would trigger an array of legal proceedings, and would have preemptively detailed additional lawyers to Minnesota to handle the increased caseload. Instead, the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota was almost comically understaffed, and completely unprepared for an array of court orders, requiring the administration to release many of the immigrants it had just arrested.
Federal judges criticized the Justice Department’s incompetence in their opinions — the chief judge of the local federal district court wrote that the Trump administration “decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.” One DOJ lawyer, who was assigned an impossible workload of 88 cases in a single month, told a judge that she sometimes wished she’d be held in contempt of court so that she could sleep in jail.
At times, the ineptitude of Bondi’s Justice Department even endangered the Republican Party’s ability to hold onto political power. Last November, a federal court in Texas struck down a Republican gerrymander that is expected to gain the GOP five more US House seats after the 2026 midterms. The court’s opinion, authored by a Trump-appointed judge, relied on a letter from one of Bondi’s top lieutenants, which effectively ordered the state of Texas to redraw its maps for racial reasons that are forbidden by the Constitution.
Though the Supreme Court eventually reinstated the gerrymander, the lower court’s decision was well-rooted in Supreme Court precedents questioning racially motivated laws. All of this drama would have been avoided if Bondi’s DOJ had never sent its letter, which the judge said was “challenging to unpack” because “it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” Texas’s Republican gerrymander would have never been in any danger.
This list is just the beginning. Not every Republican attorney general loyal to Trump would have made such basic errors in carrying out his agenda. And there’s no guarantee that Bondi’s successor will share her ineptitude. So Trump’s opponents may want to wait and see what comes next before they celebrate Bondi’s humiliation.
Bondi’s ouster gives Trump a chance to place a competent loyalist in charge of DOJ
Bondi’s bumbling management of the Justice Department would have mattered more if Republicans didn’t have a firm grip on the federal judiciary. For the moment, at least, lawsuits challenging many illegal detentions in Minnesota are on hold thanks to a decision by two Republican appellate judges holding that these detentions are, in fact, legally mandated. The Texas court’s decision against that state’s gerrymander was blocked by a Republican Supreme Court.
Still, Bondi’s incompetence is likely to plague the DOJ for a long time, even though she no longer leads it. Federal judges have historically treated Justice Department lawyers with a degree of deference, because for decades the DOJ held a well-deserved reputation for being candid with judges and for hiring highly skilled lawyers. But now many judges are openly questioning the Justice Department in their opinions. That means that rank-and-file Justice Department lawyers will have to spend countless hours shoring up claims that federal judges would have simply believed in the past.
Meanwhile, the worst-case scenario for Trump’s political enemies, and for anyone else who the Justice Department decides to target for political reasons, is that Bondi could be replaced by a capable advocate. (The full list of possible candidates to replace Bondi is not yet known, but some early news reports indicate that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is under consideration).
A competent attorney general would have made sure that a lawfully appointed prosecutor brought charges against Comey and James. A competent attorney general might have selectively leaked Epstein documents that mention Democrats, rather than inspiring an act of Congress requiring all of the documents to be released. And a competent attorney general would treat DOJ lawyers’ time as precious, because every minute a prosecutor spends on unnecessary work is time they can’t spend advancing Trump’s agenda.
It remains to be seen who Trump will pick to replace the maladroit Bondi. But there’s hardly a shortage of highly partisan Republican lawyers who are actually good at their jobs. Trump could find someone like his first-term Attorney General Bill Barr, who was an extraordinarily capable advocate for MAGA’s agenda. And, if that happens, anyone unfortunate to wind up on Trump’s enemies list will miss Pam Bondi.
