Saturday, April 04, 2026
America Is Used to Hiding Its Wars. Trump Is Doing the Opposite.
America Is Used to Hiding Its Wars. Trump Is Doing the Opposite.
“President Trump, in his second term, has embraced a more aggressive foreign policy, launching airstrikes on Iran and engaging in other military actions. This marks a departure from his first term, where he largely inherited and maintained existing military engagements. Trump’s approach, characterized by a focus on content over conflict and a reliance on autonomous technologies, challenges the traditional understanding of war and its impact on American society.
On April 1, 32 days after abruptly launching a wave of airstrikes on Iran, President Trump made his first formal White House address to the American people about the war. He offered no new information or clarity on his strategy or goals. It was mostly just Trump, talking. But amid the familiar superlatives and tangents, there was a curiously specific digression.
“It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective,” Trump said. “American involvement in World War I lasted one year, seven months and five days. World War II lasted for three years, eight months and 25 days. The Korean War lasted for three years, one month and two days. The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years, five months and 29 days! Iraq went on for eight years, eight months and 28 days.” All of this was to say that 32 days was really not very long at all.
What was most surprising about Trump’s history lesson was its inference that wars were linear events with beginnings, middles and endings. This was not the impression that a reasonable person would have gotten from the past several months of increasingly disjointed foreign adventures: the capture of Venezuela’s president, an oil blockade and intimations of regime change in Cuba, weeks of open deliberation over invading Greenland and finally the Iran war.
These episodes followed the logic of content more than conflict, not so much ending as just kind of receding down the feed, replaced by bigger and better explosions. The White House social media team leaned trollishly into the idea, posting videos to X that spliced airstrike footage with movie and video game clips and a reference to the unofficial Proud Boys motto, “[expletive] around and find out.”
By the time Trump addressed the nation, however, America seemed to be settling into its own finding-out phase, and even the president’s allies were getting nervous. Memes had given way to maps of the Strait of Hormuz; gas was clearing $4 a gallon. Scapegoats were being sought: “As this thing goes south,” the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said, “we need to know exactly who talked him” — Trump — “into it and what representations were made to convince the president that this was a good idea.”
One Trump national security official, the National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, had already resigned over the war. “In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” Kent admonished Trump in his resignation letter, blaming “Israel and its powerful American lobby” for luring him into an open-ended conflict.
The “never-ending wars” that Kent bemoaned have been the dominant condition of American foreign policy throughout the 21st century, a once-dystopian-seeming possibility that, somewhere in the long shadow of Sept. 11, became a quietly accepted reality. Americans don’t particularly like endless wars, but it’s been years since they opposed them all that actively, a fact that surely has to do with how little the wars — fought under thickening layers of classification by a professional military drawn from a sliver of the population, and with a rapidly expanding suite of autonomous technologies — cost them personally.
Trump has benefited from this jaded complacency as much as anybody. He railed against the entanglements of the Bush and Obama years in his 2016 campaign and declared in a first-term State of the Union address that “great nations do not fight endless wars.” But in that term, he mostly served as a distracted custodian of the occupations and covert operations he inherited, and voters did not seem inclined to punish him for it. Though he lost the 2020 election, in Gallup polling published early that year only about a quarter of Democrats and independents, and even fewer Republicans, considered foreign affairs an “extremely important” issue.
In his second term, Trump seems hellbent on changing that. “Trump 47 is almost a different president from Trump 45,” says Michael O’Hanlon, the director of research for the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.
A leader who was once ambivalent at best about far-flung conflicts has, in the space of a few months, tried on several centuries’ worth of American imperialist costumes: the unapologetic empire-building of James Polk and James Monroe, the petro-political intrigues and Latin American chess games of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s spooks, Donald Rumsfeld’s fantasies about frictionless air wars. Trump’s April 1 speech, with its scattered musings about triumphs both real and imaginary, did not suggest he planned to change course anytime soon.
This president is, eternally, a break from American history and a logical culmination of it at the same time. On the one hand, his newfound adventurism would seem to run counter to the unspoken pact that Americans and their government have arrived at in the 21st century, in which the country’s citizens agree to mostly ignore the open-ended and opaque military operations conducted in their name as long as the government agrees not to ask them to sacrifice anything for them. On the other hand, the weightless vision of war-making that the Trump White House is presenting to the American people is an obvious product of this same recent history.
The Rise of the Endless War
“This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger,” George W. Bush said in his speech at the National Cathedral three days after the Sept. 11 attacks. American history would beg to differ: The United States was actively involved in military conflicts at home or abroad for most years of the 19th and 20th centuries, and has remained so in the quarter-century since Bush’s speech.
Public opinion of these wars has reflected less resolve than suggestibility. In his 2009 book “In Time of War,” Adam J. Berinsky, an M.I.T. political scientist, surveying seven decades of public opinion data, found that while Americans’ support for wars was affected by major attacks on the country — Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11 — it mostly followed the domestic “ebb and flow of partisan and group-based political conflict”: That is, it tracked politicians’ fights about the wars more than the events of the wars themselves.
This is understandable. Wars are complicated and, for Americans, almost always fought far away. The sacrifices they entail, even when they are painfully felt, are open to interpretation. But the fickleness of public opinion has provided obvious incentive for presidents — who, since Franklin D. Roosevelt, have closely studied polling on their wars — to withhold or shape information.
This project proceeded steadily through America’s postwar hegemony. Congress hasn’t formally declared war since World War II. Heeding the lessons of Korea and Vietnam, presidents have gradually shifted the financing of wars toward borrowing and printing money and away from a direct “war tax,” making it harder for voters to assess their cost. Richard Nixon ended the draft, corralling wars’ human losses within a small and, increasingly, demographically and culturally specific segment of the population.
The War Powers Act of 1973, informed by Vietnam, was supposed to reassert Congress’s authority to openly debate wars before beginning them. But with the arguable exception of George W. Bush, every president since Ronald Reagan has invaded or bombed a country without congressional approval.
Sarah Kreps, a professor at Cornell University who has studied military financing, argues that these innovations have gradually undermined one of the most famous ideas in democratic theory, advanced by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “Toward Perpetual Peace.” Kant argued that democratic states behave differently, and more judiciously, in their war-making than monarchies and oligarchies. Their governments are responsive to their citizens, Kant reasoned, and their citizens are responsive to the costs of war, because they bear them. But what if the cost is hidden from them?
From Drone Strikes to TikTok Spartanism
And what if the gravest costs are not borne by them at all? This question has become particularly urgent since the advent of armed drones, which, in their capacity to inflict death without risking it, have changed the elemental moral calculus assumed in warfare. A country that does not incur much human cost from its wars is a country that does not think much about them at all. “The absence of casualties isn’t a bad thing,” Kreps said, “but what it does is make Americans not think twice about how they are spending their resources.”
This became evident during Obama’s presidency, as his administration attempted to shift the war on terror away from the Bush-era counterinsurgencies and into a more amorphous, drone-centric program of counterterrorism. Critics have long contended that this was a perverse consequence of mounting concern over the civil liberties violations of the Bush years: a replacement of black sites and Guantánamo detentions with ghostly assassinations by increasingly autonomous airborne machines, the particulars of which would remain far from the view, and consciences, of the president’s supporters.
It was a bargain that many of those supporters were tacitly willing to accept. Polls during Obama’s presidency found that even as large majorities of Americans opposed staying in Afghanistan, most also approved of the administration’s drone strikes — even when a plurality of respondents couldn’t name the countries being targeted.
The professional-class liberalism of the Obama years, happy to whistle past its moral and ideological contradictions, is one of the main targets of Alexander Karp’s 2025 book “The Technological Republic.” Karp is the chief executive of the data analytics firm Palantir, which used Obama-era Afghanistan operations as a laboratory to develop battlefield software it now provides to Trump’s Pentagon; its programs have been used to target airstrikes in Iran.
In “The Technological Republic,” he describes a fast-arriving future in which wars with beginnings and ends are replaced by constant tactical engagement with elusive, artificial-intelligence-enabled threats. In this new reality, Karp argues, one of the most pernicious threats to national security is the estrangement of American elites from the battlefield: Silicon Valley executives and programmers who angrily protest the military use of the tools they create, a political class that has “never flown halfway around the world to risk one’s life.” He argues for a return to the values of the early Cold War, when technology, culture and national defense were united in common purpose, and has suggested resuming the draft — that America “only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
Now that we are fighting the next war, however, it’s not hard to see the contradiction between Karp’s civic vision and his products. Advances in military technology, and especially the transformative technologies currently poking into view, aim to reduce the risk and cost of warfighting, not to share them as widely as possible. In the Palantir-assisted Iran airstrikes, we are getting a glimpse of a new reality in which human deliberation is considered a tactical liability. This is a recipe for a country in which citizen participation in war, where it exists, takes on a different and shallower meaning — “engagement” in the digital audience analytics sense, not the civic one.
You can see this contradiction on particularly garish display in Trump’s second-term bellicosity. The administration’s TikTok Spartanism, on a surface level, affirms Karp’s vision: The White House’s Iran content is an unapologetic brief for American hard power in a zero-sum world full of enemies. But it is a burlesque of the technologized warrior republic rather than a real enactment of it. The videos are possible only in a country that asks little from its people beyond their YouTube clicks, where the intellectual and moral muscles necessary to work through questions of war and peace disappeared into the couch a long time ago.
It is another variation on a familiar decadence rather than a repudiation of it, another reminder of how malleable the narrative of a nation is when it comes unmoored from reality. Once the links between citizen and conflict have been severed, you can tell yourself whatever story you want about who you are and what you are doing in the world.
Charles Homans is a reporter for The Times and The Times Magazine, covering national politics.“
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s Warped Vision of the Iran War
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s Warped Vision of the Iran War
“Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s approach to the Iran war, characterized by brute force and a disregard for civilian casualties, has proven ineffective. Despite initial claims of success, the war has resulted in significant loss of life, including the death of key political figures, and has failed to achieve its objectives. The Administration’s reliance on overwhelming force and lack of a coherent strategy have led to a messy retreat, driven by political considerations and public opposition.
The two men might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the war has shown that this isn’t true.
Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty
There is no good way to call off a war that you started but which hasn’t achieved what you’d hoped. On Wednesday night, Donald Trump, in his address to the nation on the Iran war, sought to counter reality with hyperbole. “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran,” the President said. “Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks.” Of course, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard retains control not just of the country but of the Strait of Hormuz, and therefore of an alarmingly constricted global oil supply. A month of air strikes had killed many leaders but had not changed the regime. Even so, Trump suggested that the mission was “nearing completion,” and that the U.S. military would soon be pulling back. But if Tehran did not accept a deal, he added, “we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
Big talk. But the announcement also sounded like a concession, since two to three weeks probably isn’t enough time for Trump to follow through on some of his prior threats: an armed invasion of the oil ports of Kharg Island, or an even more ambitious raid to extract uranium likely stored in tunnels near nuclear facilities. The morning of Trump’s address, media reports had suggested that he was considering withdrawing the United States from NATO. Instead, the President taunted America’s allies, some of whom had been pleading for a settlement over Hormuz. “Build up some delayed courage,” he told them. If they want the oil to flow again, they should “go to the strait and just take it.”
It has been a central conviction of Trump’s second term that the nations of the world now operate on self-interest and brute force, rather than on principle or alliance, and the White House has been eager to spread the news. The mockery that the Administration directed at its own, less warlike allies this week (“Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy,” the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said on Tuesday) recalled its jeering of Volodymyr Zelensky in February, 2025. “You’re buried there,” Trump told the Ukrainian President about his nation’s battlefield prospects.
This penchant for what Saul Bellow called reality instruction—the cynical delight taken in explaining to idealists how the rough-and-tumble world really works—extends from Trump throughout the Administration. But perhaps the most eager reality instructor has been Hegseth, one of the Administration’s more politically fragile figures, who, when he’d been picked to join Trump’s Cabinet, was a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.” Hegseth is so committed to a vision of the world defined by winners and losers that he once wrote that Joan of Arc was a “loser” because her last battle “ended disastrously and eventually with her execution.”
Hegseth came out of his own service, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the seeming conviction that what had stood in the way of a fuller victory in those wars had been the restraints supposedly placed on how soldiers could kill. (In 2019, he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon two soldiers charged with or convicted of alleged war crimes.) “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth told a large gathering of senior military officials, whom he had summoned to Quantico, in September. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement . . . just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters,” he said. “You kill people and break things for a living.”
On Iran, Hegseth has led the Administration’s periodic press briefings, at which he has called on Americans to pray to Jesus Christ for the military’s success; his slogan has been “maximum lethality.” But even in the first hours of the war it was clear that this approach could backfire. The initial strikes, which began on February 28th, killed the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but were so indiscriminate that, as President Trump noted, they also killed many of the political figures who the White House had hoped would form a new, more amenable cadre of leaders. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said a few days later. The ones remaining, even if Trump didn’t want to acknowledge it, were generally described as more hard-line. One of the President’s stated aims has been to inspire a popular uprising among those Iranian citizens sick of the repression and the autocracy enforced by the Revolutionary Guard. Yet that requires taking care to distinguish between the regime and its civilians, and to avoid collateral damage. But, according to a preliminary investigation, on the same day that U.S. forces assassinated Khamenei, they also dropped a bomb in the wrong place, inadvertently killing nearly two hundred people in an elementary school.
Trump and Hegseth might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the Iran war has shown that this isn’t true. The old liberal institutions may be teetering, but that doesn’t mean that all that’s left is the law of the jungle. The fact that the President is now signalling a messy retreat has nothing to do with insufficient lethality and everything to do with politics—in particular, the alarm in the global oil markets and the American public’s widespread opposition to the war. One tragedy of Trump’s war is that, in January, the Iranian regime was under extreme pressure from protests, which it quelled by murdering thousands. The right kind of coördinated push might have toppled it. Instead, the White House offered frequently shifting rationales for its war and little outreach to the Iranian resistance. It treated the military operation as something to brag about to its political base—a way to show exactly how unrestrained it was willing to be.
The day before the President’s address, Hegseth gave a press conference in which he recounted a recent visit he’d made to bases in the region. “It was the American warrior, unleashed,” he said. He seemed to view the trip as a parable. “As the sun was going down and a chill was setting on the tarmac,” he encountered an airwoman and asked her what the troops needed: “She simply looked at me with a sly smile on her face and said, ‘More bombs, sir. And bigger bombs.’ ” That might have been what the airwoman asked for. But what Trump and Hegseth really owed her, the nation they lead, and the Iranians whose country they bombed was a plan—a real solution to the disaster that they have created. ♦”
Friday, April 03, 2026
US F-15E jet confirmed shot down over Iran as Tehran releases wreckage images | US-Israel war on Iran | The Guardian
US F-15E jet confirmed shot down over Iran as Tehran releases wreckage images
"Downing of fighter plane – the first shot down over Iran since start of war – prompts frantic US rescue effort
A US F-15E fighter has been shot down over Iran, prompting a frantic US search and rescue effort for its two-strong crew, in the first such incident since the start of the war.
Images of a tail fin and other debris were released by Iranian state media early on Friday accompanied by an initial claim that an advanced US F-35 and been hit by a new air defence system over central Iran and the pilot probably killed.
Aviation experts said the wreckage pictured was in fact from a F-15E from the US air force’s 494th squadron, based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK, though it could not at first be confirmed when and where the pictures were taken.
US officials familiar with the situation later confirmed off the record that an F-15E had been brought down and the Pentagon was scrambling to find the crew. But there was no official comment from the US military about the incident.
Subsequent footage filmed from Iran showed a US C-130 Hercules and HH-60 Pavehawk helicopters flying low and at one point refuelling together, accompanied by fresh Iranian speculation that the plane crew may have ejected and survived.
Justin Bronk, an aviation expert from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said the use of the specialist helicopters “suggested a combat search and rescue mission is underway to locate and extract the two aircrew from the F-15E”.
A social media account claiming to be linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards posted a picture of an ejector seat in a desert landscape, which appeared to be consistent with the ACES II type used in F-15Es. “If genuine it would suggest that at least one of the two aircrew did eject safely,” Bronk added.
The presenter on an Iranian TV channel urged residents to hand over any “enemy pilot” to police and promised a reward for anyone who did.
Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported that the pilot of the jet – still incorrectly described as an F-35 – had been taken into custody, contradicting Tehran’s initial claim that the pilot had probably died in the incident.
Overnight, the US Central Command, which is leading the attack on Iran, had denied Iranian claims that another F-35 jet had been downed over Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. “All US fighter aircraft are accounted for,” Centcom said at the time.
No US fighter jets have been lost over Iran during the five week long conflict, though three F-15Es were dramatically shot down by a Kuwaiti air defence system in a friendly fire accident on March 1.
An F-35 fighter reportedly had to make an emergency landing at a US airbase in the Middle East after sustaining damage from the ground. A US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft was destroyed at the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia on March 27 in a particular accurate Iranian strike."
White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion for Defense in New Budget Request
White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion for Defense in New Budget Request
“The White House is requesting $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year, a 40% increase from the current year. This request is accompanied by a call for $73 billion in cuts to domestic programs, including climate, housing, and education. The proposed increase is framed as necessary due to the ongoing war with Iran, but both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concerns about the high level of military spending and the proposed domestic cuts.
The massive, proposed increase would be offset in part by steep cuts to domestic programs, some of which the administration describes as wasteful.
With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House said on Friday it would ask Congress to approve roughly $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history.
The request, which arrived on Friday as part of President Trump’s new budget, would amount to a roughly 40 percent bump from what the U.S. spent on the Pentagon this fiscal year. The administration said it would couple the proposed boost with a call for $73 billion in cuts across many domestic agencies, including the elimination of some climate, housing and education programs.
The White House released a summary of its budget request, with fuller details expected later. Together, the ideas may sum to a fiscal blueprint that could still add trillions of dollars to the brimming federal debt over the next decade, if lawmakers translate the president’s vision into law.
Mr. Trump urged Congress to approve most of the new defense money, more than $1.1 trillion, as part of their yearly work to fund the government, and to enact the remaining $350 billion using the same legislative tactic that allowed Republicans to clinch their tax cuts one year ago. He also asked lawmakers to boost federal funding to aid with border enforcement and mass deportations.
In the days before releasing the initial details of his plan, the president and his aides framed the proposed increase for defense in urgent terms, citing a need to restock munitions and other supplies amid the war with Iran. At one point, Mr. Trump indicated at a private lunch that military spending needed to be a national priority, even at the expense of federal safety-net programs and other government aid.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things, they can do it on a state basis,” he said, adding the focus had to be “military protection.”
But Democrats and Republicans have expressed a shared unease recently about raising military spending to the extent that Mr. Trump has suggested, fretting that the administration has failed to keep them updated about the status of the Iran war, now in its fifth week.
Nor have lawmakers responded favorably to some of the president’s proposed cuts for agencies and programs that serve American families and businesses. Only months ago, Democrats and Republicans approved spending packages for the current fiscal year that rejected some of the same domestic cuts, which Mr. Trump endorsed as part of his 2026 submission.
This fiscal year, the White House said it would cut domestic spending by $73 billion, or about 10 percent. The administration also said it would ask Congress for a series of boosts to federal law enforcement, including more than $40 billion for the Justice Department, a 13 percent increase.
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.“
As H-1B Visa Program Changes, Skilled Foreign Workers Consider Leaving U.S.
As H-1B Visa Program Changes, Skilled Foreign Workers Consider Leaving U.S.
The Trump administration’s changes to the H-1B visa program, including a $100,000 fee and a weighted lottery system prioritizing higher salaries, are causing skilled foreign workers to reconsider their careers in the U.S. Despite the upheaval, companies are still filing H-1B visas, particularly for highly qualified candidates.
The pathway to building a career in the United States for many highly educated and skilled foreign workers was once clear: Earn a degree from an American university or college, and then be recruited by a company willing to sponsor one of the 85,000 H-1B visas awarded annually to fill specialized roles and grant work status for up to six years.
Now that reliable route is shifting as the Trump administration has made fundamental changes to the way the visas are granted.
The New York Times spoke to three international workers caught in the middle: an Indian woman who, after receiving her master’s degree in biotechnology from Northwestern University, struggled to find a company that would sponsor her for temporary employment; a Chinese-Mongolian marketing analyst in New York who was laid off and is now hustling to find an employer to sponsor her visa; and a Taiwanese software engineer in Seattle who dealt with anxiety because of shifting immigration policies amid widespread tech layoffs.
The H-1B program allows U.S. companies in major industries like technology and medicine to submit visa applications for foreign candidates, who are then entered into a lottery system. Though the visa program has been around since 1990, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began using a random selection process in 2013 to handle the surplus of applications. Since then, demand has continued to soar.
Last September, the Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B applicants, stirring confusion around the program. Then in late February, another hurdle was introduced: The Department of Homeland Security turned this game of chance into one that prioritizes higher salaries.
Now, if there are more H-1B applicants than spots available, U.S.C.I.S. will conduct a weighted lottery system based on new criteria: wage levels that are calculated with government employment and wage data, which include factors like job title and location. This new process gives applications tied to higher wages an advantage in the lottery system.
The D.H.S. says the new rule is meant to better protect job opportunities for Americans and to deter companies from filing H-1B petitions for low-skilled, low-paid positions, a practice the Trump administration says has led to the abuse of the program.
“There’s definitely a panic level that we hadn’t seen in the past with clients,” said Matthew Maiona, a Boston-based immigration lawyer who has over 30 years of experience representing both employers and employees in sectors like I.T. and engineering.
“H-1Bs are not a cheap way of doing things,” he said. “You have to pay all the filing fees and legal fees, and you’re also paying a prevailing wage that’s set by the Department of Labor.”
These changes have impelled some foreign workers to rethink their careers in the United States. Those we spoke to said that it felt nearly impossible to find U.S. employers over the last year that would sponsor their H-1B visas for roles in biotechnology and marketing analytics.
Despite the upheaval in the H1-B program, as well as the struggling job market, Mr. Maiona said his firm hadn’t seen a decline in companies filing H-1B visas this year; but he noted that there had been a decrease in employers filing H-1B petitions for entry-level roles. “If you’re making a piece of software and the best qualified person is an H-1B, I’ll say 99 percent of the time the company is going to hire that person with the best qualifications,” he said.“
Pam Bondi broke the DOJ to please Trump. It wasn’t enough to save her.
Pam Bondi broke the DOJ to please Trump. It wasn’t enough to save her.
“Pam Bondi, Trump’s former Attorney General, was fired for failing to prosecute Trump’s political enemies despite her efforts to align the DOJ with his authoritarian vision. Her tenure saw a focus on targeting Trump’s adversaries, but the resulting prosecutions were weak and often unsuccessful. Bondi’s actions damaged the DOJ’s reputation and led to a mass exodus of career attorneys, leaving her successor with significant challenges.
The newly ousted attorney general bent over backward to defend Trump’s most indefensible policies and attack his enemies to the detriment of the Justice Department.
When Pam Bondi agreed to be attorney general under President Donald Trump, she knew what was being asked of her. Trump made no secret of his desire to transform the Justice Department from an impartial, independent law enforcement agency into a weapon for revenge against his political adversaries. She was to treat Trump’s enemies as targets of the U.S. government.
Bondi showed no hesitation in that regard and hit the ground running once confirmed — but it was not enough for Trump. On Thursday, she became the second member of Trump’s Cabinet to be fired this year. MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian reported Bondi was fired mostly because Trump “grew dissatisfied with her inability to deliver on prosecuting his perceived enemies.”
Notwithstanding Bondi’s multiple glaring errors and own goals, most of the forces working against her were outside of her direct control. Even as she failed in Trump’s main objective for her, in her desperate attempts to make good on the president’s wishes, she still managed to do serious harm to the DOJ. The choices Bondi made in the name of appeasing Trump damaged its reputation, hollowed out its staff, and left her successor even less poised to uphold the nations’ laws fairly and evenly.
For all Trump’s ire about Bondi’s failures to prosecute his perceived enemies, it’s hard to see what more she could have done to slake his thirst for revenge. After all, her hands were tied by a simple fact: There is no law against making the president mad. Bondi still devoted a significant portion of the department’s resources toward finding something, anything, to use against Trump’s political foes in court, especially after Trump publicly admonished her to move faster.
The resulting prosecutions were almost all too weak to hold up in the face of the court’s scrutiny. Some could not even clear the low bar of a grand jury indictment. An ambitious but severely inexperienced prosecutor installed by Bondi got a grand jury to indict former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, but those indictments were overturned. Subsequent efforts to pin them with alleged crimes have gone nowhere. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is reportedly under investigation, but there have been few updates in that matter since November.
The attempts from U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro to go after former President Joe Biden and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powellhave fared little better. Probes into Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for allegedly impeding law enforcement have drawn no charges. In fact, the most successful of the indictments against Trump’s antagonists, a classified documents retention case against his former national security advisor, John Bolton, came from an investigation the Biden administration launched.
There was little else in Bondi’s record at Main Justice to buoy her in the face of this failure in Trump’s eyes. The administration’s disastrous handling of the files surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted child sex abuser, fell squarely on her shoulders. While the scandal surrounding the so-called Epstein files had no good outcome, given how much of it was based on conspiracy theories, Bondi’s fumbling only added fuel to the fire.
Weeks into her tenure, Bondi insisted in a memo to federal lawyers that they “are expected to zealously advance, protect, and defend their client’s interests.” She meant that to be as Trump’s interests, of course, not the federal government’s orAmericans’. But her ironfisted attempts to instill loyalty and devotion for Trump in DOJ lawyers failed spectacularly. We have seen a massive rush to the exits from career DOJ attorneys, and those who have stayed have scrambled to handle an onslaught of cases brought against the administration.
The dearth of Civil Division lawyers willing to defend Trump’s policies is a function of how indefensible those policies are. Federal courts have been flooded with immigration cases, many of which have seen lawyers stammering to explain to judges how the plaintiff’s rights haven’t been violated. The Civil Rights Division, once a jewel of the federal government and a defender of access to the ballot box, has now adopted a mission that includes blocking Americans from the polls.
All of this was done to please Trump and align the DOJ with his authoritarian vision. Bondi’s failure, then, was not a lack of enthusiasm but her inability to bend the justice system past its breaking point. Despite a boost from a pliant majority on the Supreme Court, there were simply too many roadblocks keeping her from persecuting the people on Trump’s list of targets.
With Bondi gone, acting Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will step up until a replacement is confirmed. Early reporting points to Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin as a likely candidate. Zeldin may perform better under the spotlight of a congressional grilling than Bondi and may prove himself to be more creative in stretching the law to attack the people Trump wants to attack. But absent a total rewrite of America’s criminal code to better suit Trump’s wishes, he will have the same problems pleasing Trump that Bondi had.”
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