Donald Trump’s next attorney general must meet two job requirements. One is easy and in plentiful supply; the other is impossible. Anyone who takes the job is doomed to fail.

The first job requirement, the abundant one, is unyielding fealty to Trump and his political agenda. Our recently dispatched attorney general, Pam Bondi, had this part aced. “The greatest president in U.S. history,” she gushed during her self-debasing House testimony in February. Days later, she draped a stories-high banner over the DOJ headquarters building bearing the president’s visage atop the Justice Department’s official seal — a schmaltzy hosanna from the toadyish AG and a desecration of DoJ’s long-standing tradition of independence.

Beyond the kowtowing, Bondi tried her darndest to make Trump’s prosecutorial revenge fantasies come true. She aimed the Justice Department’s firepower at a succession of prime targets on the president’s enemies list: Letitia James, James Comey, Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, and Jerome Powell. Bondi’s prosecutors failed at every turn, their transparently vindictive cases rejected by judges and grand juries alike. (The John Bolton indictment is different, as the investigation reportedly predated the current Trump administration and the charges appear sound.) Other Trump payback investigations remain pending, but their outlooks are no brighter. It’s unclear whether Bondi actually cared about all the losing, but plainly her priority was the performative display of prosecutorial loyalty: “Hey boss, I tried.”

We’ve come to take it as a given that Trump demands absolute political allegiance from all his appointees, but this is historically aberrant for the Justice Department. No modern attorney general has been above the occasional appearance or accusation of partisanship, of course: Eric Holder called himself “the president’s wingman”; Bill Barr twisted facts and law to clear Trump on the Mueller investigation;........

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