The Sickening Image That Will Haunt Pam Bondi the Rest of Her Life |
The Sickening Image That Will Haunt Pam Bondi the Rest of Her Life
The attorney general’s congressional hearing was so bad, Fox didn’t even cover it. And it may not even have been the worst thing she did this week!
During and right after Pam Bondi’s House testimony Wednesday, I flipped on Fox News and Newsmax to see how they were covering it. I was expecting to see a celebration of how the attorney general really put those America-hating libs in their place. To my surprise, I did not. I saw mostly ads, to be honest, but the little programming I did catch was devoted entirely to the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story.
Disappointed, I flipped back to MS NOW and didn’t think much of it. But Wednesday evening, The Daily Beast reported that my experience was not aberrational: Bondi testified for about five hours, and Fox News ran roughly 10 minutes of it live.
It’s an old, old Murdochian ploy: When there’s news that doesn’t suit the agenda, just ignore it. I’ve seen this movie many times. Back in a different era, Rupert’s favorite politician was Al D’Amato, the hacky and corrupt Republican senator from New York. Whenever there was a new allegation about D’Amato’s ethics, or a Senate report reviewing same, it would be on the front page of The New York Times and get prominent play in the Daily News—and in the New York Post, there usually wasn’t a word.
Fox’s near silence on Bondi is an admission that the hearing was an indefensible horror show. And it gets worse if you really think about it for a few minutes. Think of all the planning and strategizing that went into that performance. Employees of the Department of Justice, working on our dime, spent hours prepping Bondi on exactly how to insult each and every Democratic member of the committee. They came up with the idea of requiring each House member to have an individual log-in to peruse the Epstein files so the DOJ could spy on them. They spent hours assembling Bondi’s little burn book. She had to have been coached for hours about exactly how to ignore the questions and try to turn the tables on her interrogators. In other words: Her aides, whose salaries we pay, probably thought this would be great. That she’d walk away with a catalog of sound-bite knockout punches.
Instead, Bondi walked away with the image that will haunt her for the rest of her life: her back turned to those Jeffrey Epstein victims as Representative Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands “if you have still not been able to meet with the DOJ”—and they all raised their hands. That image looked horrible Wednesday; as more and more details about the Epstein story leak out in the coming weeks and months, it’s only going to look worse.
And yet, for all this? In substantive terms, her performance at that hearing may not even have been the worst thing Bondi did this week! The morning after the hearing, she fired Gail Slater, the head of the department’s antitrust division. Slater actually had a decent reputation—she was part of the populist-MAGA anti-monopoly movement, and she brought a high-profile case against Google over its monopolization of the ad tech market.
Many progressive anti-monopolists were cheering for Slater. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren upon hearing this news: “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder. Every antitrust case in front of the Trump Justice Department now reeks of double-dealing—Ticketmaster’s stock is already surging.” That last sentence is true. If you’re interested, you can read here about why this is so bad. The bottom line is that Bondi’s firing of Slater is a big nail in the coffin of the idea that Trumpian right-wing populism is willing to take on powerful interests. It may—but only as long as they’re designated enemies of Trump.
To circle back to Fox News: If they’re going to follow the old Murdoch edict of ignoring all bad news, pretty soon they’re going to be reduced to airing nothing but scare stories about woke Olympic athletes and Spanish-speaking superstars.
It’s not even clear Bondi had the worst week among Trump Cabinet officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got seriously pulverized twice this week. First, when a grand jury refused to indict six Democrats for their earlier video reminding soldiers that they had a duty to disobey illegal orders; as Chesa Boudin and Eric Fish point out in a Times op-ed today, grand juries convened by the mighty Justice Department almost never fail to return an indictment. Second, when a federal judge blocked Hegseth from punishing one of the six, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, writing that Hegseth had grossly violated Kelly’s First Amendment rights. “Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years,” Judge Richard Leon wrote. “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!”
And Kristi Noem had to endure the indignity of seeing rival Tom Homan, the border czar, make her ICE-men goeth out of Minneapolis. Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal posted a long and devastating story about the mayhem at the Department of Homeland Security under Noem and her rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski. It’s the kind of Washington story that appears only when inside sources decide to start running to reporters to spill saucy details they once sat on—a clear sign that no one is scared of her anymore.
None of these people, of course, belongs in a high position in the federal government. They’re psychopathic monsters. There’s no doubt Bondi and her advisers think she knocked a home run on Wednesday. But one day, we’ll all learn what she’s hiding about the Epstein story. Can’t wait for that hearing.
Rich Liberals: Please, Please Step Up and Save The Washington Post
You will lose money. Piles of it. But you will help save something far more important than money.
By far the most widely read piece I’ve written in my time at The New Republic is this one, which I wrote right after the 2024 election and headlined “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” My answer to that question was the media—specifically, that an avowedly right-wing media, which existed not to report the news but to elect Republicans and turn liberalism into a grotesque and indefensible caricature of itself, had grown and grown since the 1990s, finally by 2024 reaching the point where it was more powerful and more agenda-setting than the mainstream media.
I wrote: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.… Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”
Here we sit, 15 months later, and 13 months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, and what’s changed? What’s changed, predictably, is that the landscape is even bleaker. CBS News, now run by Bari Weiss, has become part of that agenda-setting right-wing media—which includes Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, and more. And so has The Washington Post, whose rightward turn on its editorial page started becoming apparent late last year.
And this week, Bezos moved to assert his personal control not just over the opinion pages. Now he’s decided to start dismantling the news side, with the 300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday. As you’ve no doubt read by now, the Post has suffered admittedly massive losses lately—$100 million in 2024. But as you’ve also surely read, Bezos could cover those losses if he wanted to with what he makes in a few days. If he wrote a check tomorrow to cover those losses, his net worth would drop, as Truthout’s Sharon Zhang observed, from the current Forbes-estimated $248.7 billion—all the way down to a worrying $248.6 billion.
So why did he decide not to write that check? I don’t know the man, and of course on some level, rich men hate writing such checks. But if he actually believed in the value of journalism’s role in sustaining democracy, as he appeared to for the first few years after he bought the paper in 2013, he’d have written it happily.
So the question arises: What are we to conclude from his refusal to do so? There’s only one conclusion. He doesn’t care about democracy. He sees no vital role for a vigorous free press in sustaining it. And he wants The Washington Post not only to be a right-leaning libertarian newspaper, which, as many have observed, is his right. He wants it to be a lousy newspaper. A weak simulacrum of what it was once and should be. A newspaper that cannot play its time-honored role as a check on abuses of power.
I note here, as others have, that the Post still has 500 journalists, which is a lot, and that the layoffs largely didn’t touch the national reporting teams. That’s all good, I guess. But just wait. The guillotine will start finding those necks eventually. Why? Because these layoffs won’t staunch losses over the long haul. Indeed, they may make them worse. More subscribers who decided to give the paper one more chance after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement will jump ship (in my anecdotal experience, that’s happening to a considerable degree already). Losses will continue. And one day, the Post’s publisher—this horror-show hack named Will Lewis, this meretricious mountebank who was too cowardly to join the staff call announcing the layoffs but who was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco the very next day—will announce that more belt-tightening is required.
And I submit to you that Bezos at best doesn’t care and, at worst, actually wants this on some level. Once upon a dear old time, he seemed to want a real newspaper. But after he threw in his lot with Trump (or Trumps, plural, given his financing of this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop), that changed. It’s axiomatic: It is impossible to believe simultaneously in a vigorous press and in the success of Donald Trump. The latter, which is based on the smashing of democratic laws and customs, cannot succeed if the former exists. And, on an emotional and psychic and most certainly pecuniary level, Bezos has made his choice.
Rich liberals, I beg of you: Do something. Step in to save The Washington Post. Maybe there’s not a single one of you who has the money to swallow $100 million in annual losses. But maybe five or six of you together do. And by the way: If you do it right, and you hire the right editors and rehire some of the old columnists and do some intelligent modernizing around video and podcasts and are willing to be an unapologetically liberal newspaper, you’ll find an audience again.
You’ll be doing a lot more than saving some jobs. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” Thomas Jefferson wrote a friend in 1786. A news outlet isn’t a shoe store. It’s a guardrail against tyranny. It shouldn’t surprise us that a man worth a quarter-trillion dollars, whose wealth has increased tenfold in the last decade, doesn’t care about this. Democracy, tyranny … makes no difference to him. In fact, to the extent that democracy makes room for his employees to try to join unions and so forth, democracy is an inconvenience. So is a free press.
So take it off his hands. Make Bezos the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. He may actually refuse to sell to a liberal consortium—his preference for tyranny may now be that stark. But it can’t hurt to try. Your accountants might grouse, but there is no question that history will reward you.
Why We Already Know Year Two of Trump 2.0 Will Be Worse Than the First
The Tulsi Gabbard raid and the IRS lawsuit represent corruption on a level no one could even have imagined—until Trump came along.
It was already a pretty weird week, what with Tulsi Gabbard—the official in charge of gathering foreign intelligence—showing up at a Georgia election office for an FBI raid. But then, on Thursday, the president of the United States filed a lawsuit that is an obvious shakedown of the government he runs. Donald Trump, his two older sons, and their business are suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion for allowing a government contractor to gain access to their tax filings (the contractor later leaked the files to the press). It reads like a transparent attempt to steal a few billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury while he can get away with it.
It’s an interesting twist of fate that the Gabbard raid and this lawsuit both dropped in the same week, because they actually go together quite well in the Venn diagram of Trumpian iniquity. Both developments prove a core point about our system that everybody had better learn and be prepared to act on after Trump leaves office (assuming that happy day comes): namely, that Trump has shown that a conscienceless and corrupt person can pollute the system in endless ways because previous generations never anticipated that someone this comprehensively conscienceless and corrupt could win high office. There simply aren’t laws that prohibit much of what he does because it never occurred to anyone that a holder of high public trust would ever even try such stuff.
Let’s look first at this IRS suit, beginning with a little historical background. First of all, as The New York Times reported when it got the leaked documents, Trump paid no federal taxes in 10 of 15 years from 2004 to 2019. We don’t know that that was a crime; maybe it was just fancy accountants. But one way or the other, it sure isn’t right.
But OK, they got leaked. That’s against the law. Of course, one could argue that the only reason they had to be leaked was that Trump refused to release his tax returns publicly, making him the first presidential candidate since Richard Nixon not to do so. Had he complied with that honorable custom—one that requires that people adhere not to a law but to a democratic norm of behavior—there would have been no leak.
But fine. They were leaked. That’s illegal. And guess what? The guy who did it is in prison! He started serving a five-year sentence in May 2024. We can debate whether, in breaking that law, Charles Littlejohn in fact performed a public service (historical fact of note: Nixon’s returns also were leaked, and for that crime, no one was ever indicted). But Littlejohn broke a law, and he was convicted. The system, on paper, worked.
For normal human beings, that would have been enough. Justice was served. But not for the Trumps. The slightest whiff of an opportunity to scam someone or someones—in this case, the taxpayers he was elected to serve—gets them salivating like hyenas over a springbok carcass. So now we have the unprecedented and frankly insane circumstance of the sitting president of the United States suing the government of the United States, over which he himself presides, trying to use his office to line his pockets. They’ll pick that carcass to the bone if they can.
Now you might ask: Shouldn’t there be some kind of law preventing the president of the United States from suing the federal government, at least while he’s in office? I’m not a lawyer, so maybe there is some such law from 1856 or whatever, and someone will discover it. But assuming there’s not, I can tell you why there’s not: It never occurred to people that a president could be so petty and venal as to do something like this!
Now let us turn to Gabbard. She has been sidelined for some time, ever since she made the error, fatal in Trumpworld, of saying something true to the factual record—that U.S. intelligence services saw no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said at the time, “I think they were very close to having one.” More recently, she was frozen out of the action on Venezuela.
So, needing a way to get back in Dear Leader’s good graces, she boned up on a topic that she knew would demonstrate her value: the “fraudulent” 2020 election. How can she possibly claim jurisdiction over this obviously domestic matter, many have been asking since this week’s raid? Well, she can’t, on real Earth. But on Trump Earth, you might recall that back in 2020, there were some wild conspiracy theories that involved foreign governments and intelligence agencies.
Remember “Italygate”? I thought you might not. It never really gained traction among us flat-earthers. But it was a QAnon favorite for a while there, and it held that an Italian aerospace company and an........