'Beclowning themselves': Trump officials blasted for turning DC into a 'repellent circus'

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he holds a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

During her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, February 11, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi hurled one insult after another at Democratic lawmakers who asked questions she didn't like. Bondi attacked Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), the committee's highest-ranking Democrat and a former constitutional law professor, as a "washed-up loser lawyer." And she didn't spare Republicans either, calling conservative/libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) a "failed politician."

In his February 16 column, the New York Times' Frank Bruni points to Bondi's "sneering" theatrics as a prime example of a MAGA Republican emulating President Donald Trump's use of "contempt" — which, he laments, is also a tactic of Vice President JD Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and others who desperate to express their devotion to Trump.

"This crew — Bondi, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, President Trump himself — don't want to win opponents' favor," Bruni explains. "They don't even want to win the argument. Why sweat the delicate art of persuasion when you can use the brute force of condemnation? Comity and conciliation are a slog. They're for suckers. Contempt is victors' ready, heady prerogative…. Trump, his aides and many of his supporters haven't purged contempt from our politics. They've mainstreamed it. Purified it. Industrialized it."

Bruni continues, "It's their push-a-button pushback against everyone who challenges them and any circumstances that threaten to undermine them, an all-purpose way to pivot from the substance of a situation to an evasive and obfuscating ill will. Envelop everything in indiscriminate animosity and nothing real survives. That's what Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Miller, the impresario of ugliness, did when federal agents killed protesters in Minneapolis. Smear first, ask questions later — or, better yet, never."

The Times columnist argues, however, that MAGA Republicans' politics of "contempt" don't erase their policy failures.

"Bondi came into that hearing last week as a joke, a disgrace, the titular head of a Justice Department that had seen its politically motivated prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James dismissed by a federal judge, its requested indictment of six Democratic lawmakers rejected by a federal grand jury, its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files exposed as a travesty," Bruni writes. "What she should have been feeling and projecting was humiliation, She opted for contempt. It's the Trumpian way. But is it the American one? Has the country sunk quite this far? I don't think so."

Bruni adds, "She and her fellow insult mongers aren’t owning the libs; they’re beclowning themselves. And it's a repellent circus."

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