President Donald Trump’s decision to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday speaks to the deeper “feuds playing out across MAGA,” a former aide to a different Republican president and an ex-CNN reporter agreed.
“Last night he had such a disastrous speech to the nation on the Iraq — or the Iran war fuck-up — that he was going to wake up this morning and probably need to do something dramatic,” journalist Jim Acosta told ex-President George W. Bush adviser Steve Schmidt on Thursday. “You know, with the price of oil going through the roof — you know, a barrel of oil is going through the roof right now. I mean, Trump needed a distraction, and it seems to me he fired Pam Bondi to throw everybody off the scent of what a disaster the Iran war has become.”
Schmidt agreed, then added that this is symptomatic of the “feuds” spreading all across the Trump world.
“He is arbitrary. He is capricious. He is volatile, and he is in the corner,” Schmidt told Acosta. “And so it is time for the knives to come out, and that's what you're seeing play out. And this is a feature of any type of autocratic regime — the feuds that are playing out across MAGA, the people that are falling, the humiliations that are following.”
He added, “It's an incredible thing to watch, but I'll tell you this much: he's 215 days out from an election, and wow, is he going to get crushed. He's going to be crushed in this midterm election.”
Earlier in the conversation, Schmidt noted that both Bondi and Trump’s other recently-fired cabinet member, Kristi Noem, are women.
“So all the crazy women around him are going to be out,” Schmidt told Acosta. “None of the crazy men at all will be dislodged. But this is a moment that all of these top Trump people can look forward to — the moment of their humiliation, the moment where midnight strikes and the ball is over and the glass slipper disappears.”
Acosta agreed with Schmidt’s analysis.
“My sense of it was, when I woke up this morning and I saw some of these rumors that Pam Bondi was going to get fired — we used to have this sort of theory about Trump during the first administration that he sort of had firings in the quiver, ready to go for when he really needed to break the emergency glass and do something like this,” Acosta told Schmidt.
Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst with decades of experience covering the Supreme Court, argued that instead Trump was angry at Bondi for being insufficiently corrupt to achieve his administration’s objectives. In September Trump blasted Bondi for failing to successfully convict former F.B.I. director James Comey, Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Meanwhile The Daily Mail reported that Thursday Trump was angry Bondi informed Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), with whom she has a friendly relationship, that Trump planned on targeting him with a Chinese spy investigation. Bondi reportedly made a “dramatic” scene as she “begged” Trump to not fire her.
“The fact that Ms. Bondi has failed in these abusive prosecutorial efforts is cause for relief, not dismissal,” Toobin wrote of Trump’s reportedly chief reason for being upset with Bondi. “It’s the rest of her record that has turned the Justice Department into an oxymoron that will take years, if not decades, to fix.”
