Pam Bondi’s road from Four Seasons Total Landscaping to AG pick should alarm America
She's not a sex fiend like Gaetz, but Trump's second pick for AG is arguably more capable of carrying out his autocratic revenge agenda.
The long, strange trip of the United States of America has taken a wild and dangerous right turn, and you can see the exact moment that Pam Bondi — Donald Trump’s newest pick to become the nation’s 87th attorney general — jumped aboard the crazy train: in the parking lot of Northeast Philly’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping, on the unforgettable morning of Nov. 7, 2020.
Record scratch ... yep, that’s her, the former chief prosecutor of Florida, at the end of a row of all the 45th president’s men in her bright Republican red blazer and COVID-era mask in the parking lot at the most notorious news conference in American political history.
Reporters looked on in amused befuddlement as Bondi and Trump insider Corey Lewandowski erected a podium in front of a garage that Trump himself mistakenly thought would be a Four Seasons luxury hotel, not a parking lot facing a sex shop and a crematorium. The ex-Florida AG stoically stood by as the later-to-be-indicted Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani stepped up to that podium to make false claims of voter fraud — rendered even more absurd by news that every TV network had just called the race for next President Joe Biden. “Networks don’t get to decide elections, courts do,” Giuliani insisted that day, even as some of the TV crews were quickly packing up their equipment.
That hilarious day of political infamy is exactly why Thursday’s surprise news that Trump, now the 47th president-elect, was naming Bondi as his choice to run the U.S. Justice Department — after the rapid implosion of her fellow Floridian and alleged teen sex creep ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz — is no laughing matter.
Bondi came to Philadelphia that fall as an enthusiastic servant of Trump’s Big Lie, the totally unsupported claim that there had been massive fraud in the 2020 election and that the incumbent president was the rightful winner. Endorsing this most dangerous propaganda slander, Bondi made her future nomination possible by sacrificing her legal integrity at the altar of her Dear Leader, and by showing her willingness to throw away my 2020 ballot, and those cast by more than 6.8 million other Pennsylvanians.
“Trump won Pennsylvania,” Bondi falsely declared at a news conference in Philadelphia on Nov. 4, 2020, flanked by Giuliani and Lara Trump, the future cochair of the Republican National Committee, citing claims of voter fraud that were all but laughed out of court, often by Republican judges. None of that stopped Bondi from appearing on TV’s Fox and Friends to insist “we have evidence of cheating” and that Pennsylvania election workers were counting “fake ballots.”
In a simpler time, when even a minor transgression like not paying taxes on your nanny might disqualify one from serving as the chief U.S. law enforcement officer, Bondi’s lie-laden travels through the Keystone State might have ended her AG dreams before they even began. But in Trump’s America, Bondi has already positioned herself as the safe, confirmable pick after the rapid withdrawal of Gaetz, subject of a still-sealed House Ethics Committee report about his alleged sex with a 17-year-old and other transgressions. It’s a swap that no one should be celebrating.
Instead, America should be alarmed by Bondi’s nomination, because the Justice Department is still Ground Zero for Trump’s authoritarian vision of his second presidency, in which not only will felony cases against Trump himself disappear but hundreds of pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, will be freed from prison while prosecutors, political opponents and journalists live in fear of banana-republic-style persecution.
“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi told Fox News in 2023 after the fourth separate criminal indictment of Trump, in a comment unearthed this weekend by the Washington Post. “The investigators will be investigated.” That’s why her Four Seasons Total Landscaping moment matters — as the absurdist moment she proved to Trump, in a kind of mafia style, her total loyalty and willingness to do anything the leader of the MAGA movement asks, without question. It placed Bondi on a path to become both the most dangerous and worst attorney general ever in a nation that has survived the likes of John Mitchell and Bill Barr, but now stares into a much darker abyss.
Some 20 days into the Trump 47 era, with the president-elect’s entire cabinet slate filled in (for now) and its first debacle in Gaetz, the bigger picture is starting to come into focus. The second coming won’t be a well-oiled luxury ride or even a non-exploding Tesla, but will instead retain the clown-car qualities of Trump 45, with embarrassing false starts like Gaetz and constant leaks about fights and even shoving matches between Mar-a-Lago insiders.
But experts on 100 years of strongman rulers say that a buffoonish-looking authoritarian is actually the most dangerous kind, because at the end of the day they can and will still govern as a king. Trump remains on track for his two most dangerous programs that won’t require congressional action — a mass deportation drive that will manage to wreck both any notion of America as a humane society and the economy, and new tariffs that would raise prices on voters who wanted to end inflation. On Capitol Hill, a bathroom ban was the first step toward showing that demonizing “the Other” — such as more than 1 million transgender Americans — was more than just a campaign slogan.
The Bondi switcheroo served as a reminder that, one way or the other, Trump will have a government of MAGA loyalists willing to do his bidding, and likely with much of his menagerie of reality-TV figures and other off-the-wall cabinet picks intact. There are other potential Gaetzes out there — especially secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth, who seems a 50-50 shot after a deeply disturbing 2017 rape allegation (investigated but not charged) that has obscured other issues like his Christian nationalism, his past support for war criminals, and lack of any administrative experience. But a Hegseth fail could — as with Gaetz and Bondi — make it easier for the next Trump Pentagon dude-bro promising to end women in combat and undo an allegedly “woke military.”
» READ MORE: The real reason Trump picked a sex fiend, dog killer, and anti-vaxxer for his cabinet
One way or the other, Trump looks on track to assemble a government that will seek to reverse decades of accepted vaccine science — which should terrify you for the next COVID-19-level health scare — while imploding the fight against climate change in a time of worsening wildfires and floods, and looking to pay for new tax cuts for billionaires by gutting programs that benefit the poor or the elderly.
Bondi is now the avatar for where things stand. We shouldn’t allow “not being a teen sex fiend” to become the new ridiculously low bar to become leader of federal law enforcement. This Florida woman not only embraced the Big Lie with passion and zeal, but proved herself to Trump early on in the mid-2010s when the state Attorney General’s Office dropped a probe into the Trump University scam at the same time a legally improper $25,000 check from Trump’s supposed charity dropped into Bondi’s campaign account. This Bondi bond is why Trump picked the attorney as a defense lawyer for his first impeachment trial in 2019, where she defended his dubious dealings with Ukraine.
But there are also major question marks about how Bondi did her job beyond the Trump relationship. Journalist David Dayen, the executive editor of American Prospect, has written about how Bondi — first elected Florida AG in 2010, with substantial campaign contributions from a firm at the center of a massive foreclosure fraud scandal — fired the two attorneys leading that investigation and essentially tanked the case.
That scandal, as well as the Trump University matter, Bondi’s embrace of election-fraud lies, and other matters scream out for aggressive Senate confirmation hearings before any rubber-stamping as the next attorney general. That starts with a full-blown FBI background check, the longstanding practice that Trump is eager to avert for some of his nominees. Folks looking for positive signs that democratic norms have a pulse should look to Alaska’s independent-minded GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who announced she won’t vote to confirm any Trump picks who avoid the FBI.
Murkowski’s small but significant announcement is a powerful reminder that — despite the anti-science bent of the new administration — the laws of political gravity have not been totally suspended. The same goes for Gaetz’s announcement that he needed 50 Senate votes for confirmation and couldn’t get them. There will be many cracks in Trump’s far-from-perfect plans for monarchical rule, and every one of these should be fought by any and all means that still exist. The 50.1% of Americans who rejected Trump on Election Day should take heart at these developments.
But we should also look at Bondi’s upward trajectory through and beyond Four Seasons Total Landscaping as a reminder of Trump’s ultimate authoritarian goals, and why we fight. For now, her nomination might explain one of the obscure mysteries of the Trump years — why the blaring soundtrack at his rallies included the Rolling Stones singing that “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find ... you get what you need.”
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