[This article first appeared at Common Dreams on February 26, 2026.]
Incompetence will be President Donald Trump’s undoing. The only question is whether he and his minions will undo the nation first. Today’s subject is Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Bondi’s Blunders and Bluster
In her first year, Bondi has established an unprecedented record of destruction in the service of Trump. Servitude is more apt. Here’s a small sample:
· Thousands of experienced attorneys have left the Justice Department. Bondi fired those she deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump. Others resigned in protest over her directives, such as investigating the partner of Renee Nicole Good – a U.S. citizen whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota killed – rather than scrutinizing the actions of her ICE killers.
· Bondi has decimated the department’s civil rights division, which historically investigated whether federal officers had used excessive force in killings like Good’s. As division head Harmeet Dhillon turned its mission upside down, more than 70 percent of its attorneys left. University of Chicago Law School Professor Craig Futterman explained that the Trump administration “is using a division that has a history of protecting the most vulnerable among us to wage an all-out assault on the civil rights of vulnerable people, including Black people, brown people, women, LGBTQIA folk.”
· Across the country, judges are chastising federal prosecutors for defying court orders and are wondering if the problem is incompetence, work overload, or the executive branch’s systematic attack on the judiciary. At least 35 times since August, federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to explain why it should not be punished for violating their orders in immigration cases: “Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening,” Judge Joseph R. Goodwin in West Virginia wrote, calling the warrantless arrest and imprisonment of thousands across the country “an assault on the constitutional order.”
· On Capitol Hill, Bondi refused to answer pointed questions and, instead, descended into bipartisan insults of the elected representatives who dared to challenge her. When ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a constitutional law professor, told her not to filibuster through his limited time for questioning, she snapped, “You don’t tell me anything, you washed up loser lawyer.” She called Republican Thomas Massie (R-KY) a “failed politician” who had “Trump derangement syndrome.”
· Bipartisan outrage grows over Bondi’s incompetent and incomplete production of the Justice Department’s infamous Jeffrey Epstein files. It took Rep. Massie and a handful of fellow Republicans in the House to overcome the opposition of Trump and his congressional allies in forcing legislation requiring full disclosure by December 19, 2025. That deadline came and went before Bondi’s department finally produced files that included victims’ identities. The public learned on February 24th that the Justice Department’s belated 3.5 million-page document dump excluded files relating to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor, according to an NPR analysis and the New York Times.
Bondi’s Backstory
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The Belly of the Beast 