Attorney General Pam Bondi’s surly performance before a Senate Oversight Committee last week provided a clue as to why Donald Trump has kept her around despite pressure from a very vocal faction of the disgruntled MAGA base.
That is the opinion of Salon’s Amanda Marcotte who, on Monday, compared Trump’s pick as the nation's top lawyer to Regina George, the queen bee of the popular film “Mean Girls” — and added, “the resemblance was too strong to be a coincidence.”
“Bondi’s resemblance to the blonde brat from millennial movie lore wasn’t just cringeworthy in a woman pushing 60," she wrote. "It also solves a mystery that’s persisted for months,” adding that Bondi’s “mean girl” act is just the type of attitude the president admires over substance.
As she said, Trump loyalists have been baying for Bondi’s head because they don’t feel she has been going after Trump’s perceived enemies fast enough and they are frustrated by her performance since being confirmed.
“They’re mad she won’t release the Epstein files, the voluminous documentation collected by the FBI into the criminal goings-on of deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein," she wrote. "They can’t seem to grasp her reason, even though it’s obvious to everyone outside of the Trump cult: Her boss is reportedly in the files, and what’s documented probably doesn’t look good.”
She added that, "MAGA commentators got mad at Bondi when she expressed an openness to prosecuting 'hate speech', even though she was clearly talking about criticism of Trump and not the traditional bigotries over which the right is so defensive.”
According to the columnist, Trump is definitely “feeling the heat” over Bondi, shown by his now infamous Truth Social post in which he urged her to speed up the prosecution of his critics, which is why her Senate appearance was critical to her survival.
Writing that Bondi’s efforts to “derail the proceedings with her spoiled princess routine” was a success in Trump's eyes, she added, “Bondi likely knows harassing innocent people isn’t quite enough to please her mercurial boss, thus her ridiculous performance in front of the Senate last Tuesday. Showing off her mean girl skills to Trump involved two adolescent tactics: Tantrums and insults.”
"MAGA influencers have a lot of power over the White House. One reason Trump’s approval ratings on every major issue keep falling is that he is far more interested in pleasing conspiracy theorists and bigots than he is about the opinions of average Americans. So it’s noteworthy that he seems to be loyal to Bondi, even though a cheap way to excite his base would be to throw her overboard,” she suggested.
“He wants a mean girl to be his enforcer, someone who can bring sorority president energy to the task of lying and helping him break the law. When it comes to shamelessness, for Bondi, there’s no limit. And that’s what Trump loves about her.”
You can read her whole piece here.