Attorney General Pam Bondi's sneering performance in a congressional hearing drew widespread condemnation — and a veteran columnist piled on Monday.
President Donald Trump's attorney general fired off insults and shouted down lawmakers during last week's House Judiciary Committee hearing, and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni lamented the practiced contempt she showed to congressional representatives who dared challenge her.
"It’s not Bondi’s script that matters most," Bruni wrote. "It’s her voice, and the attorney general got the tone of it — the poison in it — just right when she spat those put-downs at those men during her, um, testimony before a House panel last week. She didn’t merely ooze contempt. She gushed it, so that all she communicated during more than four hours of nasty exchanges was how loathsome she found her interrogators. Which was obviously her goal. Her mission."
"I can’t get it out of my mind," he added.
Bondi gave an identical performance before a Senate panel back in October, the columnist noted, and he said that demeanor demonstrated the defining trait of Trump's second administration.
"This crew — Bondi, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, President Trump himself — don’t want to win opponents’ favor," Bruni wrote. "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."
MAGA's initial appeal was supposed to be a rejection of the condescension many Trump fans felt from Democratic elites, Bruni wrote, but he said Trump and his allies have turned contempt into their weapon of choice to evade responsibility.
"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 wrote. "What she should have been feeling and projecting was humiliation."
"She opted for contempt. It’s the Trumpian way," he added. "But is it the American one? Has the country sunk quite this far? I don’t think so. She and her fellow insult mongers aren’t owning the libs; they’re beclowning themselves. And it’s a repellent circus."