The word “bimbo” has been in the news lately. I don’t use the word lightly. I was raised by remarkable women. I’ve spent my career championing them, and they have carried me innumerable times.
The word carries a history of misogynistic dismissal that I find genuinely repugnant, and I’ve never had much patience for men who deploy it casually to diminish women they simply don’t like. I imagine Donald Trump talking this way about Kristi Noem, who he axed last month, and Pam Bondi, who today followed the glammed up Noem out the door.
But I’m going to use the word “bimbo” today. And I’m going to explain why.
A bimbo, in the truest sense, is not a woman who lacks intelligence. It’s a person who trades away their dignity, judgment, and principles for the approval of someone who will never deserve it.
By that definition, Pam Bondi is the fullest expression of the word, in how she carried herself after being sworn in as U.S. Attorney General last February.
And now, predictably, Donald Trump has fired her. And unlike Noem, she gets no consolation prize of another job.
I’ll be honest and bipartisan first: Bondi came into this job with real credentials. She served as Florida’s AG - she was a horrible and divisive AG in my opinion; nevertheless, she had legal experience. Compared to Pete Hegseth, and others, Bondi was a sigh of relief after Trump first nominated the reprehensible Matt Gaetz.
She had a leg to stand on. You could argue she was qualified. And that’s precisely what makes her tenure so damning. She didn’t use her credentials to uphold the law. She used them to demolish it. She arrived at DOJ not as its guardian, but as Trump’s most pliable judicial instrument,
She was Bimbo Bondi not because she was foolish, but because she suckled at the teat of the most corrupt man ever to occupy the White House and called it public service.
She made a mess of the Epstein files, playing them like a shell game. Look on her desk. Look in the redacted documents. Then try to find them in the last-minute “mysteriously vanished” two million pages that answered almost nothing while exposing survivors whose names were left unredacted.
I firmly believe that disclosure was intentional. Likely orchestrated by Trump, it was a last-ditch attempt to shame and scare survivors, and she enabled it. They continue to receive death threats. She bears total responsibility.
She promised transparency. She delivered the opposite. While survivors sat in a congressional hearing room in February, she prepared not to answer or apologize, but to attack Democrats with a “burn book” stuffed with oppo research and screenshots.
She tracked who viewed documents and when. She didn’t come to testify. She came to fight for Trump. And in the end, that burn book exploded in her hands.
She threw 23,000 criminal cases in the garbage while redirecting DOJ power at immigrants who’d committed no crime.
The DOJ has always maintained an arm’s-length relationship with the president. Not under Bondi. When Trump posted, she jumped. She became the obedient purveyor of his retribution tour. In a gesture so lacking in self-respect it defies description, she hung an enormous portrait of Trump outside DOJ headquarters.
She turned a blind eye when Deputy AG Todd Blanche met with Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker, and then sent her to a low-security prison.
Bondi supported Trump’s racist agenda. She disbanded the civil rights division. She spread racialized venom through the machinery of the most powerful law enforcement body in the country. She wallowed in Trump’s pigsty and then showed up to hearings to fling mud at Democrats.
She followed Trump every time, without hesitation. When he had a whim, she acquiesced.
Now he’s fired her. And we are supposed to be surprised?
We shouldn’t be. Nobody survives bending the rules for Donald Trump. Not Flynn. Not Cohen. Not Manafort. Not Noem - another who traded her soul for his favor and got dumped.
The trail of discarded loyalists stretches back years. Every one of them handed Trump everything and ended up cast aside. The pattern is so consistent, so merciless, so predictable, you wonder how Bondi believed she could be different.
Trump saw her “bimboness” a mile away, likely using the word himself behind her back. “Let me eat this bimbo alive,” he might as well have said.
That is the untold truth inside Bondi’s story. She watched others fall. She saw Trump destroy careers and reputations, even those closest to him. But she thought she could wrap him around her finger.
She likely thought hanging his portrait outside the doors of her building would save her job. She called him “the greatest president in history” under oath, with Epstein survivors sitting behind her. She thought it would protect her.
It didn’t. It never does. Everyone ends up burned. And Bondi has severe third-degree burns.
The scarlet letters D-J-T are now branded on her reputation. No one will take her tenure as AG seriously. She failed in her duty to the country and did no justice to the Justice Department.
She destroyed lives. She failed survivors. She gutted civil rights enforcement. She turned the DOJ into a personal law firm for a man who threw her away when he got bored.
.