THE DANGER OF WORKING FOR A NEEDY TODDLER PRESIDENT

 

Today the Donald Trump administration fired Attorney General Pam Bondi,  This is the second high profile firing from his administration in his second term, the first being former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.  Right away, its hard not to notice that Trump has now fired the two most prominent women in his administration and replaced both of them with white men  (Markwayne Mullin for Noem, Todd Blanche fro Bondi).  Clearly, Trump likes being surrounded by swaggering,  white men like himself; indeed, as the website Politifact pointed out,  the last time that a  Presidential cabinet has been more white and male was way back in the Reagan era.  

But I don't think that gender is the only reason for the firings, or even the main one.  Really, I think both of these women  found it impossible to meet the absurd demands of Trump.  Now while I think both of them have terrible political beliefs (and I can never forgive Noem for shooting a 14 month old dog and then bragging about in her memoir), I do have some sympathy for the position they were put in, working for a raging narcissist with godlike delusions of grandeur.

Let's look at Noem: she was seen as the point person ICE's crackdown on undocumented immigrants in this country, and like a good soldier she not only had people deported, she even posted a video of herself standing in front of  Venezuelans  who been deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador, displaying the kind of racist stereotyping of undocumented immigrants that Trump has been pushing for the last ten years.  But when the ICE crackdown brought out protests in Minnesota that lead to the killing of two American citizens, suddenly the American public's views on ICE cratered.  Even though all that Noem was doing was what Trump wanted, he couldn't possibly blame the plummeting popularity of his policies on himself; he needed to find someone else to take the fall, and Noem fit the bill perfectly.  It didn't help that while testifying in front of congress she claimed that Trump himself had signed off on her spending millions of tax dollars on an ad campaign promoting her leadership of Homeland Security, but he later said he had done no such thing.  Clearly Trump was mad that she had made ads promoting herself that drew attention to herself instead of him, and no one in his administration can ever be allowed to pull attention away from him.  Her fate was sealed.

And then there's Bondi: her first big mistake was her handling of the Epstein files, which she first tried to delay, then she released information that had already been seen, and then finally she released most of the files.  The  files have been a problem for Trump almost all through his second term, and the problem for Bondi is that the American public wanted the files released and Trump didn't because he is mentioned literally tens of thousands of times in them.  Making things even worse, we now know that one part of the files that was not released included charges made in 2019 by a woman who claimed that Trump raped her at Epstein's estate when she was underage.  Even if Trump is not guilty of that crime, it is clear that he and Epstein were friends for years and there is a good chance that Trump at the very least was aware that Epstein was trafficking underage girls.  Trump wanted Bondi to somehow make these uncomfortable facts go away, but obviously he has no one to blame but himself.  Another thing that has angered him is that Bondi as Attorney General,  has been incapable of bringing criminal charges against his political enemies, but it wasn't for lack of trying.  In the past year she has tried to indict people on Trump's enemy list like James Comey and Leticia James, but the problem is that none of the indictments have been able to stick, with juries and judges knocking them down as being obviously politically motivated.  Even though Bondi recently testified in congress about her handling of the Epstein files and spent most of the time yelling about how wonderful Trump is, it wasn't enough to keep her job.

It's clear that both of these women were just doing what Trump wanted and were punished when reality kept them from succeeding.  Of course, both of them should have known what they were in for; Trump is infamous for outrageous demands and expects total loyalty always (in his first term he fired so many people that 24 different people cycled through  15 cabinet positions).   Yes, its impossible to meet the demands of someone so needy and demanding as Trump,  and the world, like Noem and Bondi, is all the worse for having to deal with him.