Bye Bye Bondi

The distractions are adding up

Credit: Getty Images

It’s one of the most disgraceful developments of the Trump presidency: The Department of Justice has become the president’s personal law firm with seemingly one job, to prosecute a never-ending string of vendettas against his political enemies. Apparently Attorney General Pam Bondi wasn’t vengeful enough. Trump fired her on Thursday. She’s been replaced, temporarily, by Todd Blanche, a former Trump personal attorney.

Bondi failed to successfully prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. But those failures were hardly her fault. Trump insisted on both prosecutions even though the charges were specious. A federal judge tossed them.

More importantly, perhaps, Bondi bungled the release of the Epstein files. In the spring of 2025 she said Epstein’s client list was on her desk ready for review. Upon further reflection — and perhaps a conversation with the president — she claimed there was no list. Her testimony before Congress was often combative, obstructive, and snarky. She became fodder for late-night comics and “Saturday Night Live.”

Still, the timing seems odd. Why fire Bondi now?

It could be another distraction from a war that isn’t going well, as demonstrated by last night’s attempt to explain why we’re fighting Iran.

When the White House requests time from the television networks for a presidential address, especially during primetime, it is supposed to be for something important, something newsworthy. Wednesday night’s presidential address did not come close to meeting the criteria.

Donald Trump’s listless speech was short on news and long on disinformation. He may be able to fool his base, but the financial world isn’t buying it. As the speech ended, international money markets fell, while oil futures and gas prices rose immediately.

When the president doesn’t have a timeline, he often uses “two weeks” to kick the can down the road. You may remember the health care plan he was introducing in “two weeks.” Six years later, there is still no health care plan.

There he was again last night, saying the U.S. would continue to hit Iran hard for “two or three weeks.” By then the military objectives would be achieved, he promised. If the speech was meant to persuade the American people that soon all would be well, it hit way wide of that mark.

It was a live version of his rambling, lie-strewn social media posts. Because the speech was seen by millions beyond his social media followers, it is important to correct the worst of his distortions.

• While he has flip-flopped on whether he wants regime change, Trump now claims, “The new group [of leaders] is less radical and much more reasonable.” Alan Eyre, a former U.S. diplomat and Iran expert, says the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is “even worse” and more hardline than his father, who was killed at the start of the war.

• Trump claimed the U.S. military has “decimated” Iran. There is no question much of Iran’s military capability has been destroyed, but if Iran were truly decimated, the Strait of Hormuz would be open to all traffic. It is not.

• Speaking of the Strait, the president said it will “open up naturally.” Not sure what that means exactly, but the Strait was open, naturally, before bombs started falling five weeks ago. Iran is adamant they will keep out “enemy-linked” ships.

• Trump asserted that “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East, and yet we are there to help. We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil.” Actually, we do. We import 40% of our crude oil, and 8% comes from the Persian Gulf. More importantly, oil is a publicly traded commodity, which means the price is set by global markets. So a disturbance, especially one of this magnitude, adversely affects oil prices everywhere.

• “We were a dead and crippled country after the last administration and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far, with no inflation,” Trump professed. Not so. During the last year of the Biden administration, GDP growth was 2.8%, better than any wealthy economy except Spain. In comparison, under Trump GDP growth has decelerated to 2.1%.

• At one point, Trump claimed that under his leadership the U.S. has received $18 trillion in foreign investment. The official White House website puts that number at $10.5 trillion, but even that is questionable. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar have allegedly committed $1 trillion each. However, the UAE’s gross domestic product last year was just over $550 billion, while Qatar’s was $220 billion — neither large enough to support such an expenditure.

When not outright lying, Trump continued to contort reality. He said we had completed our objectives in Iran, but he never clearly outlined what they were before the war started. Since then he has trotted out at least a half dozen goals, as though he is trying them on for size.

As for the length of the war, to no one’s surprise, it’s a moving target. We are now at the end of week five of a “four to five” week war, with no end in sight. He also gave no details about an exit strategy or a ground invasion, though 50,000 U.S. ground troops are in the Middle East awaiting orders.

Everyone has their eye on the end of the war, whenever that may be. A real concern is that we and the rest of the world will be worse off after the war than when it started.

Trump’s comments about the Strait of Hormuz suggest that he is willing to end the war without reopening that strategically important waterway. Iran is currently charging every ship it chooses to allow through as much as $2 million for the privilege. Iran says that the new toll will likely continue even after hostilities end.

According to The New York Times, the United Nations projects that 4 million people in the Middle East could be pushed into poverty and the region’s economic output reduced by 6% once the war is over.

The war has all but ruined an already frayed relationship with our NATO allies. Spain and Italy refused to let the U.S. military use its bases or airspace. The British said that U.S. planes from its bases could be used “to conduct only operations that protect British and allied interests across the Middle East.”

Historian Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution believes this war will leave “the United States weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s.”

“Whenever and however America’s war with Iran ends, it has both exposed and exacerbated the dangers of our new, fractured, multipolar reality — driving deeper wedges between the United States and former friends and allies; strengthening the hands of the expansionist great powers, Russia and China; accelerating global political and economic chaos,” he wrote in The Atlantic.

Trump’s presidential legacy will be littered with political failures, broken guardrails, and the normalization of lying with impunity to the American people. We can repair much of this, but the loss of our allies and the empowerment of our adversaries will be harder to fix.

And it didn’t have to be. Was the war just another distraction from the Epstein files? Or the tariff fiasco? Or the economy as a whole? Or Minneapolis? Was the Bondi firing a hoped-for distraction from the unpopular war? We have come full circle with diversion after diversion, as a deeply flawed president continues his efforts to redirect the narrative away from his latest failures.

You can support my team’s efforts to protect our democracy through the power of independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber. It’s one of the best deals on Substack. I appreciate your support.

No matter how you subscribe, I thank you for reading.

Stay Steady,
Dan