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MAUREEN DOWD
Pam and Kristi, Kicked to the Curb
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington
My friend has a perfect pitch for a reality show for Paramount+: “Pam and Kristi’s Spring Break Barf-fest.”
With no figs left to give, fed up with everything, especially the mean boss who canned them, the girls head to Cancún. They hold each other’s hair back as they upchuck. And they sweetly keep up each other’s spirits. But then they lose their passports and can’t get back across the border. Ay, caramba!
Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem may be crying in their margaritas somewhere, wondering where it all went wrong. What happened to the halcyon days when the president praised them as his beautiful helpmeets?
The disappeared attorney general and homeland security secretary — Pam Blondi and ICE Barbie to their critics — learned the hard way that sycophancy has its limits.
In President Trump’s first term, Jeff Sessions got dumped as attorney general when he wouldn’t put the kibosh on the Russia investigation. But these women were discarded despite their eagerness to do anything to please Trump — debasing themselves and desecrating their departments.
Trump broke the news to Bondi on Wednesday, as they rode together in his limo to the Supreme Court, where he was trying to intimidate the justices into taking away birthright citizenship.
“I think it’s time,” he told her, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Justice Department staffers were quick to chuck Bondi’s portrait in the trash.
Noem was having a humiliating week as well. She is mired in a messy love triangle — reports of an affair with her aide Corey Lewandowski collided with a Daily Mail exposé about the kink of her poor husband, Bryon, an insurance agent back in Castlewood, S.D.
Bryon stood by Kristi at her rocky congressional hearings — even though the Democrats brought up the matter of her paramour and their misadventures flying around in a swanky government jet.
The women did their best to be world-class toadies.
Noem, a former governor of South Dakota, gave Trump a model of Mount Rushmore with his face added. Bondi put a banner of a scowling Trump on the front of the Justice Department — a visual reflection of the way the former attorney general tried to turn the once respected, independent department into the president’s personal legal Gestapo, purging any prosecutors who had investigated him and his allies.
On her first day as attorney general, Bondi created a “Weaponization Working Group” to look at prosecutions against Trump, scheming to undermine them.
She tried to whip up cases against James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly and Jerome Powell that have fallen apart or are heading nowhere. Aiming to be as petty as Trump, she fired Comey’s daughter Maurene, a veteran federal prosecutor. She scavenged for phantom evidence that Trump beat Joe Biden in 2020.
Noem emulated Trump’s faux macho stance. She let ICE run rampant. When federal officers shot and killed innocents in Minneapolis, she smeared the victims as domestic terrorists.
She went out on patrol with ICE officers, wearing the ICE uniform and a bulletproof vest, and brandishing a rifle. Indeed, she excelled at cosplay, striving to be the glamour girl of the administration, making an ad promoting D.H.S. decked out like Annie Oakley, riding a horse past Mount Rushmore.
Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager when he first started running for president in 2015, was stage-managing Noem to capture attention, in the grandiose way that Trump did.
But that was a fatal misreading of Trump. Noem’s tag line on the horseback ad, a message “from President Trump and me,” violated a basic rule: There is no “and” with Trump. He is the only star of this show.
The executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and her sliming of the two after their deaths, were beyond what even Trump found palatable. He considered Noem’s congressional hearings, with her refusal to apologize to the families of Good and Pretti and the titillating discussions of the D.H.S. lovebirds, embarrassing.
At her congressional hearing in February, Bondi threw dignity to the winds and ate the scenery, shouting and insulting to impress the boss.
She used Trump’s tactic of deriding, snapping at Representative Jamie Raskin, a Harvard-trained lawyer: “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer. You’re not even a lawyer.”
She also adopted Trump’s method of deflecting, interrupting lawmakers’ questions about her vindictive prosecutions and bizarre management of the Epstein files, shouting, “The Dow is over 50,000 right now!”
Trump enjoyed her strident fencing with Democrats, but overall, he considered her performance as a cabinet member lame. He thought she was weak, slow and a bad communicator, and he was furious that she couldn’t deliver indictments against the “scum” on his hit list. The fact that there was no evidence was an insignificant detail, as far as Trump was concerned.
Bondi’s bait-and-switch behavior with the Epstein files infuriated Trump’s base. She said at one point that she had Epstein’s client list on her desk, but that turned out not to be true. Kash Patel and other Trumpsters had promised they would root out anybody who had cavorted on Epstein Island. The seeming cover-up hurt the president, who has never been able to shake the stink of his close relationship with the predator.
She made it worse during her House hearing, when she refused to directly apologize to Epstein victims in the room for botching the documents’ release and inadvertently revealing some victims’ names that were supposed to be redacted.
As The Journal reported, at one point, the disillusioned president “showed White House visitors printouts of social-media posts from conservatives trashing his attorney general.” Speaking to one ally, he launched into a rant about what “a terrible job” she was doing.
Now that he’s boxed in on Iran, Trump may get the urge to fire more people. It is his trademark phrase, after all. Pete Hegseth is over at the Pentagon firing qualified officers when he’s the one who should go.
Sucking up to Donald Trump, self-crowned sun king, is a Sisyphean task. Trying to keep up with his whims, his revenge plots, his insatiable need for slobbering praise, his disdain for the law, will always be a losing battle.
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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
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