The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump fired his attorney general Pam Bondi and appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche her temporary successor. It’s that he waited as long as he did.
After exercising what is for him unusual restraint – his cabinet was in a state of perpetual upheaval during his first term as president – Trump is going on a firing spree. ‘He’s very angry, and he’s going to be moving people,’ one top administration official told Politico yesterday. Next on the chopping block could be a host of Trump loyalists – Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Labour Secretary Lori Chzvez-Remer, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – whom the US President has found wanting.
For all her florid professions of loyalty to Trump, Bondi ultimately failed to deliver the goods – the political prosecutions that her tempestuous boss insisted upon. The show trials, you could say, that never showed up. The case for tax and real estate fraud against New York attorney general Letitia James collapsed. The probe into former CIA director John Brennan appeared to be going nowhere. Conspiracy theories were swirling that a disloyal Bondi had tipped off Congressman Eric Swalwell to an impending release of documents about the irregularities of his previous association with Christine Fang, a suspected Chinese intelligence operative. Add in Bondi’s bungling of the release of the Epstein files – proclaiming one day that she had damning information, then denying it the next – and you had Trump looking for a fall girl.
Trump is in something of a geopolitical straitjacket
The current upheaval in the administration is hardly confined to Trump. At the rebranded War Department, Pete Hegseth has fired a bevy of generals. The most prominent is Randy George, the Army Chief of Staff who has pushed for the acquisition of inexpensive drones and other vital weaponry. Hegseth’s move appears to be rooted in petulance over George’s refusal arbitrarily to remove several one-star generals from a promotion list. Hegseth has also sacked two other army generals – David Hodne, head of Transformation and Training Command, and William Green, Jr. the head of the Chaplain Corps (better watch out for those dangerous chaplains). Is Hegseth aiming to rival, if not surpass, Stalin’s purge of the Red Army officer corps in 1936, when he arrested more than 1,800 officers with general-grade rank?
There is one difference. Stalin purged his army on the eve of war with Nazi Germany. Trump and Hegseth are doing it during wartime.
Perhaps the frustration of Trump and Hegseth is understandable. As polls show declining support for the war: a new CNN one shows that 66 per cent of Americans disapprove of it. Trump is in something of a geopolitical straitjacket. The contradictions are mounting as he tries to wriggle out of the conflict. The President indicated in his primetime Oval Office address on Wednesday that he intends to keep fighting for several more weeks, on the one hand, but that it is the duty of America’s allies to deal with opening the Strait of Hormuz, on the other.
Yesterday, Trump professed his perplexity at the refusal of Iran to cry uncle to Uncle Sam. ‘Why wouldn’t they call? We just blew up their three big bridges last night,’ Trump said. The President has also confessed that he was convinced that the war would last no longer than two or three days. It would be Venezuela all over again. He forgot that Iran is not a passive bystander but a lethal adversary, one that views America not as an implacable conqueror but as a vulnerable superpower. Late last night, Trump further vented his wrath toward Iran on social media:
Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far) anywhere in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants! New Regime leadership knows what has to be done, and has to be done, FAST!
Does it? On X, Scott McConnell, a founding editor of the American Conservative, observed, ‘I’m trying to imagine how Trump’s apparent policy, which is to carry out war crimes against the Iranian people, leading to state collapse, does not result in longer-term terrorist threats to Americans.’ In his zeal to upend the established order at home and abroad, Trump has flouted Shakespeare’s admonition in Troilus and Cressida: ‘Take but degree away, untune that string/And, hark, what discord follows!’
