MARCH 2026 – Pam Bondi wasn’t always a fire-spewing defender of Donald Trump. Before she landed the top legal job in America – Attorney General of the US Department of Justice – she was a normal, average, not-terribly-ambitious lawyer in Tampa. Landing in Trump’s inner circle was the result of political developments and timing largely not of her making. Stephanie McCrummen’s profile of Bondi in The Atlantic, first published in late January, provides a good roadmap of how Bondi got there, and how she is behaving now.
At this point, there is little mystery about who Pam Bondi has become. She is an attorney general who does not tell Trump no. During the first year of her tenure, Bondi has carried out the most stunning transformation of the Justice Department in modern American history, turning an autonomous agency charged with upholding the U.S. Constitution into one where the rule of law is secondary to the wishes of the president.
McCrummen, a former Washington Post writer who won a Pulitzer in 2018, spent months looking up old friends of Bondi’s to get a clearer picture of the future attorney general, who once confided to one of those friends that all she really wanted was to be ambassador to Italy.
The Atlantic, as we’ve mentioned several times now, is today dominating American journalism. Yes, the WSJ is getting plenty leaked to it from administration insiders, and the NYT is still doing its largely “trad-lib” thing, and The Washington Post is slowly trying to re-define itself while losing its local audience. But The Atlantic, unconstrained by having to gather breaking news, is somehow reporting on breaking news better than its competitors.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/pam-bondi-trump-doj-independence/685663/