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Michigan’s budget process has been sharply improved by new statutes that require legislators to file public requests when they seek grants for projects of their choice. It used to be that these grants, sometimes called earmarks or pork projects, popped into the budget at the last minute with no public warning. Now legislators have to describe the projects they want and what the money will be used for. The process gives legislators a chance to show that their requests benefit all Michigan residents, not just the direct beneficiaries.

The state House has held several hearings on legislatively directed spending requests, and it is encouraging to see proponents having to make the case for their requests in a public forum. Now legislators ought to make better use of the process to subject these recommendations to clear, consistent, and objective scrutiny.

State lawmakers are supposed to pass laws that benefit the whole state. It is their job to advance the broader public interest. This is why the state constitution puts higher approval thresholds on appropriations for local and private purposes.

Legislators have broad discretion to determine what benefits the public. It’s perfectly fine for elected officials to determine that the state is deficient in its supply of splash parks and set up a grant program to construct more of the facilities across the state.

Of course, lawmakers must figure out which splash park projects get funded and which get don’t. They proper way to do this is to establish criteria for what constitutes the best projects and go down the list until they run out of funds.

The state already does this with arts subsidies and the Natural Resources Trust Fund projects. There are criteria listed, and administrators score applications to fund the ones that accomplish the state’s goals.

The process funds projects in some legislators’ districts, and these expenditures are intended to serve local purposes. Yet they must provide some benefit to the state because lawmakers established criteria that applied statewide.

District grants do not have this feature. The money goes to particular fire trucks or sewer projects, not to the best ones. And the particular projects are requested by a legislator.

The new process asks legislators to explain why their requests would benefit the public, to argue that the constitution’s two-thirds approval requirement ought not apply. Legislators can use the process to make a case for why the projects provide broader benefits.

For instance, this request for money to replace a water main explains benefits to the community; fewer breaks, greater reliability, better safety. It does not explain why the project benefits people outside of the community.

A possible public rationale might be that the project would reduce wastewater pollution that affects areas beyond the city getting the new water main. The burden of proof is on the proponent to show that the project’s benefits extend beyond the users of the system.

For instance, a legislator who wants to improve a state prison in his or her district can argue that it administers justice that benefits all areas of the state, not just the community with the prison.

It’s also fine to acknowledge that the spending request is local or private. More legislators should state that their requests provide local or private benefits. It’s not outlawed by the state constitution. It is rather subject to the two-thirds approval requirement.

Lawmakers should also take the opportunity to explain why the normal financing mechanisms ought not apply. Water mains tend to be paid by user fees, not by state taxpayers. This ensures that the direct beneficiaries pay the costs. It also encourages governments to build only infrastructure that it can afford. District grant requests give lawmakers a chance to explain why their requests deserve extra consideration.

There is a perennial political desire for elected officials to show that they are doing something for their districts. Yet the state government is created for the benefit of all Michiganders. Lawmakers are given broad discretion to figure out how to advance the public interest. The new district grants process gives legislators a chance to make their case. They ought to use the process to acknowledge that constitutional limits apply to projects that only provide local benefits.

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James M. Hohman is the director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Among the most disorienting things about President Donald Trump’s public language is how easily it can feel numbing and shocking in the same moment. He says something outrageous, the country recoils, and then the recoil itself begins to feel familiar.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Among the most disorienting things about President Donald Trump’s public language is how easily it can feel numbing and shocking in the same moment. He says something outrageous, the country recoils, and then the recoil itself begins to feel familiar.

As a scholar who studies presidential rhetoric, I know that over time that rhythm does its own kind of damage. It teaches the public to absorb the breach. What once might have sounded like a genuine political emergency or a violation of constitutional decorum begins to register as just another day in American political life.

But the past few days merit notice. The president’s demagoguery has taken a darker turn.

Trump’s rhetoric about Iran has become more than inflammatory. Beginning with posts to Truth Social in early April, he has used profanity-laden language – “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell” – to threaten attacks on the country’s infrastructure. He urged Iranians to rise up against their government. He warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not comply with U.S. demands.

The Associated Press treated those remarks as a significant escalation in the context of a live conflict, not merely as familiar Trumpian excess: “As the conflict has entered its second month, Trump has escalated his warnings to bomb Iran’s infrastructure.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross also issued the unusual reminder that the rules of war must be respected “in words and action,” suggesting that the rhetoric itself had become part of the danger.

But were Trump’s recent remarks really different from his many earlier outbursts?

I think they were. For years, Trump’s rhetoric has relied on insult, ridicule, threat and contempt. He has degraded opponents and helped coarsen the terms of public life.

What seems different about his words during the first week of April 2026 is the scale of violence his language primed people to imagine. His remarks about Iran moved beyond personal attacks or chest-thumping nationalism to take on a tone of collective punishment and civilizational destruction. The style was familiar. The horizon of harm was not.

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Politics of fear

Presidential rhetoric is more about permission than persuasion. Presidents do not only argue. They signal.

Through those signals, they tell the public what kind of situation this is, what kind of danger is at hand, and what kinds of response are reasonable. In that sense, the president can function like a human starting gun. 
His words cue journalists, legislators, party allies and ordinary supporters about how to classify events before anyone has fully processed them.

Political theorist Corey Robin’s work on the politics of fear is a useful lens for understanding what is happening with Trump’s violent rhetoric.

Fear, in Robin’s view, is not simply a feeling that arises naturally in response to danger. It is politically manufactured. Power teaches people what to fear, how to name danger, and where to direct their apprehension. Presidential rhetoric is an essential tool for performing that work.

Thus, a president does not only describe a threat. He also gives it shape and scale. He tells the public how large it is, how close it is, and what kinds of response should feel reasonable in its presence.

A good example of a president doing this happened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when, while visiting ground zero in New York City, George W. Bush said, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” With that sentence, Bush acknowledged the gravity of what had happened, but also promised to fight back and bring justice to the 
terrorists.

When it comes to statements like those Trump has recently made about Iran, the worry is not that the president has said something extreme. Instead, the larger concern lies in what repeatedly using extreme language does to the atmosphere in which judgment takes place.

Political hyperbole lowers the threshold of what the public can imagine as legitimate, as allowable. When presidents make threats like the ones Trump issued, mass suffering becomes more imaginable. The president’s words and social media posts test whether the public will continue to hear such language as over the line, or whether it will be absorbed as one more hard-edged negotiating tactic.

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Shaping reality

Presidential rhetoric matters for reasons that go beyond persuasion or style.

It helps arrange reality. It tells the public what is serious, who is dangerous, whose suffering counts, and what forms of violence can be described as necessary. President Barack Obama did this in 2012, when he was speaking at a vigil to honor the shooting victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“We bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours,” he said. “That we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.” With these words, Obama called everyone to feel, up close, the horrific loss of 20 children shot dead, and to work for a solution to gun violence.

Trump has benefited from a public worn down by repetition. Every new breach arrives trailing the memory of earlier ones.

People begin to doubt their own reactions. Surely this is appalling, they may think, but also, somehow, this is what he always does. That dual feeling is part of the harm. A damaged baseline makes serious escalation harder to recognize and judge.

The disorientation and disgust that so many people experienced in response to Trump’s thundering, violent proclamations is important. Even after years of erosion of what was deemed normal, some lines remain visible.

Paying attention now is not about pretending Trump has suddenly become someone new. It is about recognizing more clearly what his presidency has been teaching the public to hear as thinkable. The most serious harm may lie not only in what follows such rhetoric, but in the world it helps prepare people to accept.

Friends can help us with all kinds of things in life. How could I forget moving that piano for friends in Chicago? Fortunately, none of us ended up in the ER.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Friends can help us with all kinds of things in life. How could I forget moving that piano for friends in Chicago? Fortunately, none of us ended up in the ER.

One of the most important things friends do, though, might seem surprising: They help us get to know ourselves.

Both in their 50s, Cindy and Ann had been friends since the second grade. Year after year, they never missed a birthday. Cindy would give Ann gourmet popcorn or maybe a sweatshirt from her alma mater, while Ann would give Cindy a special book on a topic that interested her, or maybe an old batch of family recipes. At one point, it dawned on Cindy just how thoughtful Ann’s gifts were. It wasn’t about the cost. “She really thinks about my life and what I’m doing,” Cindy said. “It’s amazing. Ann is just really thoughtful.”

Cindy had always imagined herself as a thoughtful person, too. But in comparing the kinds of gifts they sent to each other, she realized that she was not thinking about Ann in the way that Ann was thinking about her. And so began her deliberate process of becoming more thoughtful – as a result of the self-insight she had gained from her friendship with Ann.

As a philosopher and philosophical counselor, I’ve noticed the pronounced connection between friendship and self-knowledge in my counseling practice. Cindy and Ann are one example among many. I’ve come to the conclusion that to really know yourself, it’s necessary to have good friends.

The link between self-knowledge and friendship was key for Aristotle, too, more than 2,000 years ago. “Eudaimonia” – roughly translated as living well, or happiness – often remains elusive, yet Aristotle believed it didn’t have to be. Eudaimonia is largely within people’s control, he said, so long as they aim at the right targets.

Two of those targets are knowing yourself and having good friends. The two are tied together – you can’t develop self-knowledge in a vacuum. Happiness, for Aristotle, can never be a solitary pursuit.

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Knowing – and befriending – yourself

Humans have a highly developed capacity to think about their thinking. This is possible because of a split in human consciousness: There is consciousness, and there is consciousness of consciousness – what is known as reflection or metacognition. Metacognition allows us to step back and note our thoughts and feelings, analyzing them almost as if they belonged to someone else.

This split makes reason, self-knowledge and morality possible. We can deliberate about our thoughts, feelings and potential actions.

Self-knowledge isn’t the same as being intellectual or even intelligent. Instead, it’s about using self-awareness and reason to develop character.

In Aristotle’s view, character arises from developing habits that lead to intellectual and moral virtue, so that personal integrity is possible. This, in turn, builds self-trust and self-respect, as you learn to rely on yourself to do what is right – what Aristotle called “enkrates,” or continence.

In other words, self-knowledge is developing a good relationship with yourself. In your own internal dialogue, you become another trusted friend to yourself, based on what you’ve seen in your friendships: virtues like generosity, courage, truthfulness and prudence. Self-knowledge and moral development are tied together and realized in community, as underscored by Aristotle scholar Joseph Owens.

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Friendship based on character

Aristotle recognized three types of friendship. Some are based on utility, like a study-group friend. Others are based on pleasure, such as friends in an antique car club.

The third and highest form of friendship, which can last a lifetime, is based on virtue, or “arete.”

In these situations, Aristotle wrote, a friend becomes “another self.” These friendships are based on mutual goodwill and love for the other person’s character; they are not fundamentally transactional. Instead, they are anchored in care and concern for the other.

Such friendships are few, but foster self-knowledge. As philosopher Mavis Biss emphasizes, a good friend has a perspective on you that you yourself do not. You can step back and analyze your desires, thoughts and feelings, but you can never actually observe yourself.

That means self-knowledge always has a social dimension. True friends enhance each other’s insight and capacity for virtue. As you get to know your friend, you get to know yourself – and are challenged to become a better version of yourself.

“To perceive and to know a friend, therefore, is necessarily in a manner to perceive and in a manner to know oneself,” Aristotle wrote in the “Eudemian Ethics.” The friend is a mirror that helps refine our thinking, perception and moral understanding.

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Aiming at the good life

In the end, what makes eudaimonia – the good life – possible? For Aristotle, it’s using reason to become our best selves. Knowledge and self-knowledge are the most desirable of all things, Aristotle argued: “One always desires to live because one always desires to know, and because one wishes to be oneself the object known.”

And there’s no way to get there without good friends. A trusted and respected friend shares perceptions, enhances self-knowledge and magnifies life’s pleasures.

The desire to know and be known is part of the quest for happiness. Knowledge of self, others and everything else is interconnected. For Aristotle, relationships are a portal into the realms of the vast and mysterious universe.

The Department of Justice announced in March 2026 that it is suing Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

By Ryan Creps
University at Buffalo

(THE CONVERSATION) — The Department of Justice announced in March 2026 that it is suing Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

The lawsuits allege that both universities failed to adequately address antisemitism on campus, violating students’ civil rights.

These cases follow earlier efforts by the Trump administration in 2025 to block federal funding to several major universities. The Trump administration has also – largely unsuccessfully – pushed universities to sign agreements that would give the federal government greater oversight over their day-to-day operations.

In 2025, the Trump administration launched broad Title VI investigations into 60 colleges and universities. These investigations focused on whether schools had done enough to protect Jewish students from discrimination and harassment, particularly in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, the subsequent war in Gaza, and widespread protests across U.S. college campuses.

Many of those investigations continue. Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in any program that receives federal funding.

These federal investigations have prompted scientific researchers, among others, across higher education to ask whether the government can invoke claims of civil rights law violations to justify cutting off federal research funding that supports their labs and projects.

As a scholar of educational leadership and policy, I think it is helpful to place the Trump administration approach to higher education within a broader understanding of how courts have interpreted civil rights laws within the past few decades and the nuanced way the Supreme Court has found they apply to universities.

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Supreme Court weighs in

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. This law banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin in employment, education and public places.

Congress then passed the Higher Education Act in 1965. This law significantly increased the federal government’s investment in colleges and universities. It also created the Pell Grant program – the first federally funded need-based financial aid program for undergraduate students.

In addition, the Higher Education Act spelled out that schools that receive federal funding need to comply with civil rights laws.

Leaders of Grove City College, a small nondenominational Christian college in rural Pennsylvania, were concerned that this law would bring unwanted government oversight.

At the time, the college did not accept any direct federal funding. But some of its students received Basic Educational Opportunity Grants. These grants helped undergraduate students pay for college. Unlike loans, these grants did not have to be repaid.

In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare asked all universities and colleges with students who received federal grants to agree to comply with Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on someone’s sex.

In 1976, Grove City refused to sign on to this agreement. A legal back-and-forth ensued.

Grove City College argued that the federal government’s request amounted to unwarranted government intervention, because the college did not directly receive federal funding. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare threatened to cut off the federal grants Grove City students received.

The Supreme Court eventually ruled in 1984 that Grove City’s financial aid program – but not the entire college – needed to comply with Title IX in order to receive federal aid. That’s because this specific office directly handled federal student aid.

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A 1988 law clarifies the ruling

Many House Democrats perceived this Supreme Court ruling as a loophole that would let universities and colleges sidestep civil rights laws by applying them only to the specific programs that received federal funds.
In 1984, a group of Democrats unsuccessfully tried to pass legislation that would have extended civil rights protections across all programs within colleges and universities that receive federal aid for any program. A different version of this bill passed Congress with bipartisan support in 1988, on the brink of the presidential elections.

President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill. Reagan stated in his explanation to the Senate that this bill “would vastly and unjustifiably expand the power of the Federal Government over the decisions and affairs of private organizations.”

However, many Republicans seeking reelection in Congress feared that rejecting the bill could alienate women and people of color in the upcoming election.

Within a week, Congress voted to override the veto and enacted the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988. This law clarified that any college accepting federal funds must comply with civil rights laws in all of its programs. This law also allowed the government to withhold federal research funding from colleges based on civil rights violations.

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Enforcing civil rights laws today

The Trump administration is testing just how much the federal government can exert power over colleges and universities that receive federal funding. Some Trump administration supporters say they see this strategy as overdue enforcement against discrimination.

On the other hand, the Association of American Universities, an organization made up of American research universities, is among the opposition arguing that the administration is trying to weaponize civil rights laws to control how colleges and universities are run.

Antisemitic incidents are on the rise in the U.S., including on college campuses. But some observers have noted that the issue is nuanced, and that the administration is likely exploiting a controversial issue to achieve ideological goals.

Federal courts’ interpretations in the Harvard and UCLA lawsuits will further shape how civil rights protections are enforced at colleges and universities. Specifically, these cases will help determine whether the mere allegations of civil rights violations against a university can justify a sweeping freeze of federal research funding.

(THE CONVERSATION) — In its nearly 80-year history, the state of Israel has carried out only one court-sanctioned execution: Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the Nazi holocaust.

Arie Perliger, UMass Lowell

(THE CONVERSATION) — In its nearly 80-year history, the state of Israel has carried out only one court-sanctioned execution: Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the Nazi holocaust.

But under a law passed by the Israeli parliament on March 30, 2026, that restraint has been thrown out the window.

Death by hanging will now become the default sentence for some offenses – but only in effect when the crime is carried out by Palestinians.

The law establishes two distinct judicial tracks. For the first, civilian courts in Israel may sentence defendants to death when convicted of killing with intent to “negate the existence of the State of Israel.” Meanwhile, military courts in the occupied West Bank must impose death for killings classified as terrorism, with life sentences permitted only in unspecified “exceptional cases.”

The bill, which also indicated that executions under the military track must be carried out within 90 days, passed by a vote of 62-48, with all major parties in the ruling governing coalition voting in favor.

The move further entrenches a two-tiered legal system in which Palestinians in the West Bank are tried exclusively in military courts – tribunals with an approximately 96% conviction rate, based largely on confessions often extracted under coercive conditions.

As someone who has been studying political violence and extremism in Israel for more than 20 years, I believe that treating this law as merely another chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would miss its deeper significance. Rather, the passing of the death penalty bill is best understood as part of the consolidation of ethno-nationalist ideology in governance, the continued erosion of institutional constraints on state power and the legal codification of retributive policies directed overwhelmingly at Palestinians.

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The long arc of institutional capture

Proponents of the law focus on its purported deterrence effect and its potential use to prevent unpopular exchanges of convicted Palestinian terrorists for Israeli hostages. One such exchange – the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, in which over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for a single Israeli soldier – included the release of Hamas’ Yahya Sinwar, who later masterminded the attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

However, some senior Israeli security officials, including representatives from the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence service Shin Bet, dispute these claims, arguing that there is no evidence capital punishment deters terrorism.

Potential efficacy aside, the death penalty law did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the product of a political trajectory that has unfolded over decades and has seen the once-fringe settler movement evolve into a dominant force shaping Israeli governance.

When Likud, the right-wing party of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, first came to power in 1977, settlements in the occupied West Bank gained legal status in Israeli law. Since then, settlements have expanded rapidly, despite remaining illegal under international law.

Settlers now represent roughly 6% of Israelis, but their political influence is far greater than their demographic weight. Settlers and settler-aligned public figures have reshaped the institutional landscape by making strategic inroads into military leadership, government ministries and party primaries.

The ruling coalition includes ministers with explicit pro-settler and ethno-nationalist ideologies – most notably Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Their ideology promotes Jewish supremacy over the entirety of historic Palestine, including the West Bank, and regards territorial compromise with Palestinians as both a political and theological impossibility.

The inclusion of people so closely aligned with the settler movement in Netanyahu’s coalition signaled that anti-Palestinian violence would, in effect, be treated as legitimate expressions of state policy. Indeed, in the past two years, settler violence in the West Bank rose to unprecedented levels.

Smotrich moved to transfer control of the Civil Administration – the military bureaucracy that has governed Palestinian civilian affairs in the West Bank since 1967 – from military to finance ministry oversight, reducing institutional checks on settlement expansion. Meanwhile Ben-Gvir issued over 100,000 new gun licenses, granted settlers preferential access to firearms and began transforming the police force toward aggressive, Palestinian-focused enforcement.

Through such moves, the line between state security apparatus and settler militancy has become virtually indistinguishable.

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The politics of retribution

This is the context within which the death penalty legislation operates. Capital punishment has always been part of the penal code, but with the exception of Eichmann in 1962, it has never been used. This was by choice: Israel for much of its existence wanted to project an image of a democratic modern nation based on the rule of law.

This pivot from deterrence to retribution reflects the religious-nationalist worldview that I believe now dominates Israeli governance. It is rooted in a particular strain of religious Zionism, embraced by roughly 20% of Israeli Jews, that interprets the establishment of the state of Israel and its subsequent military victories as a process of divine redemption.

Under this ideology, the West Bank is not occupied territory but the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria – land to which Jews hold an irrevocable, God-given claim.

Adherents believe that accelerating this redemptive process requires total military dominance and the systematic negation of Palestinian national aspirations.

This theology leaves little room for the restraint that characterized earlier security doctrines. Rather, Palestinians are existential obstacles to be vanquished.

In this light, the death penalty becomes not merely a tool of criminal justice but a declaration of supremacy – an instrument through which the state enacts its divine mandate.

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Democratic backsliding

Perhaps the most consequential dimension of the legislation is what it makes explicit.

The existence of parallel legal systems for Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories is not new. It has been a structural feature of the Israeli control of the West Bank since 1967.

But the death penalty law formalizes this duality with unprecedented starkness.

This formalization matters because it strips away the ambiguity that has long allowed Israeli officials to claim that all persons under their jurisdiction enjoy equal protection of the law.

Scholars of comparative authoritarianism have long identified the selective application of harsh criminal penalties as a hallmark of illiberal governance. The Israeli case offers a particularly instructive example because it unfolds within a nation that continues to maintain democratic institutions for its own citizens while operating an increasingly coercive regime over a subject population.

The death penalty law deepens this contradiction, pushing Israel further along a trajectory that some analysts have described as democratic backsliding. What is clear is that the legislation represents more than a policy choice about capital punishment.

(THE CONVERSATION) — After President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2, 2026, news reports suggested that she fell from grace, not for being too independent, but for not being effective enough at defending him and prosecuting his political enemies.

Austin Sarat, Amherst College

(THE CONVERSATION) — After President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2, 2026, news reports suggested that she fell from grace, not for being too independent, but for not being effective enough at defending him and prosecuting his political enemies.

As The New York Times reported the previous day, Trump was disappointed with “Ms. Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which has become a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and vented about what he sees as the Department of Justice’s lack of aggressiveness in going after his foes.”

The president has long indicated that whoever served as attorney general in his administration should see themselves as his lawyer rather than as someone representing the U.S. government.

During his first presidential term, Trump was gravely disappointed with Jeff Sessions, his first attorney general, who recused himself from the investigation into alleged political interference in the 2016 election. He replaced Sessions with William Barr, who abandoned Trump when the president did not accept the results of the 2020 election.

Having learned from those mistakes, Trump set out to find a political ally and loyalist to take the helm at the Justice Department in his second administration.

As a scholar of law and politics, and someone who has written about the role of the attorney general, I think Trump’s desire has a familiar ring to it. It is not unusual for presidents to put people who share their views and policy preferences into the role. But Trump has gone far beyond what is usually done.

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Bondi’s ascent

Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz was Trump’s first choice for attorney general during the president’s second term. Many commentators viewed Gaetz as a firebrand who was temperamentally unsuited for that position. Some criticized him for calling the president an “inspirational leader of a loving and patriotic movement” in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In the face of growing opposition generated in part by allegations of his misconduct, Gaetz withdrew.

Trump turned to Bondi a few hours later. She had served as Florida’s attorney general and drawn praise from across the political spectrum for her professionalism.

A bipartisan group of former state attorneys general wrote a letter attesting to their “firsthand knowledge of her fitness for the office” and her “wealth of prosecutorial experience and commitment to public service.”

In addition, as PBS noted at the time of her appointment, Bondi was “a longtime Trump ally and was one of his lawyers during his first impeachment trial, when he was accused — but not convicted — of abusing his power as he tried to condition U.S. military assistance to Ukraine on that country investigating then-former Vice President Joe Biden.”

She also showed her loyalty by attending Trump’s New York trial for paying hush money to porn actor Stormy Daniels, with whom he allegedly had an affair.
At the time of her nomination, Bondi seemed to have the attributes of an attorney general. She had the credentials to take on the job of running the DOJ and the confidence of the president who appointed her.

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From confirmation to downfall

During her confirmation hearings, Bondi promised to safeguard the Justice Department’s independence and bolster its transparency. She also vowed to not serve as the president’s personal attorney.

And in response to a question from Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, she pledged in January 2025 that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.”

But she also showed her willingness to joust with Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She hewed to the MAGA script by refusing to say that the president had lost the 2020 election. And she mounted a spirited attack on the Biden Justice Department, which she claimed had been “weaponized for years and years and years.”

Once in office, Bondi took on the difficult task of leading the Justice Department while also pleasing the president. She stood by when Trump used an appearance at the department to give, according to The New York Times, a “grievance-filled attack on the very people who have worked in the building and others like them.” The Times added: “He appeared to offer his own vision of justice in America, one defined by personal vengeance rather than by institutional principles.”

Bondi apparently did not do enough to deliver on that version of justice.

Last year, Trump had to urge Bondi to take action against his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, California Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Leticia James.

“They’re all guilty as hell,” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, “but nothing is going to be done. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he added. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Bondi took her marching orders and launched investigations of those the president named. However, she was not able to secure any convictions. NBC News quoted a former official in the Trump White House who said that failing to secure indictments “is a problem for job security with the president.”

If that wasn’t enough, Trump was also reportedly frustrated with the way Bondi had handled the release of the Epstein files, first promising full disclosure and then botching the rollout of the files.

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Contending visions of the attorney general’s job

Bondi’s tenure illustrates the conflicting visions of what an attorney general should do that animate today’s American politics.

The questions Democrats asked her during her confirmation were designed to get her to commit to their view of what the attorney general should do. Those questions signaled their belief that anyone occupying that office should maintain their distance from the president and uphold the Justice Department’s independence.

But right from the start of the republic, presidents have chosen close political allies to serve as attorney general.

It’s common for presidents to appoint their friends and supporters to be attorneys general. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, many presidents have chosen their campaign manager or their party’s national chairperson to be attorney general of the United States.

But even compared with this history, Trump and his allies have a radically different vision, seeing the attorney general as just another Cabinet member whose responsibility is to carry out the president’s policies and implement his directions. As Trump put it in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, he has the “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.”

In the end, it seems that Bondi was fired for her failure to be effective in the political role assigned to her. It is likely that the president will want to replace her with someone even more political than she was, who promises to deliver more of the results he wants.