It seems like only yesterday that Pam Bondi was confirmed as attorney general, and Washington political insiders assured the public that she was qualified because she had once held the job in Florida.

For this writer, skepticism about the Trump administration left little faith that Bondi would act as a guardrail. Instead, she was portrayed as a drop-off, teetering on the edge alongside Donald Trump throughout her tenure before eventually being pushed off.

Bondi’s qualifications were said to have disappeared the moment she entered the Justice Department. In their place came a single operating principle: pleasing Donald Trump, regardless of the humiliation it brought her and the department.

Like others who enter Trump’s touch-it-and-you-will-burn orbit, she was said to have flamed out. She debased herself, clashing combatively with House and Senate committees in a way no attorney general in U.S. history had stooped to. Oversight hearings, the piece argued, were treated like UFC matches rather than constitutional obligations.

Even so, the performance was said to be for nothing. Bondi was discarded not because she went too far, but because, in Trump’s view, she did not go far enough. She was not carrying out the retribution campaign with enough zeal. She was mishandling the Epstein files. To Trump, she looked like a failure because she would only go halfway down the road of illegality.

So Bondi was out, and Todd Blanche was in. Trump, the piece said, has long wanted his Roy Cohn, and now he has him.

Blanche had already become the White House’s point person on the Epstein files, and he reportedly handled that assignment badly, though in a way that benefited Trump. The article described as appalling Blanche’s meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, the release of documents with victims’ identities left unredacted, and his treatment of survivors when he was forced to meet with them.

Where Bondi merely disappointed Trump, Blanche was said to have been building a different résumé: the indictment of James Comey, the subpoenaing of family members of New York Times reporters over the Air Force One story, and his hesitation over the Epstein files.

Most important, according to the piece, was Blanche’s willingness to greenlight something Bondi reportedly balked at: an "anti-weaponization fund" worth $1.8 billion. The article described it as a slush fund that looked, in effect, like a mechanism to compensate the president’s allies and January 6 defendants, including crooks, police abusers, property destroyers, and armed Confederates.

That fund nearly sank Blanche’s nomination. Two Republicans, John Cornyn and Tom Tillis, held out until Blanche signed a document narrowing IRS audit protections and formally rescinding the fund. That move allowed him to clear committee on Tuesday by a 12-10 party-line vote.

Cornyn and Tillis were described as presumably smart men, but both are leaving office in January 2027, and the piece said they surely know the paper Blanche signed was counterfeit.

The article said Donald Trump has spent months maneuvering toward a $1.8 billion pipeline, audit immunity for himself and his family, and a payout mechanism for the people who stormed the Capitol on his behalf. The idea that such plans would vanish because Blanche supposedly rescinded the fund days before the confirmation vote was dismissed as implausible.

Trump, the piece said, is laughing because he played Cornyn and Tillis for fools. The fund, it argued, will be resurrected, restructured, or reborn under another name once Blanche is confirmed. Trump will, the article said, find a way to claim he did not lie even as the truth is obvious.

The author pointed to what was described as a pattern. RFK Jr., Brett Kavanaugh, and Kash Patel each told the committee what it needed to hear, then took their jobs and did exactly what they had intended all along. They allegedly lied without remorse because they knew there would be no consequences.

Senate Republicans were compared to cowardly Wizard of Oz lions with no teeth and no growl. Why, the article asked, would Todd Blanche — Trump’s personal defense attorney before he was ever a public official — be any different? He, too, was said to have lied because Trump told him to lie.

According to the piece, nobody acts without checking in with the “Dear Leader.”

Bondi, it said, was the warm-up act. She proved that a Trump-aligned attorney general could survive public embarrassment and hostile committee questioning. Blanche is the main event: a nominee who has already shown, before even being confirmed, that he will pursue indictments of Trump’s critics, subpoena journalists’ families, and quietly engineer nine-figure slush funds on Trump’s behalf.

The article then asks what Blanche would do with the full authority of the office and no more confirmation votes standing between him and Trump’s wish list. If he is later called before committees about his conduct, the piece says, he will simply lie again because truth no longer matters in Congress.

If the full Senate confirms Todd Blanche, the Department of Justice, in the author’s view, will stop being a department of justice in anything but name. It will become, for all intents and purposes, Donald Trump’s personal law firm — funded by taxpayers, aimed at his enemies, and shielding his family.

The article concludes that most people have not fully grasped how far that could go. Dark days, it says, are ahead, and they begin the moment he is confirmed by the Senate.