We are Pam Bondi: How America Traded its Moral Compass for the Dow

In a congressional hearing yesterday, the putative Attorney General of the United States, Pam "Swampy" Blondi...er, Bondi, made a, well, jackass out of herself by carrying on in a most undignified fashion. You know, the standard MO for just about every figure in this administration.  During a dramatic moment when Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler D-N.Y. criticized the DoJ for failing to bring any indictments against Epstein co-conspirators, Pam Bondi went on a bizarre rant about the DOW Jones Industrial Average:

“The Dow is over 50,000 right now,” Bondi said in sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee after Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., slammed her and the Department of Justice for the lack of indictments of possible co-conspirators of the convicted sex predator Epstein.

The S&P 500 is also up and the Nasdaq is “smashing records,” while Americans’ retirement accounts are “booming,” Bondi said after celebrating the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s gains. “That’s what we should be talking about.”

To make matters worse, as Bondi sat there smugly reciting stock tickers, the real-world cost of her 'success' was sitting directly behind her. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) noted that the room was filled with over a dozen Epstein survivors, women like Theresa Helm and Sky Roberts, whose names and intimate details of abuse had been leaked, unredacted, by Bondi’s own Department of Justice. When Jayapal asked the survivors to stand and raise their hands if they had yet to be granted a single meeting with the DOJ, every hand in the room went up. Then came the moment that defined the administration’s character: Jayapal asked Bondi to simply turn around, face these women, and apologize for 'outing' them to the world. Bondi refused to even turn her head. Instead, she stared straight forward at her notes, dismissively labeling the request for a basic human apology as 'gutter theatrics.' She had plenty of time for the NASDAQ, but not a second for the human beings her department had betrayed.

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Not surprisingly, these remarkable retorts from the calculated Bondi soon went viral, with many commentators expressing shock and derision at Bondi's thesis that, as long as we are all making money (spoiler: we are not; it is one of the worst labor markets since the Trump-aggravated pandemic), the rape of underage girls is an acceptable sacrifice.  They should not be surprised by this rationale, as it was the rationale of the American voter in the last election. 

As I will never stop pointing out, 49.8% of the American people voted for Donald Trump after:

1. Trump freely confessed to Billy Bush that he molests women because they let him get away with it because he is rich and famous
2. Trump told Howard Stern that he walks in on Miss Teen USA contestants getting undressed by pretending he is inspecting the venue
3. That he was the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's best friend for ten years
4. That he was forced to shut down Trump University after multiple complaints that it was a scam
5. That Trump grossly mismanaged the COVID pandemic, resulting in countless needless deaths
6. That Trump was FIRST impeached after attempting to extort Volodymyr Zelenskyy to interfere in a US election in exchange for weaponry
7. That Trump instigated a violent insurrection that nearly toppled the US government and put more than 140 law enforcement officers in the hospital as a direct result, triggering a historic second impeachment
8. That Trump lost his license to operate a corporation in NYC due to corruption
9. That a jury of his peers found that Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll
10. That a jury of his peers found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts for paying hush money to a porn star so that his extramarital affair would remain secret and not affect the 2016 election
11. Donald Trump was caught hoarding thousands of classified national security documents as Mar-a-lago, many stored in openly accessible areas where anyone could access them. Worse, he was caught lying about possessing them, and was even recorded bragging to reporters about documents he illegally retained

In the public wake of this blatant criminality, a plurality of the American people said all that damning criminal and immoral conduct was outweighed by the price of eggs and the inflation rate.  

So, why are we surprised by Bondi's defence?  It was merely a restatement of the rationale of the American people in the last election.  To Bondi, and the 49.8% who put her there, the NASDAQ 'smashing records' is the holy water that washes away the stain of Jeffrey Epstein’s island. It is a transactional morality where human life, whether it's an abused child in a file or a nurse in a Minnesota gutter, is simply the overhead for a booming 401k.

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This is an ugly fact that pundits need to come to grips with if we are to prevent this political nightmare from ever happening again.  There is now a plurality of Americans who are functionally political mercenaries;  they will vote for whoever promises to line their pockets the most. Now, in a normal election where you might have two candidates who differ on economic policy but are otherwise upstanding individuals, this is a justifiable position, all things being equal. But when one of the candidates is a convicted felon, when one of the candidates is also not just a self-professed misogynist but also a close friend of a sexual predator for a decade, as well as a man who tried to use violence to steal an election on live television, well, that should be a radically different calculus to any voter with a working moral compass. Heck, forget that and just say with an iota of common sense.  

But, yet, here we are, with the worst possible person serving a second term as the most powerful chief executive in the world, all because roughly half of the voting populace thought it was economically justified.  

In light of that, do we have any right to be shocked by Pam Bondi's monetary justifications for protecting sexual predators? As a nation, didn't 49.8% of voters make the same excuses, choosing to turn a blind eye to the victims of Trump's billous history, both in private and public life, and rally around their pocketbooks instead? Pam Bondi merely dared to state openly what a plurality of American voters said privately in the voting booth. 

Look in the mirror, America. If you voted MAGA in 2024, you are Pam Bondi.

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