The conventional wisdom, such as it is, appears to have settled around the view that a) de jure Attorney General Pam Bondi (the de facto AG being the non-lawyer Stephen Miller), in her eagerness to satisfy the daily demands of court politics, spoke wrongly and excessively in offering various memorial threats to free speech the other day; and b) it is a good thing–perhaps “a relief” would be more accurate–that so many commentators on the right as well as elsewhere on the political spectrum said so. You’ll get no disagreement from me on either general proposition, really.
But it’s worth noting that a great deal of the criticism of Bondi was, well, a criticism of Bondi, as if she is somehow a disappointment as Attorney General. Some of this phrasing, of the “I’m a supporter of Trump, but” variety, seems sincere and well-meant, if ultimately ignorant. And some of it–a smaller amount by the numbers, but it embraces most of the right-wing elite, the commentariat, the vast social-media-grifter contingent, and public officials who adopt such phrasing–seems sincere about finding Bondi wrong in this instance or a disappointment in general, but insincere and self-protective in its use of language. As others have noted, and it is to be expected from a personalist regime, “good tsar, bad boyars” is a necessary part of the house style of intra-regime discourse. It’s necessary both to salve the ego of the leader and to guard against alienating the mob, whose votes and easily surrendered dollars are so essential to one’s well-being, at least when one doesn’t have deeper reserves of self-respect and honor to draw upon.
To be sure, she is a disappointment. But she is also doing her job. Not the job of de jure Attorney General, admittedly; rather, the job of “employee of President Donald Trump.” That is both the entire general political, legal, constitutional, and structural theory of this presidential regime, and the specific theory of this regime’s position concerning the Justice Department. Attorneys General are always ultimately accountable to the president for their actions, and presidents are always ultimately accountable for the actions of their AGs. But conventional practice–for which there are many good reasons–imposes some degree of insulation which complicates that story, making it a question of “ultimate” rather than immediate responsibility. That is not the position of this regime, either as a syllogistic principle or as a more immediate matter of management. As one regime apologist put it in the course of defending one of the regime’s DOJ-led extortion rackets early in this term:
The President, as head of the executive branch, can make his own determination of what is in the public good, and determine when public officials are abusing their power.
Whether that statement is incomplete or not, it is a fair description of the regime’s position. And, of course, it has implications. Trump has repeatedly praised and defended Bondi and retained her in the position. And so long as he does, she speaks for him. If Bondi says that “hate speech” is not “free speech,” and that “threats of violence” are illegal even if they are clearly fatuous rhetoric and not true threats, and that the feds can (selectively) prosecute some dude at Kinko’s for (disfavored) political discrimination, then, unless or until contradicted by The Boss, that should be understood as Donald Trump’s position. Similarly, if RFK Jr. believes that the public health system would be better if only more people agreed that he is a better scientist than Louis Pasteur, Trump should likewise be understood as a bizarre, chemtrail-happy critic of germ theory. (A point that is made clearer by the fact that when he wants to, Trump can in fact distance himself from Kennedy’s views.) Likewise, if some kid with the password to the Homeland Security Twitter account has an apparent soft spot for blood-and-soil nationalism, or maybe blood-and-soil white nationalism, Trump should be understood as a blood-and-soil nationalist, possibly of the white nationalist variety.
To be clear, this is not my position concerning Trump and his views. It’s his position. He has made clear that he calls the tune for the regime. His supporters have made it equally clear. And his legal apologists in and out of government likewise take that position. Of course Bondi is responsible for her own words and her own failures. But not alone. However diplomatically his supplicants may voice their criticisms, it should be understood that the bottom-line theory of this regime is that there are no bad boyars–only a bad tsar.