JVL fired off an emergency Triad last night on a breakpoint moment: the deployment of Texas National Guardsmen to Chicago, Illinois over the objections of state and local leaders. Make sure to give it a read.

Meanwhile, we’ve still got a few tickets left for our live show in D.C. tonight—we hope you’ll come breathe in the good vibes with us. Grab your tickets here. Happy Wednesday.

The Brazenness Is the Point

by Andrew Egger

Let no one say Pam Bondi fails to understand her assignment. Donald Trump wants an attorney general who embraces the joint roles of presidential personal lawyer and histrionic TV-ready pundit. And when Bondi showed up to testify before the Senate Oversight Committee on Tuesday, she delivered on both fronts.

Not only did Bondi prove to be an unhelpful witness—answering question after question from Democratic senators with a repetition of canned non-answers or outright refusals to respond at all—she was also remarkably hostile. Throughout the hearing, she toggled rapidly between high-volume outrage and sneering contempt for committee Democrats—accusing Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of having been paid off by friends of Jeffrey Epstein, speculating about whether Sen. Mazie Hirono might be Antifa. It got so bad that poor Sen. Peter Welsh tried to preempt her by saying he was ready for whatever she had on his oppo file.

It would have been funny if not for the fact that this was serious business. Late in the hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff went back down the list of eleven topics on which Bondi had refused to give answers, including whether Border Czar Tom Homan had gotten to keep the $50,000 he was given in an FBI sting operation last year, whether Bondi discussed indicting former FBI Director James Comey with President Trump, and whether she fired career prosecutors for working on investigations related to January 6th. By the end of his remarks, he was struggling to be heard over a diatribe of outraged non sequiturs from Bondi: “Will you apologize to Donald Trump for trying to impeach him after you now know that Joe Biden tried to cover up Hunter Biden’s involvement with Ukraine?”

FBI Director Kash Patel is a twitchy little guy, but Bondi’s testimony made his appearances last month before a pair of congressional committees look downright professional. By the end, I was starting to wonder if we’d all been a little too hard on Matt Gaetz back when he was up for the job.

It was all, of course, pure audience-of-one stuff. Bondi was doing what she thought she had to do to get a pat on the head from “President” (as she calls him) later. But it’s worth pondering: Why was this the performance Trump was hoping to see?

There’s no reason, after all, why an AG as slavish as Bondi couldn’t at least pretend to maintain some semblance of impartiality during high-profile public appearances. She could pay lip service to the concept of Justice Department independence. She could answer (or dodge) Democrats’ questions more respectfully. When Sen. Dick Durbin asked who had signed the order to have the FBI flag any mentions of Trump in the Epstein files, it’s hard to imagine anyone but the biggest MAGA dead-enders finding her snide response compelling: “I’m not going to discuss anything about that with you, senator.”

A more measured approach may have actually served this administration well—at least down the road, should the balance of power change in Congress..

But that wasn’t the play the boss wanted to run Bondi’s contemptuousness before the Senate Judiciary Committee was designed to send a clear message: You have no power to stop us.

Such a posture of utter refusal to even entertain the questions of committee Democrats—should have been cause for bipartisan scandal. But committee Republicans seemed perfectly uninterested in those questions, or in Bondi’s ridiculous manner of response. (They had their own axes to grind, after all—which Will Saletan covers down below.) The hour at which they might have protested against a Trump envoy’s scorn for their committee is long since past. And without any support from the majority, it doesn’t matter how brazenly Bondi makes a mockery of the very idea of congressional oversight of her work—all Democrats can do is post the clips online and register their outrage.

This is clearly the mask-off phase of Trump 2.0.¹ Trump doesn’t privately call Bondi to demand his enemies be prosecuted: He communicates the message via Truth Social. He doesn’t just denounce his Democratic opponents as weak on crime—he sends federal troops into their cities. He doesn’t just bring the nation’s generals together for a Team Trump pep rally—he uses that pep rally to preach his belief that Democratic electoral wins are illegitimate.

Trump is past triangulation. He’s past argumentation and persuasion. He’s in the raw-power business now. Pam Bondi went to Congress yesterday to let them know.

Arctic Blast

by Will Saletan

To deflect scrutiny from Donald Trump’s corruption and Pam Bondi’s stonewalling, Republican senators have turned their fire on former Special Counsel Jack Smith.

“We saw Jack S