Washington has long been known for its summer scandals—from Watergate, the oil leak in the Gulf that stumped President Obama to last year’s abrupt reshuffling of the presidential race amidst charges of a coverup. This year, the cause of many heatwaves and meltdowns is the ongoing battle over the “Epstein files,” now entering its second month and showing no signs of slowing as Cabinet officials (not to mention Trump’s backers in Congress and across the MAGA landscape) seek a way out of a conspiracy that fueled the president’s rise—and now threatens to take him down.
Currently, Attorney General Pam Bondi is in a particularly precarious position, as the official most directly in the line of fire over the Epstein debacle. The MAGA base doesn’t want to turn on Trump, but they want someone to pay for the switcheroo they’ve been served and, having previously promised the release of those files that apparently may no longer exist, Bondi is the likely fall guy.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is also vulnerable—expendable, even. She is currently furiously ingratiating herself to the President—having fallen out of Trump’s graces with briefings that didn’t align with his preferred talking points—by cooking up a phony treason case against former President Obama. It’s a desperate attempt at distraction from all things Epstein which, lo and behold, is not working.
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(Countering the conclusion that Russian President Putin helped Trump win in 2016 is, however, just what Trump wants to hear.)
In Trump’s cabinet, blind loyalty is the credential that matters. “If the boss is happy, he doesn’t care about anything else,” explained Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the non-partisan non-profit Brookings Institution. “My sense is he’s delighted to have Bondi and Gabbard in a bit of trouble, so they work harder to please him.”
It is also fair to say that Trump loves it when his lackeys have to fight among themselves. It’s mano a mano, even when it’s two women. To save her job, in other words, Gabbard has to throw Bondi and the DoJ under the bus.
“It’s like ‘The Apprentice’ taking place in the White House with Cabinet secretaries and top officials knowing that in order to survive they better do anything they can to please him, even when it’s not in the best interest of the American people,” added Michael Sozan, a senior fellow in governance, democracy and ethics at liberal think tank the Center for American Progress.
Sozan noted that Bondi brought in conspiracy theorists Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to the Department of Justice to run the FBI. Those hires might be something Trump “foisted upon her,” he told The Daily Beast, “but she still sits at the apex of the decision-making. I don’t see how she successfully gets out of this.”
Who knows whether Bondi and Gabbard will be in their jobs a month from now, or six months from now. They are both scrambling to come up with something that will get Trump off the hook—and themselves too. Or, at least, until some better bait comes along; a phony investigation of Obama and his national security team can go on for months, even years, stirring the pot by subpoenaing the people around the former president without coming up with anything actionable.
“The thing that everybody should have learned in the first Trump term is that total loyalty is not a guarantee of job security,” said Jack Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. “Sometimes loyalty doesn’t coincide with minimum competency,” he added, singling out Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who he predicts is so under-qualified that he will sooner or later make a mistake “bigger than” Trump can shield him from.
Of course, Hegseth, has already survived a series of mishaps, including the inappropriate sharing of classified information, which in any other administration would be job-ending. Elaine Kamarck, also with governance studies at Brookings, has a theory about why Hegseth remains impervious to criticism in Trump’s eyes: “In corporate America, one advantage men have always had is they could bond with the boss in a way that women couldn’t,” she said. “(Trump) clearly likes him.”
Still, the former Fox anchor is regarded by most seasoned observers to be a short-timer at the Defense Department. It’s the least well-kept secret in Washington. And it’s not a surprise that NBC News reported Hegseth recently sounded out sources in Tennessee, where he currently lives, about potentially running for governor there, suggesting he might be looking for an off-ramp from a job he never should have had in the first place.
In other words, he’ll get to fail upwards. Bondi and Gabbard, should they fail to get Trump out of the scrape he’s in, won’t be so lucky to waltz out the door with the commander-in-chief’s blessing.
