Pam Bondi, Cuba, and Plato | Ruminant

was that, uh, Pam Bondi was fired. I have this weird feeling, you know, about the administration is like when they fire hacks, I'm like, "

Oh, that's good." And then I'm like, "

Ugh, but who are they-- They were fired because they were incompetent at their hackery, so who are they gonna try and replace her with?" And so it's like, I don't know. Is America better off or not?

I don't know. I think this is, like, sort of a fundamental dynamic, particularly the Trump second term, but it has its applications in the first term too. Trump cares more about anything, more than anything about personal loyalty.

This is a well-established fan- fact. You know this from the way he talks. You know this from the, the, the literally the tests and interview questions that were given to employees about what they-- what potential employees about what they thought about January 6th and all this kind of stuff.

You know, I wrote about critical Trump theory, you know, years ago, where, you know, Trump takes any inconvenient facts, any bad news, any, um, restraint on him personally. You know, so when Bill Barr said he looked into the, the stolen election stuff and said it was all BS, Trump's response wasn't, you know, "

Oh, you screwed up. You gotta look harder." It wasn't, "

Well, what about, what about these reports I'm seeing in Wisconsin?" Or whatever. It wasn't anything like that. It was, "

You must hate Trump." Right? Because Trump thinks that if there's any disparate impact, negative impact upon him in any regard, it's a sign of irrational, unfair, unjust hatred of him or dislike of him, that you are an enemy. In fact, there's this great clip of him speaking this week at some Easter thing where he talks about how if you're nice to him, he loves you. He says, "

You know, you're not supposed to be that easily seduced, but what can I say?" It was amazingly-- I think Tim Carney pointed out how, how, you know, people say Trump isn't self-aware, but, like, he just, he said the quiet part out loud. He's like, if you kiss his ass, if you praise him, if you're nice to him, he'll get your back, he'll fight for you.

And he says, "I, I don't care if you're a bad person. You know, I'll, I just do it." But the, the point I'm trying to get to is, so when you have that criteria, when the, the chief criteria is personal loyalty first, loyalty to the president, political loyalty, personal loyalty to the president first, that as a fact of logic just simply means that there's content to the loyalty, right?

I mean, the, the demonstration of loyalty is being willing to do things that are unethical, right? So that, that puts it down even-- That puts integrity even lower on the list. And so the thing is that people with good qualifications for really hard, important jobs tend to actually have integrity, right?

The way you rise to the top of the legal profession or, you know, foreign policy and all these kinds of things, it doesn't mean you don't play hardball. It doesn't mean that you can't be cutthroat about various things. But you learn that your reputation matters.

You learn where-- you know where the guardrails are. For those kinds of people-It's really just not worth it to work for this administration. I mean, it, it was at the beginning of the first Trump administration because people thought, "

Okay, we'll be the guardrails, we'll be the circuit breakers, we'll be the, the checks, and my country is called to serve, and, and this guy's inexperienced and he easy-- needs help." And so, you know, Mattis and Pompeo and all those gu- politicians too, right? They went in, but, like, it became apparent by the end of the Trump administration that those people get chewed up.

And at, by the second Trump administration, the, the, the single most important criteria was yes men and women. No restrainers, right? No one who...

Well, on- only enablers wanted here. When you start going through the list of potential candidates, part- particularly ones who could pass even a Republican-controlled Senate, there just aren't a lot of them, and they tend to be, you know, a pretty shabby quality. There are a few exceptions.

I think Burgum, Doug Burgum, you know, is a, is a serious, decent person. I think, you know, rumor is he really regrets his decision going in the administration or wants to get out, but I don't know if that's true. Wouldn't surprise me.

Rubio, I think is a quality cabinet secretary with real skill, who has made some maneuvering compromises that obviously I have criticism of. But in the grand tradition of, you know, world's tallest midget and all that kind of stuff, at minimum, Rubio really stands out in the administration for having, not just... I mean, I, in, you know, forget the word integrity for a second.

Some professionalism, some understanding that arguments still matter, that facts still matter. Like, he's, he's better at debating and making his case than most of his critics and opponents. He stands out in that way in this administration.

You know, and then there are people who have some positions that don't really matter, and so their hackishness seems up, at an appropriate level for the job. Bondi is just, like, the perfect example of finding someone who is hackish enough, morally flexible enough, craven, cynical, glory-seeking, uh, partisan enough to wanna do the job with the qualifications to get the job, right? 'Cause she wasn't elected, you know, she was a, a, a prosecutor or a AG or district attorney, whatever it was, in, in Florida. But she's also got sort of Mar-a-Lago poisoning, which is, like, why he would want her.

But she's not a top-tier candidate. You know, in, in a normie world, no one would ever think about her being appointed attorney general. And so the problem is, you get these people who lack competence, they lack integrity, which is why they got the job.

They are subpar people, you know, in these positions, and the thing that ends up ruining it for them is that Trump cannot abide by the idea that he doesn't have the best people, right? He like, he, it, it, he doesn't mind it if it's secret, but he wants the public reputation that his people are the best and that there's no trade-off in quality when you get someone willing to work for the Trump administration. And then he gets em- over time, he gets embarrassed by the fact that the only people he could get for a lot of these positions are unqualified hacks, and when they start demonstrating their un- unqualified hackery, it makes him look bad.

That's a pattern with a bunch of people, but, like, the, Bondi is just so perfect for it. You know, her testimony before Congress, which I think was a constitutional hate crime, and Republicans and Democrat... You know, forget Democrats.