Once again, a woman takes the fall for an unpopular president

This is not a defense of Pam Bondi.

Like Kristi Noem before her, Bondi aligned herself with a political project that has shown little regard for human life, institutional norms, civil rights, or government independence. She didn't merely orbit that project, she helped animate it, defend it publicly, and carry it forward as one of its most visible faces. That kind of proximity can look like power, but it functions more like a storefront, carefully arranged to appear credible while concealing the room in the back where the real horrors occur. And while that machinery operates out of view, its effects are felt viscerally. Daily life feels like a feverish, grinding series of terrors under this regime, shaped less by stability than by a constant sense of disorder that no one in power has any interest in fixing.

Her removal as attorney general arrives at a moment that now feels like every American is trapped on the same doomed hamster wheel: Something wildly unthinkable happens at the highest levels of government, public pressure boils over in multiple directions at once, and headlines begin to nosedive alongside the stock market. The administration responds not by altering course but by replacing a woman whose exit will dominate the news cycle just long enough to buy a little breathing room. The gesture is framed as a bold new shake-up, maybe even a “the boss is back” moment, as if something meaningful has shifted, even as the underlying structure remains intact and largely unexamined. We have seen this before and we are watching it happen again.

Bondi did not stumble into the role she is now vacating. She spent years constructing the record that made her valuable to it in the first place, building a career on enforcing a narrow vision of who belongs, who is protected, and who is allowed to exist comfortably within American life. Long before she arrived at the Justice Department, she had already demonstrated a willingness to translate that vision into policy, litigation, and public argument.

Her résumé, taken at face value, reads less like a record of public service than a set of anti-LGBTQ+ ideological commitments.

Here are some of Pam Bondi’s greatest hits.

She fought to preserve bans on same-sex marriage, arguing in court that recognizing those marriages would cause “serious public harm,” even as the country moved toward affirming them as a constitutional right. She defended Florida’s prohibition on adoption by gay couples and worked to keep it in place, despite the direct harm it caused to families and children already living those realities. She also pursued legal challenges designed to block same-sex couples from accessing basic protections, including the ability to dissolve marriages the state itself refused to acknowledge.

More recently, she helped advance policies targeting transgender people under the language of protection, backing investigative efforts meant to exclude trans women and girls from public life while elevating a manufactured sense of crisis around a population so small it barely registers statistically. What is framed as protection operates, in practice, as a narrowing of who is allowed to exist in public without scrutiny.

Her record has also drawn sustained criticism from civil rights organizations, which point to actions viewed as undermining voting rights, targeting diversity and inclusion efforts, and aligning the machinery of government against longstanding civil rights frameworks. Critics argue that these moves are not isolated, but part of a broader pattern that treats racial equity as a political threat rather than a democratic obligation.

Related: Kristi Noem’s husband accused of living double life as ‘busty bimbo’ cross-dressing fetishist

Related: House Oversight Dem Robert Garcia celebrates Kristi Noem’s firing: ‘Now we don’t have to impeach her’

And Bondi is no friend to women, either.

Bondi’s record on reproductive rights reflects the same underlying logic: opposing abortion access, supporting efforts to restrict reproductive healthcare, and advancing arguments that cast women’s autonomy as suspect or conditional. She has suggested that many women who seek abortions do so under pressure, a claim widely rejected by reproductive health experts but useful in reframing choice as coercion. She has also supported efforts to weaken protections around clinic access and aligned herself with broader attempts to roll back federal safeguards, positioning reproductive freedom as something to be limited rather than protected.

Taken together, the through-line is not complicated. Whether the target is LGBTQ+ people, women seeking control over their own bodies, or communities of color fighting for equal protection under the law, the pattern holds. Rights are treated as negotiable, and autonomy becomes something to manage. That hateful usefulness is what brought her into the center of power, and it is also what made her expendable. It is no coincidence that the people asked to absorb that fallout are women.

Misogyny is not a cultural side effect in this machine. It’s an integral part of the structure.

Women are positioned where visibility and vulnerability collide, asked to defend policies shaped within overwhelmingly male power structures, and left to absorb the fallout when those policies begin to crack under scrutiny. Their presence functions as a kind of moral cover, not unlike seeing the most immoral person you know wearing a conspicuously large gold cross as a form of virtue signaling—a symbol meant to project righteousness while shielding something much murkier. It softens the image of the system and complicates criticism, but it does nothing to shift power or enforce accountability.

That kind of duality is exactly why the comedian Druski’s recent Erika Kirk skit landed so well. The viral whiteface impression works because it isn’t stretching the truth. The contradiction is already fully visible, and people are responding to it with a new, or at least newly unrestrained, clarity. Once the public mood turns that sharply and the appetite for calling out this behavior becomes that widespread, the administration doesn’t correct course. It looks for relief.

And the easiest place to find it is in a woman the public is already primed to reject.

Bondi fits this moment almost too perfectly. She embodies the contradiction, carries the record, and has become deeply unlikable to the very audience now demanding accountability. That makes her useful again, just in a different way.

Kristi Noem’s trajectory made that pattern a roadmap for success. And now the pattern has become so obvious that the unfunny jokes start writing themselves. Who will be next? Susie, Tulsi, Karoline? Let’s start taking bets. Maybe the manosphere can offer some invaluable insights from the online prediction markets. Maybe these women are becoming modern-day gladiators. We just love to build them up to watch them fall, don’t we?

Bondi’s usefulness had an expiration date, and like the women before her, she was always going to reach it. And when women like Pam Bondi begin to realize how many of their own personal liberties have been stripped away by the very administration they worked for, maybe they’ll start to see the light. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

For now, I guess let’s bid adieu to misogyny’s latest victim.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. Follow at @momdarkness and listen to music on Spotify.

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