When Trump ran into trouble during his first term, he reportedly cried out, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?!”

Alas, his favorite thug-fixer-lawyer had been dead since 1986 (having perished just six weeks after he was disbarred for fraud). Nobody in Trump’s embattled orbit was qualified to pick up the torch and run with Cohn’s credo, which, was quite simple: If they hit ya hard, hit ‘em back twice as hard.

Back in the day, Trump told the press, “If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy.”

Now he has Cohn 2.0, courtesy of slavish supplicant Pam Bondi, who is systematically destroying the credibility of the Justice Department, converting it into a Trump defense firm, and spitting venom at anyone with the temerity to ask adversarial queries.

What we witnessed last week on Capitol Hill would likely live in infamy if not for the fact the news cycle churns so quickly, fueled seemingly each hour by new horrors, hurling whatever just happened onto the ash heap of amnesia.

But I can’t let it go, not just yet.

It’s important to remember why Bondi got the gig as America’s top legal eagle. Her loyalty pact with Trump, forged in scandal (naturally), was sealed way back in 2013. As Florida’s attorney general, Bondi was deciding whether to join a class action lawsuit, filed in New York, against phony Trump University, with dozens of bilked Florida suckers demanding justice.

That’s when the Donald J. Trump foundation, then a nonprofit charity, swung into action. It sent an illegal $25,000 campaign contribution to a political group with ties to Bondi, who herself solicited that donation. Shortly thereafter, she announced she would not join the class action suit. Trump denied trying to buy Bondi, and Bondi denied there was any quid quo pro, but denials like those have less value than a degree from Trump University.

Anyway, she showed up in front of a Senate oversight committee, seething in anger at the very idea that anyone in the legislative branch would dare exercise the constitutional right of oversight. Senators do that as part of their duty to check and balance the executive branch and report to the American people. But that means nothing to Bondi because Bondi basically behaves and auditions for an audience of One.

Take, for instance, her exchange with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who asked if the FBI found photos of President Trump with half-naked young women in Jeffrey Epstein’s possession.

Bondi tried the Roy Cohn treatment: “Senator, you sit here and you make salacious remarks, once again trying to slander President Trump, left and right, when you’re the one who was taking money from Epstein’s closest confidants. I believe, I could be wrong, correct me, Reid Hoffman…Yet, you’re grilling me on President Trump, some photograph with Epstein? Come on.”

It’s a good thing she said “I could be wrong,” because there’s no evidence that anyone named Reid Hoffman or Reed Hoffman has ever donated anything to Whitehouse’s Senate campaigns. But she needed some kind of Cohnesque con, given the sensitivity of the Epstein scandal, given the fact that she has shut down release of the files, and given the fact that, as Florida attorney general from 2011 to 2019, she declined to prosecute Epstein after he got a slap-on-the-wrist sweetheart plea deal from the feds in 2007.

During the Senate hearing, she also did her Cohn thing during an exchange with Senator Richard Blumenthal: “I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service…You lied. How dare you. I’m a career prosecutor. Don’t you ever challenge my integrity.”

Blumenthal, a U.S. Marines reservist for six years, said on the stump in 2008 that he’d served “in Vietnam.” He acknowledged that falsehood and apologized for it…15 years ago. Apparently Blumenthal’s lie in 2008 carries more weight with Bondi than the 30,573 lies that her bone-spurs client uttered during his first term alone.

It’s no wonder 280 former Justice officials have signed a letter demanding Congress demand more oversight of Bondi, not less. The letter points out 5,000 public servants have exited the Justice Department since Bondi began her reign, taking steps that have already proved ‘“catastrophic for the nation.”

I’d love to believe Bondi’s mockery of Senate oversight will backfire. Terry Moran, the ex-ABC reporter, clearly harbors such a hope. On his Substack, he references “Normal people. Remember them? Well, we’re still out here, you and me and tens of millions more…Normal, decent people don’t want what Pam Bondi showed them…Americans haven’t changed that much, for all our desperate political disagreements. We are still a decent, middle-class, middle-temperament, middle-of-the-road nation.”

But if that’s true, why did Americans re-hire a convicted criminal and saddle us with the second coming of Roy Cohn? And even if the normal and the decent wake up in sufficient numbers to protest what has happened to this country, what evidence is there that the authoritarians in power will care?

Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]