I’ve been thinking about Pam Bondi. I didn’t want to. I genuinely tried not to. But here we are.

Specifically, I can’t stop thinking about the sheer, breathtaking, record-setting levels of sycophancy this woman has managed to achieve in public life. Because it takes a special kind of person to look a man in the eye — on camera, in front of the country — and say with a straight face:

“You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority, and Americans want you to be president because of your agenda.”

That was Bondi at a Cabinet meeting earlier this year. And if you thought that was something, she wasn’t even close to done.

“Your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it.”

But the crown jewel — the moment that should live in infamy — came at Trump’s 100-day Cabinet meeting on April 30, 2025, when Pam Bondi turned to face the cameras with the energy of a woman who had been waiting her entire life for this moment and announced, with genuine theatrical flair:

“Since you have been in office, President Trump, your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 3,400 kilos of fentanyl… which saved — are you ready for this, media — 258 million lives.”

The total U.S. population is about 342 million people. Bondi had just claimed that 75% of every man, woman, and child in America would be dead right now if not for Donald Trump personally.

But here’s the part that makes it even more spectacular: the day before that Cabinet meeting, on April 29th, Bondi had posted on X that the same fentanyl seizures had saved “over 119 million lives.” So between Tuesday and Wednesday — in a single 24-hour period — Trump somehow saved an additional 139 million Americans from death. The number more than doubled overnight, and nobody in that room blinked.

Experts were quick to point out that nowhere near 258 million Americans use drugs that could even potentially contain fentanyl, and that by Bondi’s own logic, if law enforcement continued seizing fentanyl at the same rate for another month or so, the Trump administration could claim credit for saving every single American from a fatal drug overdose. In reality, approximately 50,000 Americans died from a fentanyl overdose in the year prior — a tragic number, but one that would need to move its decimal point three times and then be multiplied by five before it approached what Bondi claimed.

The math wasn’t just wrong. It was cosmically, universe-bendingly wrong. And she delivered it with the confidence of someone who had absolutely no intention of ever being held accountable for it.

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Which brings me to the actual question I can’t shake:

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Not as a rhetorical flourish. As a sincere, genuine inquiry. What makes a person like Pam Bondi? What makes a Tulsi Gabbard? A Kash Patel? What was going through Squeaky Fromme’s head when she pointed a gun at Gerald Ford for Charles Manson?

Because the thing that gets me is that they have to know. They are not stupid people. They can see what happens to everyone who comes before them in this role. The loyalty is always one-directional. The affection is always transactional. The moment you’re no longer useful — the moment you become a liability, an inconvenience, or just someone Trump is bored with — you get thrown on the heap.

And Bondi’s already there. Her portrait reportedly ended up in a trash can. The internet documented it. He has almost certainly not thought about her since she left. She prostrated herself in front of cameras and claimed he saved three-quarters of the country from death — and it bought her exactly nothing.

So what was the calculation? Is it just money? Pure access? The intoxication of proximity to power, however ugly that power is? Do they genuinely believe they’re different — that they’re the one who finally figured out how to make it work, who finally earned the real loyalty, who won’t get the knife in the back that everyone else got?

Or — and I think this might actually be the answer — is the groveling itself the point? Is there something in the performance of absolute submission, the complete erasure of your own dignity in service of someone else’s ego, that fills a need these people have that nothing else can fill?

Because you don’t claim a man saved 258 million lives — a number you inflated by 139 million in a single day — by accident. You don’t accidentally turn to the cameras and theatrically ask if they’re ready for your announcement. That’s a person who has fully, completely, and without reservation decided that their own credibility, their own integrity, and their own sense of self are all negotiable — and that this man is worth the price of all of them.

The tragedy is that he isn’t. He never was. And when the moment comes — and it always comes — he will look at every single one of them and say he barely knew them.

Trust in this.