It’s what Donald Trump always wanted: an Attorney General willing to harness the law in service of his agenda. Is Pam Bondi just getting started? Plus:

• Wall Street needs to stand up for honest data
• Columbia’s troubling new definition of antisemitism
• May the best Met win

David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker

In February, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, told Fox News that Jeffrey Epstein’s client list was sitting on her desk. By July, the Department of Justice had declared that no such list exists, and prominent members of the MAGA movement—who are convinced that Epstein, the late financial adviser and sex offender, is at the center of a deep-state conspiracy—began to call for Bondi’s resignation.

But they haven’t gotten it. Even as Trump struggles to explain his relationship with Epstein and to deflect attention from it, the President has continued to support Bondi. In this week’s issue, Ruth Marcus, a New Yorker contributing writer and a former legal columnist for the Washington Post, profiles an Attorney General who seems to have survived a siege by a powerful wing of her own party. “You know, she looks like Barbie,” the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, tells Marcus. “She’s blond and beautiful, and I think people will underestimate her because of how she looks. But she’s got nerves of steel, and she has stood up to some withering situations with a fair amount of grace.”

Bondi, a Florida-born prosecutor with a talent for television polemics, has known Trump since the mid-two-thousands. And yet she was not given a prominent role in his first Administration. This time around, she was Trump’s second choice for Attorney General, behind the disgraced former congressman Matt Gaetz. When Bondi’s name came up during the first term, one Trump ally said that the President would “roll his eyes and shake his head. I always took it as he didn’t take her seriously—he didn’t think she was a person of substance.”

But today, Bondi is, in many ways, the Attorney General that Trump’s “always wanted,” a former member of the Justice Department tells Marcus. The President has long sought to use the D.O.J., which is traditionally independent, as his personal political instrument. Bondi appears more than eager to help him in this pursuit. Under her leadership, the Justice Department has defended some of the most extreme elements of Trump’s second-term agenda, such as the elimination of birthright citizenship, and she has signalled her eagerness to investigate and prosecute the President’s enemies.

Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, told Marcus, “You have one client, and you have to represent that one client. If you don’t want to do that, then it’s just not the place for you.” When Marcus followed up by asking who that client is—the United States or the President?—Mizelle said, “I don’t see a difference between those.”

Read “Pam Bondi’s Power Play” »

In nominating an inexperienced MAGA partisan for commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Donald Trump is chipping away at an essential foundation of the American economy, John Cassidy writes. What can we do to prevent a data catastrophe? Read the column »

P.S. MS what, now? Today, MSNBC announced that it will soon be known as MS NOW, which apparently stands for My Source for News Opinion and the World. As media rebrands go, it’s not great. But is it worse than Tronc?