The Idiot in Chief of Law Enforcement
Yes, I spend entirely too much time on these pages complaining about stupid politicians. Guilty as charged. But to be fair, we live in a target-rich environment.
There are two species of political stupidity. The first begins with a functioning brain and ends in partisan lobotomy. The second begins and ends with naked, abject stupidity. Today’s subject belongs squarely in the latter.
For decades, I’ve wondered why presidents so consistently appoint incompetent Attorneys General. John Ashcroft? Janet Reno? Jeff Sessions? Loretta Lynch? Seriously?
The pattern, I think, is deliberate. Since Nixon, presidents have grown wary—if not downright petrified—of their own Justice Departments. Installing a loyalist to blunt its power makes a kind of sense. But there’s a difference between a pliable loyalist and a bona fide idiot.
Which brings us to the current Attorney General: Pam Bondi, for whom stupidity isn’t a flaw. It’s a calling. Stupid, for her, is aspirational.
Pam Bondi: A Case Study in Cynicism
I lived in Florida during most of Pam Bondi’s tenure as State Attorney General, and she quickly rose to the upper ranks of politicians I actively abhor. But personal distaste aside, Bondi’s record—before, during, and after her time in Tallahassee—warrants closer inspection. It is a case study in how performative law-and-order politics can mask something far more cynical: tyranny dressed up as free-market liberalism.
- As an Assistant State Attorney in Hillsborough County, she earned a reputation as the politician most firmly in the pocket of the Church of Scientology cult, which maintains its world headquarters just across the Bay in Clearwater.
- In 2013, she persuaded then-Governor Rick Scott to postpone a scheduled execution—not out of moral or legal concern, but because it conflicted with a campaign fundraising event.
- That same year, she accepted an illegal $25,000 donation from Donald Trump. Shortly afterward, her office dropped its investigation into the fraudulent enterprise known as Trump University—a coincidence so nakedly transactional it would make a Chicago alderman blush.
- In 2018, Bondi made several appearances on Fox News while falsely claiming those appearances had been approved by the Florida Commission on Ethics.
- And in 2020, she dutifully joined the chorus of Trump loyalists claiming the presidential election had been stolen. To her credit—such as it is—she avoided naming names or citing evidence, thereby sidestepping the defamation suits that later wrecked the careers and bank accounts of some of her fellow travelers.
There was a time—not so long ago—when any one of these would have disqualified someone from high political office. All of them together? Well, that would have been up to a jury of their peers. But those days are gone, and we all know it.
The Toady Takes the Stage
What we’re left with is a pattern: a politician untethered from reality, uninterested in law except for the clicks, and perfectly positioned for promotion. Her résumé, such as it is, reads less like a record of public service than a prologue to her inevitable role in the Trump Administration.
While I don’t see it, some claim Bondi is telegenic, and it’s true she isn’t shy about shouting down perceived enemies. In Trumpworld, that’s a governing philosophy. She looks good on television and she’s a “fighter”—two qualities highly prized by the president.
But her most valued skill is sycophancy. And never has it been on fuller display than in the now-infamous, televised cabinet meeting—a bizarre hybrid of North Korean pageantry and an Orwellian Two Minutes Hate—held to mark the first one hundred days of Trump 2.0.
I watched the charade—at least Bondi’s recitation of the gospel according to Trump—and I honestly don’t know what was more cringe-inducing: her unblinking, straight-faced toadyism or the contented, credulous expression on Trump’s face throughout. It was revolting.
Bondi rattled off a string of statistics—some of which may even be true—before arriving at a conclusion so absurd it defies language.
After crediting Dear Leader with overseeing the greatest wheat harvest in recorded history (I am only slightly exaggerating), she turned to the Drug War. In the first 100 days of his administration, she claimed, the DEA seized 22 million fentanyl pills and 3,400 kilos—about 7,500 pounds—of fentanyl.
Okay. Sure. Maybe. It’s a stretch to give the president sole credit for a couple of drug busts, but fine. We’ve all sat through worse.
Then came the punchline. Bondi claimed—almost verbatim—that thanks to the president’s heroic efforts, 258 million American lives were saved.
Let that sink in. According to Bondi, without Trump, nearly 80% of the U.S. population would be dead. Mass extinction, averted by a man who once suggested we inject bleach to fight a virus.
And that bleach is some pretty good shit.
The Math Doesn’t Work—And They Know It
And just imagine the lives saved under President Biden. During his four years, the DEA seized nearly 200 million fentanyl pills and more than 4,000 kilos of powdered fentanyl.
By Bondi’s math, that makes Joe Biden the greatest lifesaver in human history. Roughly 40 gazillion American lives spared. Give or take. Maybe he should be on Mount Rushmore.
This claim—delivered with a straight face and never walked back—launches stupidity to an interplanetary level. But what makes it worse is this: Pam Bondi knows better. Even she isn’t so far gone as to actually believe it.
The DEA itself admits that it seizes, at best, about 3% of the drugs smuggled into the country. But let’s be generous. Let’s say, thanks to the sainted president’s leadership, that number somehow increased tenfold. Now they’re nabbing 30%.
Sounds impressive, right?
But if 22 million pills were seized, then over 70 million pills still made it through. I don’t know exactly how many people are about to die, but if we follow Bondi-logic, it’s pretty much everyone.
Democracy at work.
Clearly without meaning to do so, Bondi did say something that was not only true but which points the way out of a Drug War that has consumed thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars on its way to becoming the most colossal failure in human history.
Speaking of fentanyl users, she remarked: “They don’t know what they’re taking.”
She’s right. They don’t.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s the beginning of an actual policy solution. Perhaps the smartest thing we could do is make sure people do know what they’re taking.
The Economics of Death
There are two forces at the root of America’s drug crisis: the economics of illicit production and the economics of law enforcement. Together, they form a kind of dark symbiosis—a codependency between drug lords and drug warriors. For the most part, neither would exist without the other.
Take fentanyl. It’s a synthetic opioid, far more potent than morphine—by some estimates, up to a hundred times stronger. It didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It rose to dominance largely because less dangerous, less addictive opioids—like heroin, oxycodone, and hydrocodone—were forced out of circulation by regulatory crackdowns.
Fentanyl is cheap, compact, easy to manufacture, and wildly profitable. A single pill that retails for $3 on the street costs about two-tenths of a cent to produce. Even after factoring in the costs of operating in a black market—distribution, concealment, bribes, and the ever-present risk of jail or worse—the margins remain obscene.
At the street level, it’s equally compelling. A small-time dealer moving 200 pills a day at $3 a pop can clear six figures annually—even after paying off the local beat cop or his informant.
The market is massive and accelerating. Estimates suggest that in 2024, 200 million fentanyl pills were sold at retail in the U.S. That figure is expected to double in 2025.
So when Pam Bondi crows about the seizure of 22 million pills over three months, understand: that’s not even a drop in the bucket. It’s theater. It’s noise. It’s politics as usual.
More Americans will die from drug overdoses in the next ten years than died in the last ten—and nothing Trump, Bondi, or any other drug warrior says or does will change that.
The End of the War—If We Want It
We’ve seen this movie before.
When the United States banned alcohol in the 1920s, law enforcement budgets exploded. Alcohol consumption barely budged. Deaths from alcohol abuse actually increased. The era’s equivalent of fentanyl—tainted and bootleg liquor—killed thousands.
Today, alcohol abuse remains a problem for some. But deaths from tainted alcohol? Virtually zero. We don’t spend billions trying to intercept bootleg booze. And as Pam Bondi accidentally pointed out, Americans know exactly what they’re getting when they buy a beer.
That’s the key. A regulated market doesn’t just ensure safety—it builds norms.
The greatest obstacle to ending the Drug War isn’t panic or fentanyl. It’s law enforcement.
Civil asset forfeiture. Federal grants for arrests. Inflated conviction stats. Careerist ladder-climbing.
They’ve been comically losing this war for over sixty years, and they’ll never stop—because the grift is just too good.
So if you really want to end the carnage, here’s what you do:
Set a date—three, maybe four years from now—at which time all U.S. drug laws will be repealed. Yes, all of them. Heroin. Cocaine. LSD. Even fentanyl.
Between now and then, build treatment facilities. Set reasonable regulations. Legalize the full supply chain: production, sales, and use.
Yes, it sounds radical. But not as radical as pretending another trillion dollars, another million arrests, and another generation of dead Americans will fix anything.
Will use go up? Maybe. But harm will go down. And the cartels will vanish overnight.
Pam Bondi is not an outlier. She is the distilled essence of a failed regime—loud, shallow, sanctimonious, and willfully and abundantly ignorant. Like every drug warrior before her, she clings to prohibition not because it works, but because it pays.
Prohibition has never worked—not with alcohol, not with cannabis, and certainly not with fentanyl.
It breeds black markets, fuels violence, corrupts police, and kills the very people it claims to protect.
The Drug War is not a war on drugs. It’s a war on logic, on liberty, and on the truth.
And it’s time—long past time—to end it.
