Chelsea captured the FIFA Club World Cup last weekend and President Trump, who attended the game, managed to obtain one of the gilded Tiffany trophies to display in the Oval Office.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had been invited to the presidential box at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, took home what was, for her, an equally valuable prize: a photograph of Mr. Trump offering her a squinchy smile and the thumbs-up sign.
The snapshot provided visual proof that Ms. Bondi has, for now, prevailed in her fight with Dan Bongino, a top F.B.I. official
who blamed her for bungling the endgame of the investigation
into the financier Jeffrey Epstein. Some Trump advisers share that view, but Mr. Bongino badly overplayed his hand and Ms. Bondi parlayed close relationships in the White House into a Truth Social post by Mr. Trump commanding her critics to shut up.
“LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!” he wrote in all caps.
Yet Ms. Bondi’s long-term victory, and perhaps her survival, is anything but assured. Her decision this month
to issue a memo affirming that Mr. Epstein’s jailhouse death in 2019
was a suicide precipitated an intense, unexpected right-wing backlash against Mr. Trump with no precedent, no obvious off-ramp and no mercy shown to an attorney general seen by some Trump die-hards as a symbol of a second term littered with broken promises.
“I’m going to be here for as long as the president wants me here, and I believe he’s made that crystal clear,” Ms. Bondi told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.
“It’s four years — well, three and a half now, right?” added Ms. Bondi. “We’ve got six months in, and it feels like six years.”
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