This morning we published a post called “The Next Move of Desperate Fools.”
We talked about what desperate power does when the clock is running out. We said something big was coming. We said it would be designed to intimidate, to reset the conversation, to make the cost of opposition feel higher than people were willing to pay.
We did not have to wait long.
Thursday, President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi. Not because she failed to uphold the law. Not because of a scandal or a breach of public trust. She was fired because she did not go far enough. Because the prosecutions of his political enemies did not succeed at the rate he demanded. Because the Epstein files were not handled in a way that served his interests cleanly enough. Because loyalty, in this administration, is not a shield. It is a performance that must be repeated every single day at an escalating level, and the moment the performance slips, you are gone.
Read that again slowly.
The Attorney General of the United States was removed from office for failing to prosecute the President’s political opponents aggressively enough.
That is not a Justice Department. That is a weapon. And they just decided it needed a sharper edge.
Todd Blanche, Trump’s own personal criminal defense attorney — the man who sat beside him at his own trial — is now the acting Attorney General of the United States. The person whose entire professional recent history is defending Donald Trump from legal consequences now sits at the head of the institution responsible for deciding who in this country faces legal consequences.
If that does not clarify the situation for anyone still uncertain about what we are dealing with, nothing will.
And waiting in the wings is Lee Zeldin, currently running the EPA, being considered as the permanent replacement. A man with no prosecutorial background, no Justice Department experience, and a confirmed willingness to go wherever this administration points him. That is not an appointment. That is an installation.
Here is what this means in plain language.
They are not finished. They are accelerating. The removal of Bondi is not a correction — it is an escalation. It is the administration looking at what they have built and deciding it is not extreme enough for what comes next. And what comes next, in their calculation, is the primaries. The votes. The moment when the people get to register what they think about all of this in the most direct way available to them.
They are afraid of that moment. This firing is proof of it.
Desperate power does not rebuild from scratch. It does not reconsider. It does not look at failure and ask what went wrong philosophically. It looks at failure and decides the problem was insufficient force. It fires the person who wasn’t hard enough and finds someone harder. It turns up the heat and hopes the people on the other side break before the calendar runs out.
They are counting on you to look at Blanche sitting in that chair and feel something that makes you want to step back. Intimidation. Futility. The sense that the machinery is too large and too committed to its course for anything you do to matter.
Do not give them that.
What you are watching is not strength consolidating. It is fear performing. There is a difference and it is important. Strength does not need to fire its own attorney general for insufficient loyalty Three weeks before a primary. Strength does not need to install its former personal defense lawyer as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. Strength does not need to replace the head of the EPA with the head of the Justice Department because it cannot find anyone willing to go far enough.
This morning we said the next move of desperate fools would be big, visible, and designed to demoralize.
And we were right about something else too.
When it lands and the people are still standing — still watching, still talking, still building, still planning to vote — it does not work the way they intended. Recognition is the one thing they cannot counter. You cannot manufacture intimidation against people who already know intimidation is being manufactured.
This is the set up for MAY
Stay steady. The primaries are here. And they just showed you exactly how afraid of that they are.
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“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
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