Attorney General Pam Bondi attended Donald Trump’s marathon Cabinet meeting on Tuesday and, like other members of the president’s team, praised him effusively when it came time to give her prepared remarks.
But Bondi leaned back into an old habit as she did so: using the title “president” as if it was Trump’s first name.
As the president turned to Bondi in the three-hour-plus public meeting Tuesday afternoon, Bondi responded: “Thank you, President.”
Her habit of addressing Trump in this manner previously caught the eye of critics online, who’ve previously bashed Bondi for the odd honorific.
She’d do so again as she described drugs seized as part of the administration’s deployment of federal law enforcement and National Guard troops in the capital: “We showed you pictures of some of the drugs that were seized right here in D.C….president, they were packaged for children.”
As she concluded, she nearly did so again, before seeming to catch herself and adding “Trump,” after a short pause.
The odd and almost childlike manner of using the president’s title alone to address him directly was particularly noticeable given the amount of time each member of Trump’s Cabinet spent praising and buttering up Trump during their respective moments in front of the cameras.
Bondi, in her remarks, touted the government’s takeover of Washington D.C. and Trump’s claim that he’d made the city a safe place to visit.
By the second hour, even conservative TV networks like Newsmax and Fox had tired of the endless compliments and were only sporadically tuning back to cover Trump’s remarks.
It’s not the first time Bondi, who previously served as Florida’s attorney general and was an avid Trump supporter before joining the Cabinet, has done this. In past instances, it has led to strange looks and even some criticism online both from MAGA supporters and the president’s critics alike.
“Why does Pam Bondi refer to The president as ‘President’? not ‘Mr. President’ or ‘President Trump’, just ‘President’? And what ever happened to the Epstein files?” wrote one Trump-supporting account on X earlier in August.
One left-leaning account tweeted on Monday: “Why does Pam Bondi refer to Trump as president. Not Mr. President president. It’s creepy.”
For Bondi, that wasn’t even the most memorable part of her participation in Trump’s rambling Cabinet meeting, during which the president addressed a staggering range of topics. It was instead the moment when the president commented on her physical attractiveness that circulated widely online.
“Look at Pam, I would never say she was beautiful because that would be the end of my political career,” Trump quipped, having jumped to the topic of Bondi’s looks after ranting about Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, and how the supposedly “Palestinian” Schumer (who is Jewish) seemed in his mind to have aged significantly over the first year of Trump’s presidency.
She wasn’t the only one to be awkwardly shoved into the spotlight by Trump. Secretary of State Marco Rubio bore that honor as well, as Trump, hinting at coverage projecting that Rubio will run for the GOP nomination for president in 2028, joked that Rubio should “never” run for another office ever again, because of how well-suited he was to the job of America’s top diplomat.
Rubio, unlike Bondi, scored his own points in return when he made mocking reference to the chaotic nature of the Laura Loomer-directed “purges” of the Trump White House and broader administration which have repeatedly occurred this year. Thanks to one of those purges, Rubio is now also simultaneously serving as national security adviser, acting archivist and director of USAID.
“For me personally, this is the most meaningful Labor Day of my life as someone with four jobs,” the secretary said, evoking some of the loudest laughs of the day from the assembled Cabinet members.
Bondi’s popularity with the MAGA base and Trump’s efforts to salvage it on her behalf remain relevant as the attorney general continues to face criticism for the Trump administration’s reversal on releasing information related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.
Rather than release more documents directly to the public from the Justice Department’s stores, the agency announced in July that it would cease those releases and instead issue blank declarations about Epstein’s death and the supposed lack of evidence linking other men to the convicted pedophile’s crimes.
Since then, Bondi has been reeling from reports of sharp divisions between her and two top FBI officials, Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, as well as accusations that a bid by the Justice Department to convince a court to unseal grand jury testimony was just a distraction that would not elicit new information.
