Donald Trump’s Monday Oval Office attack on Jeanine Pirro produced mostly another round of palace intrigue. She was summoned to the White House, then spotted leaving with a briefcase and a white box. Cable news pundits immediately speculated about a looming resignation. Fox News aired Trump calling his own U.S. Attorney a choker who “folded like an umbrella,” then moved on to Iran. As of Monday night, its only follow-up was a one-minute report several hours later.
But it was the wrong story. Or rather, a very superficial look at what is a much more distressing and compelling narrative yet to emerge. This was never about who’s in or out of the Trump administration. It’s about what the loyalty test has not so quietly turned into, and Pirro just found out the hard way that loyalty is no longer the test she, or anyone else, has to pass. There’s more.
The political media's reaction to this Trump insult fest is as understandable as it is predictable. Pirro has long been one of Trump’s closest friends, close enough that their families vacationed together.
As a Fox News contributor and host, she defended him through every scandal and gave his wildest claims a jury box on national television. She pushed the stolen-election lie so hard after 2020 that Fox News notably pulled her off the air. Her own executive producer reportedly called her a “reckless maniac” in private; another said she had “a tendency to find random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites.” She kept going anyway, and was seemingly rewarded by Trump, who made her U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C.
And in that role, Pirro did not resist Trump’s story about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. She backed and prosecuted it. Her office charged David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist, with felony vandalism, because Trump insisted the damage was deliberate and said video proved it. Then prosecutors discovered the damage actually came from a botched renovation, fed to them by bad information from the Interior Department. They couldn’t even prove a thousand dollars in damage. So they dropped the felony, because … that’s her job.
Trump exploded anyway.
It’s not that Pirro never doubted Trump, or that she didn’t resist, and followed orders. She built the case he wanted, and only backed off once reality, or a lack of facts, made it impossible to press charges, or more to the point, deliver the outcome he’d already decided on. Trump punished her just as he’d punish a critic. Loyalty was never really what mattered all along.
Trump has moved beyond wanting officials who endorse his lies and is now demanding officials make those lies produce real-world outcomes. Even Jeanine Pirro became expendable the moment the evidence made that impossible. That’s why this is so troubling and a bigger story overlooked by so many.
Todd Blanche just showed us what passing this new Trump standard looks like. He’s advancing his attorney general nomination through the Judiciary Committee by formally killing the $1.8 billion fund and narrowing Trump’s tax agreement while preserving its central benefit: protection against audits involving past returns for Trump, his son, and their family business. Whereas Pirro first amplified the fiction. Blanche operationalized Trump’s interests through government power. He advanced, while she got summoned to the White House.
Pirro is as close to being Trump’s most loyal, most compromised, most all-in defender he’s ever had, but none of it mattered once she couldn’t manufacture the result he wanted. If Jeanine Fucking Pirro is expendable, the loyalty test has metastasized into something narrower and stranger. Not “will you defend me,” but “can you make reality agree with me?” If not, you choked.
When Jeanine Pirro is too fact-based for Trump’s inner circle, loyalty is not longer the thing that matters most. Delivering an outcome, regardless of facts, is all that matters. And that’s a development that should greatly concern us all.
"Delivering an outcome, regardless of facts, is all that matters. And that’s a development that should greatly concern us all."
Yes indeed, Mr. Colby. It "should" concern us all - at least those of us who abhor having Captain Ahab at the wheel. At least in Ahab's case, until the end, there was a reasonable hope of gleaning some usable oil from the endeavor ...
I apologize that you needed to, and thank you for saying, what should be obvious to us all. You Mr. Colby, are the proverbial player, who at some point in the proceedings looks into the camera and exclaims, "Can you believe this!" And suddenly the audience realizes that yes, there is something seriously wrong about what we all just observed.