There is a particular kind of silence that descends upon a nation when its instruments of justice are turned against it—not the silence of peace, but the silence of a people watching the locks being changed on their own doors.
It is the silence Hermann Hesse understood when he wrote of the soul's capitulation to the machinery of the state, when the individual awakens one morning to find that the institution meant to protect him has become the very thing from which he requires protection. In the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi, that silence has become deafening.
We are told, always, that democracies do not die in a single dramatic act. There is no singular explosion, no visible moment of collapse. Rather, the pillars are hollowed from within—termites given the keys to the cathedral. When Bondi was confirmed as the 87th Attorney General of the United States in February 2025, she spoke the language of restoration. She would end "weaponization." She would return the Department to its "core mission." These words, spoken under oath, carried the cadence of sincerity. But as Hesse's Siddhartha understood upon the riverbank, words are the least reliable vessels for truth. One must watch what the river actually does.
What the river has done, in the year since Bondi's ascension, is flood the lowlands of institutional independence until nothing remains but silt and debris. On her very first day in office, she dismantled the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force—the unit charged with protecting the republic from the quiet incursions of hostile powers. She shuttered Task Force KleptoCapture, which had coordinated investigations into illicit financial networks. She curtailed enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Each act, taken alone, might be interpreted as bureaucratic restructuring. Taken together, they form a pattern as legible as scripture: the watchtowers were unmanned because the enemy was expected as a guest.
Then came the purges. Career prosecutors—men and women who had served across multiple administrations, who had secured convictions against those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021—were terminated without cause. Their dismissal letters, signed by Bondi herself, cited nothing but the bare constitutional authority of the Executive. No misconduct alleged. No incompetence documented. Only the silent implication that their sin was having enforced the law against those the President wished to pardon. Over thirty-five Department employees connected to the January 6th investigations and the Special Counsel's work were ultimately removed. An Orwellian-sounding "Weaponization Working Group" was formed to find and eliminate those who were thought to be too disloyal.
There is a passage in Hesse's Steppenwolf in which Harry Haller recognizes that the most terrifying aspect of the bourgeois order is not its cruelty but its capacity to make cruelty appear administrative. The firing of prosecutors who upheld the law against insurrectionists was presented as housekeeping. The decimation of the Civil Rights Division—where attorneys resigned in droves rather than serve an inverted mission—was described as "realignment." Language itself was conscripted into the assault.
The campaign of retribution extended well beyond internal restructuring. At the explicit direction of the President—who posted his demands on social media with the subtlety of a man accustomed to obedience—Bondi's Department pursued indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Career prosecutors had expressed doubts about the strength of the evidence. They were overruled. A hand-picked acting U.S. attorney, installed precisely for this purpose, secured both indictments. A federal judge subsequently tossed both cases, finding that the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed. The Department appealed because the point was never conviction. The point was the spectacle of prosecution itself—the message that opposition to the President would be met not with debate but with the full weight of federal law enforcement.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Senator Adam Schiff. Former intelligence officials James Clapper and John Brennan. The list of those investigated reads not as a docket but as a political enemies list. And it is here that one must pause to contemplate the depth of the transformation. For over fifty years, since Edward Levi rebuilt the Department of Justice from the wreckage of Watergate, there existed an understanding—imperfect, occasionally violated, but fundamentally intact—that the Attorney General served the law and not the President's personal grievances. That understanding is not merely weakened under Bondi. It has been repudiated with a thoroughness that suggests not carelessness but conviction.
The most recent chapter in this unraveling arrived just yesterday, when Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee for an oversight hearing that devolved, almost immediately, into something resembling a theater of the absurd. The ostensible subject was the Department's handling of the Epstein files—documents mandated for release by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which the President himself had signed into law. Yet the Department had missed its deadline by more than a month. When it finally released millions of pages, it did so with a recklessness that exposed the full names and intimate photographs of survivors while meticulously redacting the names of co-conspirators. Survivors, some of whom sat in the hearing room, had published an open letter containing fifteen unanswered questions. Bondi offered them condolences. She did not offer them answers.
More disturbing still was the revelation that the Department had been tracking which unredacted documents Democratic lawmakers had reviewed at a DOJ facility—and that this information appeared in what observers described as a "burn book" of opposition research available to Bondi during the hearing. When confronted about the connections between senior Trump administration officials and Epstein, she deflected, accusing her questioners of "Trump Derangement Syndrome"—a phrase she deployed against a Republican congressman, Thomas Massie, who had the temerity to hold her accountable for the very failures she was summoned to explain.
Hesse wrote, in The Glass Bead Game, of a civilization so enamored of its own intellectual gamesmanship that it failed to notice the foundations crumbling beneath it. The Judiciary Committee hearing was precisely such a spectacle: the nation's chief law enforcement officer, confronted with evidence of institutional failure and possible surveillance of legislators, responding not with accountability but with the rhetorical equivalent of a slammed door.
Multiple federal judges have now suggested that the Department of Justice under Bondi is no longer entitled to the "presumption of regularity"—the legal doctrine by which courts assume that government lawyers are acting in good faith. In the hundred-and-fifty-five-year history of the Department, this has never occurred. The phrase deserves to be read slowly, for its implications are staggering. The judiciary—the branch least inclined to dramatic pronouncement—is signaling that the nation's principal law enforcement agency can no longer be trusted to tell the truth. The public corruption section has been gutted. The FACE Act, which protects access to reproductive health clinics, has been effectively suspended by internal memorandum—not by Congress, not by judicial ruling, but by the unilateral decision of political appointees who have decided which laws deserve enforcement and which may be quietly abandoned.
Meanwhile, on the immigration front, DOJ officials conspired to deport individuals under the Alien Enemies Act without affording them the opportunity to seek relief in federal courts. Universities have been coerced into signing legally binding "compacts" under threat of fabricated civil rights investigations. Law firms and media organizations have been bullied into ideological compliance. Each of these actions represents not a policy disagreement but a fundamental repudiation of the constitutional order.
Hesse believed that every human soul contains within it both the capacity for order and the capacity for destruction, and that civilization is merely the tenuous agreement to favor the former. Pam Bondi is not a figure of grand villainy. She is something far more dangerous: a competent bureaucrat who has placed her competence in the service of democratic erosion. She is the custodian who burns the archive and files the ashes alphabetically.
The assault on democracy she has overseen is not a deviation from the administration's program—it is its core function. The Department of Justice has been transformed from the guardian of constitutional order into the instrument of presidential will. The prosecutors who defended the Capitol have been punished. The political enemies of the President have been indicted. The survivors of sexual exploitation have been exposed while their abusers remain shielded. And through it all, Bondi has maintained the serene composure of someone who believes that loyalty to power is indistinguishable from service to justice.
In Narcissus and Goldmund, Hesse wrote that "the world was beautiful when one looked at it in this way—without any seeking, so simple, so childlike." But there is nothing childlike in the deliberate dismantling of institutional independence. There is nothing simple in the weaponization of federal law enforcement against the very citizens it was designed to serve. What Bondi has constructed is not order but its simulacrum—a Potemkin Department of Justice behind whose facades the real work of democratic degradation continues, day after administrative day, memo after unsigned memo, firing after unexplained firing, until the silence becomes so complete that we mistake it for peace.
It is not peace. It is the sound of the locks being changed.