Pick after pick, we’re watching Trump try to fill his Cabinet with people who have histories that should make any normal person blush. The fact that some of these folks even still have the audacity to still be out in public astonishes me.

Don’t get me wrong: That attitude is fitting for people that Trump might pick. Trump was adjudicated liable in 2023 for an unspeakable act himself — one that we all heard him brag very specifically about being able to do before he was ever elected the first time.

So it’s fitting that his pick for Defense Secretary would be a serial philanderer who’s been credibly accused of rape. It stands to reason that his Education Secretary nominee would be a woman who lied about having a teaching degree the last time she applied to be on a school board.

And it makes perfect sense that his choice to lead the Department of Justice would be a woman who once delayed justice entirely so she wouldn’t miss a fundraiser for her own political campaign.

At least this pick actually has experience in the kind of job she’s up for. She served as Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019.

Two years after joining then-governor Rick Scott’s administration in Florida, Bondi was scheduled to oversee the execution of a convicted murderer. Marshall Lee Gore was on the docket for September 10, 2013 for killing a 19-year-old woman, and according to Newsweek, “He was also accused of raping, strangling and stabbing a 30-year-old woman in 1988 before leaving her body in a Miami-Dade County trash heap. He had also attempted to murder a third woman prior to kidnapping her 2-year-old son.”

Sounds like a guy whose execution you might want to just go ahead and get out of the way as soon as possible, if he’s exhausted all of his appeals — Gore had.

In fact, he’d been scheduled for execution back in June, but then there were new questions about whether he was sane enough for the state to carry out the sentence.

Unfortunately for Pam, September 10 posed a scheduling conflict for her. Was it a legal deadline? An important meeting with law enforcement agencies that day?

Nah, she just wanted to get a jump on her next campaign.

That was the date of her campaign kickoff in South Tampa. And everyone knows you can’t miss a fundraiser, even if you have something as trivial as ending a prisoner’s life on the schedule.

Bondi was able to convince Governor Scott to reschedule for the beginning of October. Presumably she had no tennis lessons that day, or massage appointments. She was probably still full from all the hot dogs at her campaign event three weeks prior. Thanks for your patience, Marshall, now it’s time to die, the rescheduling seemed to say.

It didn’t take long for her to apologize. She was already giving an interview in the Tampa Bay Times before the year was out. Better to apologize than ask permission, Pam always says. In the piece from the paper, she issued a statement:

As a prosecutor, there was nothing more important than seeing justice done, especially when it came to the unconscionable act of murder. I personally put two people on death row and, as Attorney General, have already participated in eight executions since I took office, a role I take very seriously.

The planned execution of Marshall Lee Gore had already been stayed twice by the courts, and we absolutely should not have requested that the date of the execution be moved.

Well, that’s a fine apology, Pam. It doesn’t change the fact that you DID requested the stay — not “we” but you — for a personal reason, and you got your way. You personally extended the man’s pain. Whether he deserved to be tortured with a few extra looming weeks is up to the universe, but it certainly shouldn’t have come from Pam Bondi’s desire to attend a party being held in her honor.

It goes without saying that Bondi is a longtime Trump supporter. As Florida AG, she had at one point been set to join a mostly-nationwide lawsuit brought by various state Attorneys General against Trump University for fraud. She dropped her involvement in the suit when Trump suddenly donated $25,000 to her political action committee.

WEIRD, right?

Pam is just plain unsavory in the first place. She’s a scientologist, which wouldn’t endear her to Trump supporters if they knew about it. But she was also on Trump’s defense team during his impeachment hearings, so who knows? Maybe they’d forgive her.

In any case, she’s got plenty of support, as one of the loudest election deniers there was after the 2020 election. This confirmation seems likely.