New Attorney General, Same Albatross: Trump’s Quest for Retribution

President Trump’s pick to replace Pam Bondi will face the same conundrum that every attorney general he has hired and fired has confronted: It is hard to steer the Justice Department when the president is grabbing the wheel and stepping on the gas.

Mr. Trump is searching for a tougher version of Ms. Bondi but the fault lies not in the shirking weakness of those he has called upon to execute his will, but rather in the impossibility of his request — to bring criminal charges against political targets with little to no evidence or legal justification.

The president has settled for the moment on Ms. Bondi’s chief deputy and his former defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, whose grasp of legal matters and low-key personality represent a contrast from the voluble, less lawyerly Ms. Bondi.

Yet the name atop the Justice Department’s organizational chart matters less than the overbearing presence of a president whose demands for retribution against his enemies have become so frequent and extreme that even his most obsequious appointees have fallen short.

“It’s certainly not about the willingness or the loyalty of any one person to carry out the president’s orders,” said Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor who is writing a book about the current state of the Justice Department.

“It’s more that there are limits on the president — courts, grand juries, lawyers and investigators who understand norms and ethics — that have started getting in his way.”