Chelsea captured the FIFA Club World Cup last weekend and President Trump, who attended the game, managed to obtain one of the gilded Tiffany trophies to display in the Oval Office.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had been invited to the presidential box at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, took home what was, for her, an equally valuable prize: a photograph of Mr. Trump offering her a squinchy smile and the thumbs-up sign.
The snapshot provided visual proof that Ms. Bondi has, for now, prevailed in her fight with Dan Bongino, a top F.B.I. official who blamed her for bungling the endgame of the investigation into the financier Jeffrey Epstein. Some Trump advisers share that view, but Mr. Bongino badly overplayed his hand and Ms. Bondi parlayed close relationships in the White House into a Truth Social post by Mr. Trump commanding her critics to shut up.
“LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!” he wrote in all caps.
Yet Ms. Bondi’s long-term victory, and perhaps her survival, is anything but assured. Her decision this month to issue a memo affirming that Mr. Epstein’s jailhouse death in 2019 was a suicide precipitated an intense, unexpected right-wing backlash against Mr. Trump with no precedent, no obvious off-ramp and no mercy shown to an attorney general seen by some Trump die-hards as a symbol of a second term littered with broken promises.
“I’m going to be here for as long as the president wants me here, and I believe he’s made that crystal clear,” Ms. Bondi told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.
“It’s four years — well, three and a half now, right?” added Ms. Bondi. “We’ve got six months in, and it feels like six years.”
The Epstein saga has exposed the hazards of Ms. Bondi’s focus on courting her mercurial political patron, an inside-game strategy rooted in the assumption, now an open question, that Mr. Trump will maintain the total backing of his political base.
Mr. Bongino and his boss, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, have also been fierce Trump defenders. But unlike Ms. Bondi, they cultivated independent bases of support by positioning themselves as outsiders, even if it meant appealing to the conspiracy theorists now turning on the Justice Department and F.B.I.
Ms. Bondi aroused the suspicion of Mr. Trump’s base from nearly the moment she was selected to replace Matt Gaetz, the former congressman, as the attorney general pick late last year.
At the time, Ms. Bondi was working as a high-paid lobbyist. She soon ran into trouble with her choice to run the Drug Enforcement Administration, a sheriff from the Tampa area; he was forced to withdraw after hard-right activists objected to his arrest of a pastor who had violated pandemic lockdown regulations. Mr. Trump was miffed.
But Ms. Bondi’s true original sin — one from which she might never fully recover — was overhyping the “Epstein files” shortly after taking over in February, and refusing to rule out the existence of a list with the names of purported clients of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring.
Ms. Bondi, eager to improve her standing with Mr. Trump’s base, handed out binders marked “Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a conclave of far-right influencers at the White House, in part to prove she was committed to transparency and full disclosure, according to people in her orbit.
