Dunning-Kruger: Why Letitia James Was Always Going to Beat Pam Bondi

The Dunning–Kruger effect is often treated as a meme, but in regimes like President Trump’s it is an operating principle: the incompetent are certain, the competent are cautious, and power tends to elevate the most certain.

Once you understand that, and once you understand who Pam Bondi is and who Letitia James is, the outcome of their collision was never in doubt. The writing was on the wall from the moment Trump chose Bondi as his instrument and James as his enemy.

The core of Dunning–Kruger is simple: people who lack competence also lack the metacognitive ability to recognize their own limits. They don’t just make mistakes; they don’t know they are making mistakes. They confuse loyalty with talent, access with expertise, and television skill with legal skill.

In an authoritarian ecosystem driven by regime security—Pillar One of the Raymond Method—that cognitive defect becomes a feature. A leader like President Trump is structurally drawn toward sycophants who loudly overrate themselves and who will happily use the justice system as a weapon on his behalf. That is Pam Bondi’s entire post-Florida career in a sentence.

Bondi’s record tells you everything you need to know about the ceiling on her abilities. As Florida attorney general, her most notorious Trump-adjacent act was to receive an unlawful check from the Trump Foundation while her office was “considering” action on Trump University—and then to quietly do nothing.

That is not the behavior of a serious institutional actor trying to build durable legal precedents. It is the behavior of a local politician who understands that her value lies in not making trouble for the powerful man writing the checks.

When Trump later elevated her—first as a cable-news impeachment attack dog and then as his attorney general—he was not promoting a heavyweight; he was rewarding a loyalist for past non-enforcement.

Letitia James’s trajectory is the mirror image. James came up through the grinding, unglamorous machinery of New York public life: Legal Aid, the Assembly, the City Council, Public Advocate, then attorney general.

Each rung added institutional muscle and a deeper understanding of how to turn investigative authority into real-world consequences. When James took aim at Trump, she did not do it with TV segments and innuendo; she did it with document subpoenas, asset valuations, sworn testimony, and civil-fraud statutes.

The Trump Foundation was dissolved. Millions changed hands. The Trump Organization was dragged into a marathon fraud trial that produced a detailed liability finding and a massive money judgment.

Even where appellate courts have trimmed back the remedies, the factual record stands and the price paid by Trump is real.

If you map Bondi and James onto the Dunning–Kruger curve, the contrast is stark. Bondi occupies the high-confidence, low-competence zone: she moves through the world as if she is a premier legal mind, but her signature achievements are either non-decisions that protected Trump or highly politicized offensive moves that collapse under scrutiny.

James sits in the zone that Dunning–Kruger predicts for genuine experts: battle-tested, sometimes cautious in public, but quietly willing to take on cases that require real courage and craft. Trump did not misread this. He understood exactly how dangerous James had become: she had already cost him money, exposed his frauds, and demonstrated she could topple powerful men in her own party.

From a regime-security perspective, she had moved from “nuisance” to “structural threat.”

This is where the inevitability comes in. Once Trump, driven by his own Dunning–Kruger blindness, put Bondi in charge of a retaliatory prosecution against James, the outcome was baked in. You had a sycophantic, overconfident loyalist aiming a flimsy mortgage case at an adversary whose entire career consists of building cases that survive contact with real judges, real juries, and real appeals courts.

You do not need prophecy to see how that was likely to go; you only need to understand the players and the structure.

For Bondi, the case was a continuation of her role: use the law as a club against Trump’s enemies. The alleged benefit to James was trivial, the legal theory strained, and the procedural trail—unlawful appointments, career prosecutors displaced—incoherent.

For James, the case was almost a caricature of what she herself has historically attacked: political actors abusing legal forms to shield their own regime. She has spent years building prosecutions and civil actions against precisely this kind of self-dealing; she was never going to be easy prey for a beyond clumsy version of the same play.

The federal grand jury’s refusal to indict James is unusual in a system where prosecutors almost never lose at that stage. It is not because grand juries are inherently noble; it is because even laypeople can smell when a case has been overreached.

When you put a genuine heavyweight in the dock on a trumped-up theory, you are not just challenging her; you are challenging the basic intelligence of everyone watching. Dunning–Kruger predicts that the Bondis of the world will not see this. They will assume their certainty is contagious, that their status as “the government” guarantees deference.

Competent actors know better: they know that the more trivial the alleged violation and the more naked the political motive, the more skeptical a fact-finder is likely to become.

The Raymond Method’s Pillar One—regime security—locks this into place. President Trump’s regime is not optimized for competence; it is optimized for loyalty and pliability.

That means he routinely selects allies from the top of the Dunning–Kruger curve: people who overestimate their abilities and underestimate the difficulty of the tasks they are given. They will botch complex operations (Kash Patel anyone?) because they have never had to build anything serious on their own.

By contrast, adversaries like Letitia James are forged in systems that reward results over flattery. They make enemies, sometimes overreach, and inevitably collect scars—but they also accumulate the experience needed to survive counterattack.

That is why, from the moment Bondi pointed the Justice Department at James, the likely contours of the endgame were clear. Bondi would stride out full of certainty, convinced that her television skills, her proximity to Trump, and the raw power of federal indictment would carry the day.

James, however, would do what she has always done: assemble a serious legal team, exploit every procedural irregularity, and calmly invite a neutral decision-maker to examine the facts.

One side would be betting on spectacle; the other on competence. Spectacle can work in politics. It rarely works in law when the underlying case is this weak.

The personal corollary is straightforward. If I had to choose one of these two women to stand in my corner, I would pick Letitia James every time and jettison Pam Bondi without a second thought.

That is not because I expect perfection from James; she is ambitious, political, and imperfect like any other human being. It is because I respect demonstrated competence and abhor sycophancy.

Bondi’s entire brand is premised on subordinating judgment to the whims of a man who serves foreign interests and treats the law as a toy. James’s brand is built on making that kind of man pay.

In a regime built on Dunning–Kruger logic, it is no surprise that Trump chose Bondi as his sword and James as his enemy. But the same cognitive blindness that makes Bondi attractive to him is the reason she was always going to lose this fight.

When overconfident mediocrity goes to war with hard-earned expertise, the outcome may be delayed, but it is rarely in doubt.

The only real question is how much damage the lightweight can do on the way down.

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