Out goes a Florida man, in comes a Florida woman. Hours after Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, withdrew from consideration, the president-elect last night announced that he will nominate Pam Bondi to lead the Justice Department.

Bondi, a former attorney general of Florida, is widely viewed as a more serious and confirmable pick, and although that is partly a statement of what a ridiculous choice Gaetz was, it also shows how far expectations—and standards—have been lowered since the start of the first Trump administration. In 2017, Bondi was passed over for an administration role for fear that she was too scandal-tainted. This time around, she’s the safe, acceptable fallback choice.

If Bondi’s name means anything to you, you’re probably either a Floridian or a real Trump-news obsessive. After a stint as a local prosecutor, Bondi was elected as Florida attorney general in 2010 and served two terms. She left that office in 2019 and worked on Trump’s defense teams for both of his impeachment trials. Bondi also worked as a lobbyist in that period, with clients including the Qatari government, Amazon, and Uber. (You really don’t hear much about “draining the swamp” these days.) She also joined the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned nonprofit.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s first defeat]

Bondi’s highest-profile connection to Trump began in 2013, during her first term as Florida attorney general. Several state attorneys general had probed Trump University, a souped-up real-estate seminar suspected of advertising itself with fraudulent claims. In September 2013, Bondi announced that she was considering joining a lawsuit in New York. Within days, Trump’s personal putative charity, the Trump Foundation, had written a $25,000 check to And Justice for All, a group supporting her reelection—a donation that Bondi had personally solicited several weeks earlier. Bondi then declined to join the suit. (Bondi denies that the payment affected her decision.)

In the kaleidoscopic way of Trumplandia, the foundation itself was a kind of scam; it was later forced to shut down, and Trump admitted to 19 violations, including self-dealing. The Trump Foundation was not legally permitted to make political donations, and instead of reporting the pro-Bondi donation as such, it reported it as a gift to Justice for All, a similarly named nonprofit in Kansas. After The Washington Post uncovered the details, a Trump aide insisted that the mistake was innocent, but the IRS fined Trump $2,500.

When Trump won the presidency in 2016, Bondi was widely expected to land a job in his administration. In January 2017, Bloomberg even reported that an appointment was imminent, but nothing ever materialized—apparently because Trump staffers were concerned that questions about the donation would make confirmation hearings difficult and damaging. How quaint—now she’s the person Trump is relying on to sail through confirmation. And given the scale of Gaetz’s problems, the weaknesses of other Cabinet nominees, and the fatigue among the press and populace, that seems likely to work.

She is similar in this way to John Ratcliffe, whom Trump last week nominated to lead the CIA. During Trump’s first term, in 2019, he nominated Ratcliffe to be director of national intelligence, a job that helps coordinate all U.S. intelligence agencies. Ratcliffe was forced to withdraw once it was clear that the Senate wouldn’t confirm him, because he had no real qualifications for the job, and had exaggerated what little he did have. (I wrote at the time that Ratcliffe “would have been the least qualified DNI in the position’s short history,” but the current nominee for that post, Tulsi Gabbard, gives him a run for his money.) A year later, Trump nominated him again, and this time the Senate sighed heavily and confirmed him, despite concerns that he would improperly politicize the job. This is precisely what he did: In the last weeks of the 2020 campaign, Ratcliffe disclosed unverified information about the 2016 election, which career officials worried was disinformation, in a blatant attempt to boost Trump’s reelection.

[Read: The art of the swindle]

And yet when Trump announced Ratcliffe’s nomination this time around, it was met with something between a shrug and relief. After all, compared with Gaetz and Gabbard, here was a guy with actual experience in his appointed subject and in the executive branch! Trump has managed to move the goalposts so far, they’re in the budget parking lot.

Pete Hegseth, his nominee to lead the Defense Department, fits the same pattern. He was considered to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration, but not chosen. Now he’s been picked to lead an even more important and sprawling bureaucracy, though the only new qualifications he’s picked up in the ensuing years are three vitriolic books, many hours on Fox, and dismissal from guarding Joe Biden’s inauguration. (Hegseth’s nomination seems rickety after revelations of a sexual-assault accusation, but he may yet make it through.)

If confirmed, Bondi will likely be a more effective and reasonable attorney general than Gaetz. She is not driven by personal grievance in the way he seems to be, and she has experience as both a prosecutor and a state attorney general. Like Gaetz, however, she is unlikely to defend the independence of the Justice Department from presidential interference. In addition to her past loyalty, she backed Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud in 2020. Trump has also already named three of his personal criminal-defense attorneys to top DOJ positions. At this stage, perhaps less bad news is the best anyone can desire, but none of this is good.

This past summer, a U.S. district court declared Google a monopolist. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed its proposed remedy. This plan—the government’s “proposed final judgment,” or PFJ—must be approved by the judge who is overseeing the case. But it outlines changes the government believes would be sufficient to loosen Google’s grip on the search market.

Notably, the DOJ has proposed that Google sell off its Chrome web browser—which currently accounts for about two-thirds of the browser market—and stay out of that business for five years. That proposal may seem righteous and effective, and stripping Google of its browser does make the government look bold. The proposal also seems to right a cosmic wrong from more than two decades ago, when the DOJ tried (and failed) to get Microsoft to unbundle its own Internet Explorer browser during a prior antitrust enforcement. This time around, the government’s lawyers insist that wresting Chrome from Google’s mitts is necessary to prevent Google from setting a default search engine for the majority of internet surfers, and pushing those same people to other Google products too. (By the same logic, the PFJ prevents Google from paying rivals such as Apple for default-search placement.)

This is a mistake. Google’s control of Chrome has surely benefited its market position and its bottom line. But Chrome might remain a boon for Google even if it’s under outside ownership. Instead, why not force Google to strip Chrome of its Google-promoting features, and let the browser be a burden rather than a tool for market domination?

In August, I argued that declaring Google a monopoly might not matter, because the company had already won the search wars. Searching the web effectively via text typed into input boxes was Google’s first and perhaps only innovation; the competitors that arose—DuckDuckGo, Bing, and so on—offered their own takes on Googling, which became the generic term for searching the web. People returned to Google because they wanted to, not just because the company had strong-armed them.

[Read: Google already won]

Google did incentivize competitors to maintain that status quo. Mozilla’s Firefox browser offers a case study. The foundation’s most recent annual report lists $510 million in royalty revenue for 2022, some of which surely comes from Google in the form of referral fees for Google searches. The PFJ appears to prohibit these kinds of payments, and whatever revenue they generate for Mozilla. If those are off the table, browser companies may end up letting users choose their own default search service. But the results could ultimately look very much the same: People who like and are familiar with Google might just choose it again.

Google built the Chrome browser in part to steer web users to its services—Search (and the ads it serves), Gmail, Google Docs, and so forth. Search was, of course, the most important of these. (Chrome was the first major browser to integrate web-search functionality directly into the address bar, a design known as the omnibox.) But over time, other Google features have become more and more entwined with Chrome’s operation. When I opened my Chrome browser in order to write this article, it presented me with a user-profile screen, strongly encouraging me to log in to my Google account, which gives Google insights into what I do online. That facility also offers me seamless access to Google Docs and Gmail, because I am already logged in.

Given that Chrome accounts for so much of the web-browser market, a more effective way to quash Google’s bad tendencies might involve sabotaging its browser rather than selling it off. Instead of making Google divest Chrome, the DOJ could have it keep the browser running (and secure) while stripping it of all the features that make Google services ready to hand. Killing the omnibox would be the boldest of these acts, because search, which basically means Googling, would no longer be presented as the default act on the web. Likewise, removing the tight Google-account integration and associated benefits for Google’s services and data collection would frustrate the company’s monopoly more effectively than a spun-off browser ever could.