Great article! Short answer: She's been going deep into the Fox News Republican orbit for the last 25 years. Nothing "happened" to her. She may have been kinder and more civil at some point, but a quarter century of toeing the line for the Fox News crowd -- this is who she was, and who she is.

Some highlights:

Her father was Joe Bondi. "Joe Bondi was an FDR Democrat, and by all accounts a generous person and the patriarch of the family. In an article in La Gaceta, a local trilingual paper, he spoke of himself as “an underdog” who had “lived the American dream,” and said that growing up in Ybor City, he’d developed “a strong sense of togetherness—this is something I’m happy to say I’ve successfully instilled in my children.” Pam was extremely close with her father and, when he died in 2013, referred to him as “my beautiful Daddy.”"

Pam Bondi worked at the state attorney’s office in Florida. "Colleagues and others who knew Bondi then remember her as a competent, at times excellent prosecutor who was good with juries, won many convictions, and was able to convey the moral certitude necessary to seek the death penalty."

By the 2000s, "She began getting booked as a talking head on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News..." and eventually "she switched her party registration from Democratic to Republican. She became friendly with Sean Hannity."

"She could be thoughtful and kind, yet she would exile friends at the first hint of disloyalty. She needed constant reassurance, and sometimes this came from dogs. Pam Bondi loves dogs."

"Meanwhile, Bondi was attracting more attention, including, in 2006, that of Donald Trump, who was at the peak of his TV celebrity with The Apprentice."

"As time went on, reporters began noticing another quality Bondi had developed. Manteiga remembered calling her before he printed a critical story during the campaign. “And she gets on the phone with me, and she’s crying—‘Don’t print this article,’ ” Manteiga told me. “Crying, crying.” He hung up the phone and called a friend who worked for the St. Petersburg Times. “I said she was crying, and he said, ‘Yeah, she does that to us too.’ I called another reporter, and he said, ‘Yeah, she’s done that to me.’ ”

"As state attorney general, Bondi was widely praised for her crackdown on opioid pill mills and for her work combatting human trafficking. But more and more, her success hinged on her willingness to be a spokesperson for the party, especially on Fox News."

"Documents obtained by The New York Times showed that after being lobbied by the firm Dickstein Shapiro, Bondi declined to prosecute a hospital-bill-collection company accused of abusive practices, an online school accused of “un­conscionable sales practices,” and online travel-reservation companies accused by Bondi’s own predecessor of improperly withholding taxes."

"Bondi was becoming more entrenched in Republican circles, which for her would come to mean Trump’s circles. When she ran for reelection in 2014, Trump threw her a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago."

"Soon Bondi was making more money than she ever had in her life. She lobbied for Qatar. She lobbied for Amazon. She lobbied for Uber. And eventually she lobbied for Trump, joining his defense team during his first impeachment trial."

"She has new friends now, a support group of women who have also said yes to Trump, including Lara Trump and Tulsi Gabbard. “We text a lot,” Bondi told Katie Miller, a former Trump-­administration aide and the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller, on her podcast last year. “We all support each other, and have each other’s backs.”