A question for Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing: Will she stand up to Trump?

Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s attorney general pick, will enter her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday with a solid reputation as a prosecutor, and a crucial question looms: will she stand up to Mr. Trump?

Mr. Trump chose Ms. Bondi, a former Florida attorney general and lobbyist, to replace his first choice, Matt Gaetz, the former Republican representative from Florida who withdrew after a furor over allegations of sexual misconduct, including with a minor daughter.

Most Democrats are still likely to oppose Ms. Bondi, 59, but she is a much more conventional and qualified candidate than Mr. Gaetz. That all but guarantees support from Senate Republicans, with the real possibility that she picks one or two Democrats.

If his hearings don’t produce much drama, his tenure at the ministry almost certainly will. Mr. Trump, emboldened and embittered by the two federal prosecutions against him, has made clear that he wants top Justice Department officials to carry out his political orders, investigate those who investigated him and, perhaps, pursue his political enemies.

“The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” she said on Fox News in 2023, when asked whether it would be appropriate to open files related to the department’s prosecutions under the direction of Jack Smith, the special counsel.

Richard Donoghue, the former Justice Department official who resisted Mr. Trump’s efforts to install Holocaust-denying loyalists in the department’s top posts after losing the 2020 election, said the ideal candidate was operating at above partisanship. “Ideally, you want to ensure that partisan political considerations never influence the department’s decisions and positions regarding investigations and prosecutions,” he said.