Bluesky

Donald Trump loves to justify his crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in federal workplaces with the rote assurance that he’s restoring the principle of merit-based performance in government jobs. Many of Trump’s high-profile cabinet appointments give the lie to that claim, from science-averse conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services to dipsomaniacal accused sexual assaulter Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon to humor-impaired bully-boss Elon Musk everywhere you turn. But for a truly concentrated dose of merit destruction at a federal agency, it’s hard to beat what Trump’s done to the FBI. 

In a lapse of advise-and-consent authority that was egregious even for them, Republican senators voted late last week to confirm Trump’s nominee for FBI chief, Kash Patel, whose chief qualification for the post is acute Trump sycophancy. Patel had previously bounced around the MAGA nomenklatura class in a tour of agency posts that produced a résumé that could charitably be described as undistinguished. When Trump, still desperate to steal the 2020 election, frantically tried to coerce law enforcement into joining his fascist crusade, his first thought was to name Patel, who had bounced from the Justice Department to the House Subcommittee on Intelligence to the Defense Department to the National Security Council, as deputy director of either the CIA or the FBI. Then–Attorney General William Barr—who, though no slouch at executive appeasement himself, found the lethal scale of “Stop the Steal” delusional thinking in the Oval Office a bridge too far—tersely replied, “Over my dead body.” Barr later recalled in his memoir that Trump’s bid to elevate Patel displayed “a shocking detachment from reality.”

Now, Patel is poised to create a whole new reality at the FBI. Like all ardent MAGA loyalists, Patel has assailed the agency he now leads for alleged “politicized” abuses of law-enforcing authority on behalf of Democrats—from investigating the January 6 coup attempt to allegedly targeting right-wing activists to ill-specified Hunter Biden skulduggery. These lush conspiratorial reveries are nothing if not ambitious, since the FBI has never had a Democratic director in its 116-year history. It has certainly been guilty of politicizing justice across its scandal-plagued track record, but always to the right—from the harassment of radicals during wartime to the subversion of the 1960s anti-war left to the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover to humiliate Martin Luther King Jr, and indeed to drive him to suicide.

But Patel’s historical consciousness, like his grasp of any non-MAGA-branded talking point, is extremely shaky. Indeed, in a blatant pre-confirmation legal trespass, Patel was evidently already plotting the dismissal of FBI staff involved in January 6 investigations even as he swore under oath that he was doing no such thing. So much for wiping out the scourge of politicized law enforcement.

But the director in waiting was just getting started. Agency veterans hoped that, as an untested, and virtually unvetted, outsider seizing the reins, Patel would at a minimum appoint a longtime FBI hand as his deputy—perhaps either the agency’s acting director, Brian Driscoll, or his deputy, Robert Kissane. Instead, Patel, with Trump’s enthusiastic blessing, tapped Dan Bongino—a fellow provocateur of the MAGA right who hosted a Rumble podcast rife with heavy-breathing conspiracy theorizing. In addition to spinning fables about Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News and the stolen 2020 election, Bongino whaled away at the FBI and its alleged leftist perfidies. Bongino, who’d formerly worked as a New York City cop and a Secret Service agent, hadn’t always been dismissive of federal law enforcement, but after Trump took office in 2017, he began publicizing baroque theories about how senior FBI agents tried to rig the 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton. (Yes, the same election cycle that saw FBI director James Comey swoop in with an unfounded 11th-hour investigation into the Democratic nominee’s e-mail server.)

NBC News, reviewing data from Bongino’s podcast KnowledgeFight, reported that it featured more than 21,000 mentions of the FBI and “the deep state” from May 2017 to his final broadcast earlier this week. Just as Patel is himself an aspiring Trump mini-me, who reportedly launched his meteoric career revival in DC by telling Trump, “Mr. President, the Deep State is out to get you, and I’m going to save you from it”—so is Bongino a mini-Patel: a relentlessly on-the-make Trumpian huckster, peddling diet supplements and concealed-carry permits while claiming to face down the faithless and all-powerful forces of weaponized commie-lib wokeness. The two men also share the MAGA-certified histrionic view of journalists as enemies of the people—one FBI tradition that they’ll doubtless adhere to. Washington Post media reporter Jeremy Barr shared one e-mail reply from Bongino that began, “Are you a dipshit all the time, or only on weekdays?,” before calling him “a chump, and a coward, who has never stood for anything in your entire sorry life.”

The Patel-Bongino alliance is, of course, much more than another Trumpian effort to upend the administrative status quo in Washington: It’s a model of purely ideologically driven law enforcement straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Bongino is not simply a MAGA yes man; he’s an enforcer of right-wing orthodoxies now outfitted with virtually limitless power to harass and punish his political enemies. “Will the deputy director get a security clearance? FBI background checks?” a retired FBI agent asked NBC News. “Does it matter that he supported the Oath Keepers? I doubt it because the director supported Jan. 6th.”

It also bears reminding that Bongino’s job was formerly held by Mark Felt, the anonymous source dubbed “Deep Throat” during the Washington Post’s investigation of the Watergate scandal. Far from following that example of exposing a reckless White House’s criminal wrongdoing, Bongino has summed up his life’s mission as simply “owning the libs.” Still, Felt may yet have the last word—his famous counsel to Bob Woodward goes double for the abuses and provocations sure to be wreaked by Trumpian law enforcement: “Forget the myths the media has created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”