Is Kash Patel An Even Worse Nomination Than Matt Gaetz Was? Will The Senate Just Say No?

The Ultimate Politicization Of The FBI?

There are no good nominees coming out of the Trump transition— and anyone who thought there would be must be extremely naive. But some of them really are beyond the pale. Who’s the worst or the worst? The deranged ideologues like Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, Russ Vought, Pam Bondi, Tom Homan, Dr. Oz… or it one of  the robber barons like Elon Musk, Chris Wright, Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, Doug Burgum, Charles Kushner, Vivek Ramaswamy? Last Saturday night, hours after Trump announced his appointment head the FBI, Tom Nichols made the case— a very strong case— for former Kevin Nunes staffer Kash Patel. Patel, whose Gujarati parents snuck into the U.S. via Uganda and Canada, was born in Garden City (Nassau County) and went to third rate colleges with no substantive academic requirements. He’s always been a moron, an asslicker and crazy extremist. When Trump tried naming him deputy director of the FBI towards the end of his first term, Attorney General Bill Barr ’s reaction was “Over my dead body.” After the voters rejected Trump in 2020, he tried putting Patel into the CIA as a deputy director and was talked out of it by Director Gina Haspel, who threatened to quit, and Mike Pence.

Nichols wonders if Trump’s cascade of terrible appointments is “an attempt to paralyze opposition in the Senate with a flood of bad nominees or to overwhelm the public’s already limited political attention span… A Patel nomination to some position in the law enforcement or intelligence spheres has always been lurking out there as a possibility, and Trump may have held off announcing it until he felt he had drawn out enough outrage (and exhaustion) with his other nominations… Patel’s nomination is shocking in many ways, not least because the FBI already has a director, Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed to a 10-year term only seven years ago and who he would have to fire almost immediately to make way for Patel. Worse, Patel is a conspiracy theorist even by the standards of MAGA world. Like other senior Trump nominees, his primary qualification for the job appears to be his willingness to do Trump’s bidding without hesitation. Patel will likely face a difficult path to confirmation in the Senate.”

The word “difficult” is scary. “Impossible” would be much better. Are there 4 Republicans with the guts to just say NO to a nomination this consequential or someone as manifestly unqualified as Patel?

For Trump, naming Patel to the post serves several purposes. First, Trump is taking his razor-thin election win as a mandate to rule as he pleases, and Patel is the perfect nominee to prove that he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. Even knowing what they know, Americans chose to return him to office, and he has taken their decision as a license to do whatever he wants— including giving immense power to someone like Kash Patel.

Second, Trump wants to show that the objections of senior elected Republicans are of no consequence to him, and that he can politically flatten them at will. Some of his nominations seem like a trollish flex, a way to display his power by naming people to posts and daring others to stop him. Trump has always thought of the GOP as his fiefdom and GOP leaders as his vassals— and if the Senate folds on Patel and others, he may be proven right on both counts.

… Trump has made clear how much he hates the FBI, and he has convinced his MAGA base that it’s a nest of political corruption. In a stunning reversal of political polarity, a significant part of the law-and-order GOP now regards the men and women of federal law enforcement with contempt and paranoia. If Trump’s goal is to break the FBI and undermine its missions, Kash Patel is the perfect nominee. Some senior officials would likely resign rather than serve under Patel, which would probably suit Trump just fine.

Of course, this means the FBI would struggle to do the things it’s supposed to be doing, including fighting crime and conducting counter-intelligence work against America’s enemies. But it would become an excellent instrument of revenge against anyone Trump or Patel identifies as an internal enemy— which, in Trump’s world, is anyone who criticizes Donald Trump.

The Russians speak of the “power ministries,” the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity. In the United States, those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community. Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions, a move that eliminates important obstacles to his frequently-expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution.

If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it.

The early 20th century Peruvian strongman Óscar Benavides once stated a simple principle that Trump now appears to be pursuing when he said: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” It falls now to the Republican members of the Senate to decide whether Trump can impose this formula on the United States.

Last night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Patel had written in his book, Government Gangsters, that “The agents and lawyers who think they can hide in the shadows while abusing their positions will be put on immediate notice.”

Patel, one of the FBI’s sharpest attackers, said in a September interview on the conservative podcaster Shawn Ryan’s show that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.” He suggested that the bureau had become too powerful and that he would strip it of its intelligence-gathering role and purge it of employees who refuse to go along with Trump’s agenda.

This morning, Patel was endorsed by Trump suck-ups Bill Hagerty (R-TN) on Meet the Press and Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Face the Nation and by Chuck Grassley (R-IA) while Mike Rounds (R-SD) danced around the question on This Week. Chris Murphy (D-CT), also a guest on Meet The Press, said “Oh, I will vote no, and I will organize not just my colleagues but the American public to understand what’s happening here… Kash Patel’s only qualification is because he agrees with Donald Trump that the Department of Justice should serve to punish, lock up, and intimidate Donald Trump’s political opponents, and so the cost to the American public is pretty simple.”

Just a few years ago, who would have imagined that a fringe QAnon lunatic could be appointed to head the FBI? Ever laugh at the Germans who voted for the Nazis in the 1920s and '30s? The laugh's on us now.