No One Forced Kash To Dress Himself Up Like This
Once it became clear that Musk will pay for primaries against any Republican who dared to stand up to Trump on anything… well, as Greg Sargent put it yesterday, their whole Senate party is ready to hoist the white flag on even the most vile, contemptible and incompetent nominees. That means we’re likely getting all those absurd ambassadorial picks as well as the cabinet of clowns featuring RFK Jr, Russ Vought, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Tom Homan and… even Kash Patel.
Sargent warned that “Republicans are quietly laying the groundwork to give their full blessing to one of Donald Trump’s more corrupt schemes: Unleashing law enforcement on his political enemies without cause once he’s sworn in again next year. That capitulation is already underway, with an argument they’re beginning to put forward to smooth the path for Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, Kash Patel. The New York Times has a big piece reporting that Senate Republicans are growing ‘warm’ to Patel, who has explicitly declared that in Trump’s second term, a range of enemies of Trump should be prosecuted for no discernible legal reason whatsoever.”
Sargent wrote that Republicans are fine with turning the FBI over to Patel because they “now harbor a ‘deep distrust’ of the FBI, that they see it as ‘rotted by corruption and partisanship,’ and that all this has become a new ‘Republican orthodoxy’:
It is the culmination of a remarkable turnabout that has been years in the making for a party that traditionally had given unyielding support for the nation’s law enforcement agencies.
Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma claims that Patel will “clean out the FBI.” And Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina insists he’lll restore the bureau’s “integrity.” In short, we’re meant to believe GOP senators back Patel because he will reform a badly corrupted agency in a way that will better serve our country.
Of course “all of that is nonsense. Most Republicans don’t actually think those things about the FBI, and they don’t actually believe Trump picked Patel to reform the bureau to address those alleged problems. Nor is there any reason to treat this as any kind of sincere, momentous ideological shift. We should treat that very idea— that Republicans have in some principled sense begun to deeply question the FBI’s institutional role— as itself being spin. If anything, the GOP embrace of Patel carries echoes of the corrupted, secretive, intrusive FBI of the pre-Watergate days, and the new reformist pose is being hatched as fake cover to support Patel later despite what Republicans all know to be true— that Trump has selected him to transform the agency into a weapon against his enemies.”
The media is about to face a serious stress test. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick points out, we may see the FBI become akin to ‘J. Edgar Hoover on steroids,’ but because the implications of this scenario are so immense and jarring, it’s hard to find the language to capture it adequately. Meanwhile, when Republicans close ranks behind Patel, the propaganda will be deafening: Trump is picking Patel to ‘clean house’ and ‘take on elites.’ The temptation will be strong to slot this into a ‘populist versus the establishment’ frame that inadvertently flatters Trump.
It’s a good moment to lay down a marker. Any media accounts that don’t leave casual readers armed with some simple truths— that Trump-MAGA rage at law enforcement is exclusively about its efforts to apply the law to him, and that he’s installing Patel in a position of extraordinary power for wholly corrupt ends— are failing to inform at the most basic level. Republican Senators know all this perfectly well. The rest of America deserves to know it, too.
It seems odd that none of the media outlets that compare Kash to J. Edgar mention that there’s another little something something going on here. J. Edgar was a notorious closet case, even if he never admitted that Clyde Tolson was his lifelong lover. No one seems to want to mention that there have been rumors about Kash being in the closet as well, just that he would politicize the FBI the way Hoover did. Beverly Gage last week: “Hoover, for all his many faults and abuses of power, was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the FBI’s nonpartisan independence… Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the FBI as a partisan force to protect Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies. If such naked politicization happens to undermine public faith in the FBI, so much the better. In Patel’s book Government Gangsters, published last year, he describes the Bureau’s top officials— along with other ‘Deep State executives— as a group of ‘spiteful mandarins’ hell-bent on destroying the country in service of their ‘uniformly left wing’ desires. He warns, ‘Democrats and the Deep State are on the same team.’ The idea that people who work at the FBI are closet leftists conspiring to bring down the Republic has to be one of the more bizarre takes in a political moment with no shortage of them. But such is the state of our politics, in which self-proclaimed protectors of ‘law and order’ attack the national-security establishment, while reluctant liberals defend its professionalism and autonomy. Hoover would agree with Patel that what happens at the FBI matters. However, the similarities mostly end there. Hoover used to describe the Bureau as the ‘one bulwark’ against a hidden left-wing conspiracy that penetrated all corners of American life. In Patel’s world, the FBI is the conspiracy.”
Yesterday, Politico reported that “Patel’s chances to become the head of the FBI are looking better and better,” although they didn’t offer any substantive proof of that, just chit chat about meeting with senators and about Wray resigning.” In terms of having the votes for confirmation… they got nothin’.
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