Politics

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December 3, 2024

Kash Patel Is Trump’s Scariest Cabinet Appointment Yet

The president-elect wants to put a “deep state” conspiracy theorist in charge of the actual deep state.

Chris Lehmann

Over and over again during the first reign of Donald Trump, weary students of strongman corruption and late imperial decline warned that “there is no bottom.” They were proven right, of course, and we’re about to experience an accelerated lurch into authoritarian chaos that makes the whole notion of a bottom seem quaint. Yet with all those provisos fixed clearly in mind, it’s also safe to say that Kash Patel, hurriedly tapped over Thanksgiving weekend from the president-elect’s Truth Social account as the incoming director of the FBI, represents a significant signpost in the direction of the deeper chasms of the bottom. He’s in many ways the MAGA equivalent of Renfield, the ambitious, dangerous, yet infinitely petty helpmeet of the Dark Lord Count Dracula.

Patel first came to widespread public attention in the frenzied run-up to the January 6 coup attempt, when an aggrieved Trump, frustrated by the failure of senior law enforcement officials to play along with the great myth of the stolen election, began a last campaign to elevate lickspittle flunkeys to central positions. He sought to install Patel, a former staff attorney for the House Select Committee on Intelligence with very little administrative experience—and even less direct familiarity with law enforcement—as deputy director of either the FBI or the CIA, so as to place a proven MAGA lapdog in the upper reaches of the “deep state.” Attorney General Bill Barr, who would soon forsake his own post over the delusive fables leading to January 6, vetoed the suggestion with the terse reply, “Over my dead body.” (Gina Haspell, Trump’s CIA director likewise threatened to resign rather than accept Patel as her No. 2.) In his later memoir, Barr recounted that the proposed elevation of Patel, who had been serving as deputy chief of staff in the Pentagon, represented “a shocking detachment from reality.”

But here on the cusp of Trump’s second term, shocking detachment from reality is a job qualification—and there’s no denying that Patel brandishes it in spades. Over the past four years, he’s leveraged his supporting role in the 2021 coup effort into a crass marketing brand, following the model of his predatory Oval Office benefactor. He launched a product line of right-wing merch under the brand name “K$H”—from a series of wines to T-shirts promoting January 6 defendants to the “Fight With Kash Punisher Intarsia Reversible Scarf” that he sported from the podium at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

Patel has also duly minted his battles over control of the deep state into a book, Government Gangsters, which derides the agency he’s now charged with administering as “one of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State,” where rampant corruption has become “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” He has also vowed, should he be entrusted with overseeing the agency’s operations, to shut down its Hoover Building headquarters in Washington on day one, and convert it into “a museum of the deep state.” (Readers who prefer their MAGA red meat in bite-size format, meanwhile, can encounter the same unhinged fable of power in Patel’s children’s book, The Plot Against the King, in which a resourceful wizard named Kash rescues King Donald from “Hillary Queenton” and the Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democratic member, the newly elected Senator Adam Shiff, rendered here as a “shifty knight”—Patel’s clumsy appropriation of Trump’s derisive nickname for his erstwhile impeachment foe.)

There are of course, a battery of sound reasons to attack the investigative overreaches of the FBI, which has long empowered right-wing covert surveillance agendas and has never in its history had a non-Republican director. But Patel is not advancing a civil-libertarian quarrel with the agency; indeed, his complaint is that it’s overrun with self-protecting raging liberals—another plaint cribbed entirely from the persecution fantasies of Trump. Patel’s own history with the agency dates from his tour at the House Select Committee on Intelligence, where he reportedly penned the “Nunes memo,” which castigated FBI officials for approving a baseless FISA surveillance order on former Trump campaign official Carter Page. That caught the eye of Trump, who appointed Patel to the National Security Council after the GOP lost its House majority in the 2018 midterms, and then promoted him to serve as the NSC’s senior director of the agency’s counterterrorism directorate. As one of his former colleagues recounted to The Atlantic, he achieved his rapid ascent in a flourish of pure Renfieldism—he was hell-bent on getting himself in front of Trump to recite a pitch that his coworkers came to know by heart: “Mr. President, the Deep State is out to get you, and I’m going to save you from it.”

Patel soon landed at the Defense Department, where he promptly came into disfavor for nearly jeopardizing the safety of a SEAL team mission in Nigeria to rescue an American hostage by prematurely and mistakenly announcing that the operation had secured air rights to carry out the rescue. No such permission had been granted, and Patel’s boss, former DOD Secretary Mike Esper, has written that Patel simply fabricated the claim. (The mission was subsequently cleared and succeeded, but under the authority of then–Secretary of State Joe Pompeo, who reported that he had never been in contact with Patel.) After an outraged colleague posed the reasonable query, “What the fuck you were thinking?” with the explanatory proviso, “You could have gotten them killed,” Patel replied, “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”

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Patel denies saying this, or making up the clearance story, or in any way diverging from the chain of command, but Defense officials were “unsettled” by the whole episode, since there’s no simple, non-corrupt explanation for Patel’s antics, according to Atlantic writer Elaina Plott Calabro: “If Patel had in fact just invented the story, as Esper’s team concluded, then why? Was it because the election was in four days, and Patel was simply that impatient to set in motion a final potential victory for Trump, whatever the risk—was it as darkly cynical as that? Did his lack of experience mean he just had no grasp of the consequences?”

Everything in Patel’s subsequent career trajectory suggests that the answer here is yes, to all of the above. Patel’s tight identification of his personal ambition with Trumpian delusion is clearly the force propelling his otherwise utterly inexplicable and rapid rise through the ranks of the federal bureaucracy. And as with Trump himself, the conspiratorial logic behind Patel’s advancement has curdled into additional shocking and dangerous breaches with reality. Patel is a champion of the Trump-aligned QAnon cult and conspiracy theory, announcing in a 2022 podcast appearance that the mythical figure at the center of Q “should get credit for all the things he has accomplished.” He’s also joined Mike Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser, for the Q-promoting ReAwaken America tour. In his role as all-purpose MAGA hustler, Patel has hawked a dietary supplement that supposedly reverses bodily damage wrought by the Covid vaccine, dubbing it “a homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax.”

Patel’s conspiracy-mongering finds a frequent outlet in his broadsides against the press—an especially troubling penchant for the leader of an agency like the FBI, which has stood stoutly athwart basic civil liberties. “We’re going to put in all-American patriots from top to bottom,” Patel announced in a 2023 appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in the government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly—we’ll figure that out.” Bannon was clearly chuffed by Patel’s McCarthyite outburst. “I want the Morning Joe producers that watch us, and all the producers that watch us—this is just not rhetoric,” he replied. “We’re absolutely dead serious.”

No doubt. It’s unlikely that Patel’s résumé, which makes failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz seem like an Enlightenment philosophe by comparison, will net him a Senate confirmation. But after Trump-appointed FBI director Christpher Wray either resigns or is fired, Patel can take over at the FBI for 200 days as an emergency appointment. It would be a singularly deranging tour atop the law-enforcement bureaucracy, even by the debauched standards of the FBI. But it would also be a blaze of glory that even Renfield dared not dream of.

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Chris Lehmann

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).