Trump Nominates Malevolent Clown To Lead FBI

Even a cartoon villain can be dangerous.

On Saturday night, Donald Trump announced his most dangerous nominee yet: Kash Patel to lead the FBI.

There’s a lot of competition for this superlative — Trump nominees threaten to put millions of immigrants in concentration camps, arrest Democratic politicians who get in their way, and crash the economy with trade wars. But if you believe that a free press is essential to fighting back, then Patel, who vows to criminalize dissent, lock up Trump’s enemies and jail journalists, poses the greatest risk to democracy.

That Trump is nominating Patel at all is a gross breach of norms. FBI Directors are named for ten-year terms to insulate them from politics, and other presidents have honored this by not removing them except for cause. In 2017 Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to drop the investigation of Mike Flynn, replacing him with Chris Wray, a former high-ranking official at the Justice Department during the second Bush administration. President Biden kept Wray on, and he has three years left in his term. But for Trump, norms aren’t even speed bumps at this point, and so he’s named a guy for the job who joked that he’d “shut down the FBI Hoover building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.”

An Unlikely Supervillain

Patel is the Forrest Gump of MAGAworld, appearing in every major episode of the Trump presidency. Except instead of being kind and loyal, he’s a malevolent grifter.

Patel claims to have been inspired to go to law school by caddying for attorneys at the Garden City Golf Club, and he hoped to become a high-priced defense lawyer. He failed to get the law firm job he hoped for, though, and wound up working as a public defender in Florida. This is not a diss on public defenders, who are, of course, amazing, but it is relevant to his villain origin story. As Elaina Plott Calabro points out in an excellent profile at The Atlantic, it was the beginning of a career marked by resentment of nefarious, entrenched forces that were conspiring to deprive him of his due.

Patel went on to serve in the federal public defenders office, and then in the counterterrorism section of the National Security Division at Main Justice in DC. The position was prestigious, if mid-level. But Patel retconned it in his book “Government Gangsters,” exaggerating his role and painting the DOJ as an agency rotted from within by incompetent bureaucrats.