The Kash Patel Principle

Trump has been releasing names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves. He began with some relatively conventional choices, and then unloaded one bombshell after another, perhaps in 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. He’s chosen a Fox News host with a sordid personal history to lead the Pentagon, an apologist for dictators in Russia and Syria to be the Director of National Intelligence, and an anti-vax, anti-science activist to be the nation’s top health official.

Trump has now added yet another dangerous nomination to this list. In a Saturday night post on his social-media site, Truth Social, he announced that he is nominating Kash Patel to serve as the director of the FBI. 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.

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.

This approach backfired when Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general flamed out quickly in the face of likely defeat in the Senate, but Trump seems confident he can get most of his other picks across the finish line, even nominees who would have stood little chance of confirmation in previous administrations. And Trump always keeps pushing limits: In place of Gaetz, he sent forward the more competent but equally committed MAGA loyalist Pam Bondi, who has aroused far less opposition.

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 R. 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.