Opinion | What an F.B.I. Under Patel and Bongino Might Mean for America

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This is “The Opinions,” a show that brings you a mix of voices from “New York Times” Opinion. You’ve heard the news. Here’s what to make of it.

I’m Michelle Goldberg, and I’m an opinion columnist at “The New York Times.” I write about politics and culture — unfortunately, more politics than culture these days. This week, Donald Trump announced that Dan Bongino would be deputy director of the FBI.

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So Dan Bongino is this sort of pit bull right-wing commentator, a relentless defender of Trump against his pursuers in the so-called “deep state.”

He’s a former Secret Service agent — before that, a police officer — who cut his teeth as a talking head on “Alex Jones.”

And of course, going from “The Alex Jones Show” to the second highest position in the FBI is quite a journey. In between those two poles, he had a streaming show for NRATV, a kind of online channel of the National Rifle Association. And now he broadcasts on the right-wing streaming site Rumble.

He has no experience with the FBI, except as a relentless critic of the FBI. He’s alleged all sorts of dark deeds at the FBI.

I think it remains to be seen, now that he has a tremendous amount of power in the FBI, whether he tries to substantiate these phantasms and use them as pretexts for investigations into Trump’s enemies. He’s also kind of laughed at the idea that there are checks and balances.

He thinks that anybody who believes in these traditional ideas of the separation of powers and a nonpolitical, bureaucratic civil service is a sucker.

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Historically, the people who get this role are FBI agents, people who have deep experience with the institution. It’s the person who oversees day-to-day operations of the country’s most powerful law enforcement organization.

And Kash Patel, who also has no experience with this organization, except as a scathing critic of it, had reportedly met with members of the FBI Agents Association and privately agreed that his deputy director should continue to be a special agent, the sort of person who was always filled that role. But the choice of Bongino to be his deputy, I think, shows just what a bald-faced lie it was.

I mean, I think that if you had told people even a few months ago that Donald Trump was going to make Dan Bongino second in command at the FBI, if you had told that to Republicans, they would have accused you of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And so but the way Trump works is to just kind of bludgeon us with horror, absurdity, outrage, until it’s difficult to react.

But I think that this is a pretty dystopian development. It’s funny. I have two kids. They’re 10 and 12. And when I work at home, they like to come into my office and ask what I’m working on. And I often don’t like to show them because I already really worry about the despair they’re imbibing about the future of the country that I’m bringing them up in.

But last night, they were really insistent. They really wanted to see what I was doing. And so I showed them this clip of Dan Bongino.

And this was just last month. And he was kind of gloating over the angst that Trump’s nominees were causing career civil servants. He was talking again and again about total personnel warfare.

And then he took out these two plastic toy robots, the orange one that represented Trump and a blue one that he called liberal screaming Karen. And he used the Trump one to smash the lady blue one over and over and over again and said, yes, this is how we fix this place.

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And my son was like, oh, my god, this is both so horrifying and also so funny. I can’t believe I live in this time. My daughter was like, what, is he five? And so there’s just a sense of dumbstruckness, I guess. And I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that. I think that that’s one reason why Democrats have been kind of flat-footed and have been really struggling to mount a proper response to this.

I really try to ration my Hannah Arendt references because otherwise, I would basically be using them in every column that I write. There is just so much in his book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that foreshadows what we see in Trump.

But this quote, which I think is a pretty famous one, it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw that they had made Dan Bongino deputy director of the FBI. Quote, “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

And I think that here, the “regardless of their sympathies” part is important because it’s not as if Donald Trump could not have found somebody either deeply versed in the FBI or deeply versed in law enforcement, who was also a devotee of his, right? The FBI is a very Republican organization. There’s lots of smoother figures, say, people who are coming out of the Claremont Institute, who have authoritarian tendencies, but can dress it up in erudite rationalizations. But that’s not who he wanted. He wanted this jacked-up hothead.

And so when you look at somebody like Pete Hegseth, who, even aside from his lack of qualifications, just has this completely sordid personal history, who has paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault, even though he claims that he’s innocent, whose own mother wrote a letter to him about his abuse of women, even though she now recants it. Or you look at somebody like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who, again, is a top Health and Human Services, who has this record of subverting one of the most important health interventions of the modern world, which is vaccine programs.

And it’s not necessarily that these people were chosen kind of in spite of their personal failings. In a way, it’s their personal failings that are a sort of qualification to serve in an administration that, every day, through its actions, are saying that none of the old standards apply. None of your old morality matters anymore. What matters now is the ability to project an image of manliness and virility and slavish loyalty to the leader.

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What you see is that this administration is laying the foundation for autocracy. But even though it’s increasingly obvious what they’re doing, there’s still a feeling of either disbelief or paralysis among many Democrats. And in part, this is because the Democratic Party is full of lawyers. It’s full of politicians. These are people who devoted their lives to the rules, to the understanding and application of the rules, and who are, I think, not really prepared for a world in which the rules no longer apply.

And so we’re in this kind of uncanny interregnum where we’re seeing the kind of liberal Democratic world that many of us grew up taking for granted, we’re seeing it totter. It looks like it’s going to collapse. And yet its collapse is so unimaginable that I think a lot of people are having a hard time getting their heads around it, much less developing a plan of action.

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