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Just one week after Donald Trump won a second White House term, the president-elect announced that he wanted then-Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz to serve as the next attorney general. This was, of course, utterly insane: The Florida congressman wasn’t just manifestly unqualified, he was also burdened by devastating scandals and a lengthy criminal investigation into alleged sex trafficking.
Eight days after the president-elect made his selection, Gaetz withdrew from consideration, recognizing the fact that he faced insurmountable and bipartisan opposition. (Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing and a Justice Department investigation concluded last year without bringing any charges against him.)
In theory, this should’ve taught Trump a valuable and timely lesson: Limits still exist. Many of his outlandish picks will likely be confirmed by a Republican-led Senate, but as the Gaetz fiasco helped prove, the president-elect can go too far and face meaningful pushback.
In practice, Trump has learned nothing. An Axios report published over the weekend noted that people close to the president-elect “say he feels empowered and emboldened, vindicated and validated, and eager to stretch the boundaries of power.” The evidence to bolster the observation is overwhelming. My MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim reported on Saturday:
President-elect Donald Trump has picked MAGA loyalist Kash Patel as FBI director, signaling his intention to overhaul the intelligence agency he has long criticized. Patel is expected to face an uphill battle for Senate confirmation. ... Patel is known as a diehard Trump loyalist who has echoed the president-elect’s grievances — and threats — against the intelligence community. During Trump’s first term, Patel served on the National Security Council and as chief of staff to the acting defense secretary.
As regular readers might recall, Patel first came to national attention during Trump’s first impeachment scandal. Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert at the White House National Security Council, told Congress that she discovered that the then-president was ignoring the NSC’s Ukraine expert, choosing instead to listen to Patel — which struck Hill as quite odd.
In fact, Patel had no expertise on Ukraine, though he was a congressional aide who seemed to have a knack for telling Trump whatever the then-president wanted to hear. With this in mind, Hill found it necessary to warn her staff to be “very careful” about communications with the Republican operative, and she removed Patel from internal distribution lists.
A year later, Trump gave him a promotion, and Patel landed a plum assignment at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Nine months after that, the outgoing Republican president gave Patel another promotion, naming him to a prominent position at the Pentagon.
By some accounts, Trump, after his 2020 defeat, even wanted to make Patel the deputy director of the CIA, though other insiders pushed back aggressively and derailed the idea. Former Attorney General William Barr wrote in his memoir that Trump also considered making Patel the deputy director of the FBI, though Barr said he told the White House that would happen “over my dead body.”
In his book, Barr added that Patel “had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency. The very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality.”
It’s against this backdrop that Trump wants Patel to lead the FBI.
As the political world digests this absurdity, there are four key questions to keep in mind.
1. What about Chris Wray?
Implicit in Trump’s Saturday announcement was the fact that he’s replacing Chris Wray, the current FBI director whom Trump tapped for the job seven years ago, after the scandalous firing of James Comey. While casual observers might see this as somehow routine — presidents get to pick members of their team — the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation isn’t a member of the White House cabinet.
On the contrary, FBI directors serve 10-year terms, overlapping presidential administrations, to prevent the kind of politicized abuses that Trump is eager to engage in.
Indeed, before we even get to Patel’s lack of qualifications, it’s enormously important to appreciate the fact that the incoming American president is poised to oust an FBI director, without cause, again. Under normal circumstances in a healthy political environment, this alone would be the basis for a major, presidency-defining controversy.
(Let’s also not forget that President Joe Biden, upon taking office four years ago, could’ve replaced Trump’s handpicked FBI director with someone new. The Democrat chose not to. The funny thing, while Biden decided to keep Trump’s FBI director, Trump himself is eager to replace him.)
2. Is Patel qualified to lead the FBI?
Not even a little. Patel has earned a reputation as a radical political operative, conspiracy theorist, election denier, and a sycophantic Trump lackey who wrote a children’s book in which told the story of a wizard named Kash who tries to save King Donald from Hillary Queenton.
Just as importantly, he’s publicly condemned the bureau and threatened to go after the president-elect’s perceived foes.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon one year ago this week. “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.”
He went on to say, “We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”
In fact, Patel has repeatedly boasted about his ambitions to seek revenge against Trump’s detractors and launch investigations into Trump’s opponents.
An article in The Atlantic, published over the summer, explained, “Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree. ... Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all — his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow.
3. Would a Patel nomination undermine democracy?
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols wrote in response to Trump’s announcement about the broader concerns surrounding such a choice.
The Russians speak of “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.
4. Will Patel be confirmed?
The most important number in American politics next year will be four. That’s the number of Senate Republicans who’ll have to balk in order to reject Trump’s most ridiculous nominees.
Will these four votes materialize? The Wall Street Journal reported, “Some of President-elect Donald Trump’s top advisers in recent weeks warned him it would be problematic to nominate Kash Patel, one of his most loyal foot soldiers, to lead the FBI, even as it became increasingly clear Trump was leaning in that direction. They cautioned that Patel not only lacked the right experience, but they feared his embrace of controversial theories could hurt his chances at Senate confirmation, people familiar with the discussions said.”
That said, as of this writing, exactly zero GOP senators have publicly condemned the choice, and quite a few Senate Republicans spent the weekend praising Patel, even going so far as to endorse his looming nomination ahead of next year’s confirmation hearings.
Watch this space.