The New York Times has a big piece reporting that Senate Republicans are growing “warm” to Patel, who has explicitly declared that in Trump’s second term, a range of enemies of Trump should be prosecuted for no discernible legal reason whatsoever.
It is the culmination of a remarkable turnabout that has been years in the making for a party that traditionally had given unyielding support for the nation’s law enforcement agencies.
Here’s the thing: All of that is nonsense. Most Republicans don’t actually think those things about the FBI, and they don’t actually believe Trump picked Patel to reform the bureau to address those alleged problems. Nor is there any reason to treat this as any kind of sincere, momentous ideological shift.
The evidence for this reading is everywhere. First, Trump already tried to wield law enforcement against political enemies during his first term (do you recall Republicans objecting at the time?) and Trump has explicitly threatened this to a far greater extent this time around. Republicans know all this. Take Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who murmured something to The Times about Patel bringing “transparency” to the agency. Do you think Ernst actually believes Trump picked him to realize some sort of substantive, far-reaching vision of reform? Of course she doesn’t.
As TNR’s Timothy Noah notes, many of the latter ones are political appointees, so by definition, they are not members of the “deep state.” That’s the permanent, all-powerful bureaucracy that Trump is supposed to be targeting by picking nominees like Patel, giving the move superficial justification. But as this list suggests, Trump wants an FBI director primarily committed to persecuting people for being Democrats or telling the truth about Trump in public.
In recent years, Republicans have attacked the F.B.I. for its role in investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, including its handling of the so-called Steele dossier; accused officials there of failing to investigate issues surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop; and slammed its leaders for authorizing a raid of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in pursuit of classified documents.
Fourth, MAGA Republicans’ more-recent claims about the “deep state” targeting Trump and MAGA keep collapsing—but Republicans keep pushing them, anyway. The inspector general just released another report finding that the FBI didn’t actually instigate the violence of January 6, 2021, debunking one of MAGA’s biggest conspiracy theories. MAGA Republicans immediately distorted the report’s findings about FBI informants in the crowd (at their own volition) to claim it had confirmed their “false flag” theories, but as Philip Bump of The Washington Post details, it’s just baloney.
But Trump doesn’t have any genuine interest in any of that. “Generally there are areas where serious discussions could be had about reforming the FBI,” Figliuzzi tells me. “I don’t see any serious discussions coming from the Trump crowd.”
While there’s a grain of truth to this notion, the whole idea should be handled with extreme caution. Trump and his MAGA allies are angry at law enforcement—but only to the degree that it tried to hold him accountable for his alleged lawbreaking. That’s it. There’s just no serious institutional critique behind any of this.
The media is about to face a serious stress test. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick points out, we may see the FBI become akin to “J. Edgar Hoover on steroids,” but because the implications of this scenario are so immense and jarring, it’s hard to find the language to capture it adequately. Meanwhile, when Republicans close ranks behind Patel, the propaganda will be deafening: Trump is picking Patel to “clean house” and “take on elites.” The temptation will be strong to slot this into a “populist versus the establishment” frame that inadvertently flatters Trump.
It’s a good moment to lay down a marker. Any media accounts that don’t leave casual readers armed with some simple truths—that Trump-MAGA rage at law enforcement is exclusively about its efforts to apply the law to him, and that he’s installing Patel in a position of extraordinary power for wholly corrupt ends—are failing to inform at the most basic level. Republican Senators know all this perfectly well. The rest of America deserves to know it, too.
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