This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
Hello Mr. Patel!
Welcome back to the federal government. President-elect Donald Trump has named you his new FBI director, replacing Christopher Wray (Trump’s previous appointment to that post) before his term is due to expire. If confirmed, you will become one of the most powerful people in the country, so it seems important that your fellow Americans know a bit more about you. Here are some things that I’ve divined from your public statements, which I am told do not “count” because they were merely spoken on TV or written in public, but please do let me know if any of this is off with respect to your general worldview:
1. You hate the press and have plans for us.
As you said just prior to the last election: “We collectively join forces to take on the most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen, and no, it’s not Washington, D.C., it’s the mainstream media and these people out there in the fake news. That is our mission!”
You also threatened to sue former Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye (you did not sue her) when she said on MSNBC that you would “lie about intelligence” and “lie about making things up on operations” during your time working together at the White House. Please do not sue me for this article as none of it “counts” since I have only written it in public.
2. You especially hate the parts of the press that don’t believe Trump won the 2020 election.
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” you told Steve Bannon in 2023. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.” Duly noticed.
3. You hate the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, and all the people you think are a part of the Deep State.
“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’ ” you said of your plans for the bureau in September. “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops—go be cops.”
You have said that high-ranking officials who weren’t subordinate to Trump, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, should have to pay a price or face jail time.
Your 2023 book, Government Gangsters, features an enemies list of 60 people whom you describe as “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.” Most of them have stood up to Trump (or you) in the past. That is their sole common infraction.
Government Gangsters also describes the officials who comprise the deep state as “swamp creatures,” “spiteful mandarins,” and “dirtbags.”
4. In fairness, they hate you too.
Your former supervisor (and deputy national security adviser) Charles Kupperman called you “untrustworthy” and “absolutely unqualified.”
When Trump considered you for FBI director during his first term, then–Attorney General Bill Barr said it would happen “over my dead body.”
When, in the final weeks of the last Trump administration, Trump planned to name you as deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the agency’s head, promptly threatened to resign.
5. You do like Donald Trump.
You authored the Nunes memo, a wildly overhyped and massively discredited partisan hit job on the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
You authored a kids book about Trump in which he is an unelected permanent monarch and you, a magical wizard, are his lone defender and savior.
You told Breitbart News you witnessed Trump verbally declassifying “whole sets of materials” before leaving the office of the presidency and became a witness in the Trump classified documents case. You then appeared in 2022 before the Washington grand jury investigating Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after receiving immunity for your testimony.
A Colorado court found that you were “not a credible witness” when you testified on Trump’s behalf in a trial about the Jan. 6 insurrection, stating that Trump had preemptively authorized 10,000 to 20,000 troops to deploy days before the attack.
He likes you too: “A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Donald Trump is reported to have said of you. “I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.”
6. You like the insurrectionists.
You helped produce a literal ode to them!
You launched Fight With Kash, an organization that funds defamation lawsuits by selling branded socks, T-shirts, and other clothing with the “K$H” logo. This merch includes “the official K$h wine!” ($233.99 for six bottles); the “Fight With Kash Punisher Intarsia Reversible Scarf” ($25); The “TAKE A LAP RHINO tank tops” ($35); Kash Krew Golf Polos ($50–$53); and the “GOVERNMENT GANGSTER playing cards” ($19.99).
You have been peddling a dietary supplement that claims to be a COVID vaccine “detoxification system.” Warrior Essentials, maker of the product, told NBC News that “while the so-called ‘experts’ who ignored vaccine injuries and pushed failed policies scramble to defend their narratives, we deliver real, science-backed solutions that have already helped thousands reclaim their health.”
8. You like truthiness.
In Government Gangsters, you describe yourself as “leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, DC,” in the Benghazi case, pursuing the terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Libya. “I was the Main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi,” Patel said in a YouTube interview. This was not true. As NBC News subsequently reported: “The Justice Department’s 2017 announcement that the Libyan [Ahmed Abu Khattala] had been charged in the attack and of his conviction in a 2019 federal trial do not list Patel as the lead prosecutor or as part of the prosecution team.”
You’re a QAnon enthusiast. “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” you’ve said. And, “We’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.” And, “If it’s Q or whatever movement that’s getting that information out, I am all for it, every day of the week.”
When you did have a serious role in national security, it was not pretty. The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro reported that Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper believes you falsified an approval from him for a rescue mission in West Africa in 2020. It almost ended in disaster. As Plott Calabro reported,“Anthony Tata, the Pentagon official and retired Army general to whom Patel had originally given the green light, confronted Patel in a rage. ‘You could’ve gotten these guys killed!’ Tata shouted, according to two people familiar with the exchange. ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ ” Your reported response was: “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”
This is who you have told the world that you are Mr. Patel, and this is who Donald Trump wants to put in charge of the most powerful federal law enforcement agency in the country; someone who will put us all in danger and then respond, “Who the fuck cares?”
You are someone who has carved all Americans into worthless enemies and pristine loyalists in a way that effortlessly scales from kids’ books to scarves, to vaccine-reversal drugs, to hit songs, to consulting fees, to a memoir, to possible perjury. You have an itemized enemies list and will soon have the resources to destroy entire lives. That you will shortly be in charge of the entity that investigates and prosecutes America’s sworn, lethal enemies is so perfectly of the moment that it could be the plot of a children’s book. A children’s book about a powerful king and his one humble, loyal wizard.
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