As President-elect Donald Trump assembles his new administration, his critics have touted one of two schools of thought. The first is the “calling balls and strikes” school, in which his detractors evaluate each nominee or action individually. It goes like this: “Hey that was a good choice for the State Department, but a bad one for the Department of Labor.”
The second school sees the new administration as trying to undermine long-standing democratic guardrails. In this “Trump as potential authoritarian” view, we’re asked to assess his nominees with that overall framework in focus.
The jury is out on which — if either — view is correct, but Trump’s selection of attorney Kash Patel as the director of the FBI certainly bolsters the second tale. The 44-year-old New Yorker held moderate-ranking federal jobs, having served as a prosecutor and chief of staff to the secretary of defense in the previous Trump administration. He’s best-known as a Trump “loyalist.”
“The true danger is almost less about Mr. Patel and more about what it says about Mr. Trump and his approach to his new presidency,” argues author Garrett Graff in The New York Times. In his view — and one shared widely, even among many Republicans — is the pick is a break with the generally nonpartisan traditions of this police agency.
A highly politicized appointee can use the agency’s fearsome powers to punish the president’s political enemies. In the wake of egregious FBI abuses and scandals, Congress limited a director’s term to 10 years. So it’s a bad sign that Trump even named a new director given that the existing one — Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed during his first term — still has two years left in his appointment.
Trump obviously has an agenda here — and the president-elect certainly has stirred fears about his vengeful designs with his outrageous rhetoric. “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all those countries,” Trump said in a pre-election interview. Such talk was not an aberration.
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As a frequent commentator in recent years, Patel has also let loose with wild talk that understandably stokes the worst fears among those who worry about the next Trump term. On Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast last year, Patel said, “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. … We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Trump and his allies have some legitimate beefs with the FBI and its conduct. So do many other Americans who have experienced its overreach and abuses. But the right way to approach those outrages is to neuter its authority — not to use it to exact revenge or appoint someone to lead the FBI who threatens to use federal power to come after the media and others.
So if you’re calling balls and strikes, it’s easy to conclude that Patel is a bad choice to lead an agency that can ruin lives and careers. But we tend to agree with those who see the Patel choice as a warning sign about the most troubling goals of Trump 2.0.