The limitations of loyalty

What is Donald Trump so afraid of? I ask the question because in the military, it has long been known that only frightened, little men – it has always been men – appoint toadying loyalists to positions under their command. If a frightened little man wants his orders carried out, even when his orders are likely to cause deaths of his compatriots by their idiocy and cravenness, then he must appoint people who will follow his orders unquestioningly. Fellow frightened little men fit that requirement to a T.

All the news stories last night and commentators today on the appointment by Trump of Kash Patel to head the FBI have started out with the proposition that he is a “dangerous” and “shocking” appointment. He is neither. He’s not shocking, because Trump has made it clear over the last two years that he was going to put someone like Patel in the job of FBI Director. He’s not dangerous, because you’ve got to be effective to be dangerous, and Patel hasn’t been effective at anything he’s ever done.

Patel got his start as an aide to Devin Nunes when he was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 2017. Nunes, with the able help of Patel, fucked up that job by the numbers. He claimed he received classified documents from unnamed sources that would prove that President Obama had “tapped my wires,” as Trump had claimed, and he would show them to the White House. The documents came from two National Security aides in the White House, with whom Nunes met secretly one night in early March of 2017. Nunes and Patel took the documents, which turned out not to be secret at all, back to the Capitol, where Nunes shared them with the press, and then made a show of taking them to the White House to show them to Trump, whose aides had had them all along. Even Trump toady Lindsey Graham compared Nunes to the fictional and incompetent “Inspector Clouseau.”

Patel stayed with Nunes throughout his comical attempts to prove anything Trump said about “Russia Russia Russia” was true. The problem was, they kept running up against uncomfortable facts. Trump’s campaign aide George Papadopoulos had, in fact, met with Russian agents of the GRU who offered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. When Nunes traveled to London to meet with MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, the British office of government communications, no one would meet with him. Patel was his aide on all this.

Patel got a job as a counterterrorism specialist on the Trump National Security Council and promptly inserted himself right in the middle of Trump’s botched attempts to use Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas – remember him? – to pressure Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to open a fake investigation of Joe Biden that Trump could use against him in the presidential campaign. Patel’s many laughable maneuvers in that clusterfuck are too numerous to go into here, but suffice to say that Patel’s frequent contacts with Giuliani tell you pretty much all you need to know about how effective and successful that scam was.

Patel next popped into public view when Trump appointed him as Chief of Staff to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who replaced Mark Esper in the job after Patel accused him of being disloyal to Trump by refusing to deploy active-duty soldiers to put down George Floyd protests. During Patel’s three months in the Pentagon, he served alongside Ezra Cohen-Watnick, one of the sources who provided Nunes with the fake documents that “proved” Obama had tapped Trump’s “wires.”

While Trump was out of office, Patel was given a job with Trump’s social media company and with one of his superpacs, where he was paid several hundred thousand dollars for what amounted to no-show jobs. Patel also earned money hawking pro-Trump T-shirts and other cheap trash under the company name “K$H.” He also sold pills he claimed would reverse the effects of the COVID vaccine and wrote a series of children’s books that featured the character of “King Donald.”

Okay, Patel is one more grifter in the great panoply of Trump loyalists who have made careers out of their closeness and loyalty to the Great Man, for which he was promoted ever-upward. Every person who has ever had a government job at any level – county, city, state, federal – or in a corporation, has known a Kash Patel, a creepy little briefcase-carrier who’s always currying favor with the boss, and despite any evidence of having skills other than self-promotion and ass-kissing, just keeps getting promoted or shifted job titles that keep him or her employed and in a position where they can serve the interests of the boss.

That’s the point, how common the Kash Patels of the world are, how well known they are to anyone who has a job where they are actually required to produce stuff, whether it’s studies, or plans, or construct roads, or build cars, or come up with ideas for products that will produce income or in government, programs that are successful in what they are intended to do. Sniveling little suck ups like Patel are so prevalent in American life that everyone has had to suffer under them during their professional lives. So, if you know anything you say to a certain co-worker is going straight into the ear of the boss, you tend to keep your mouth shut about things you don’t want the boss to hear about. If one of these Patel-like suck ups is known for taking credit for ideas he or she didn’t come up with, then ideas of those down in the trenches of the government agency or corporation aren’t shared with that person. If a suck up is known for stabbing others in the back to get his or her way, then people learn not to present their backs in such a way that they will be easily accessed by a knife.

Here is how Patel described in a recent right-wing podcast interview what he would do if he was appointed FBI Director: “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I’d take the seven thousand employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops, go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers. What do you need seven thousand people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here? Looking for the next government promotion.”

There are about 35,000 people who work for the FBI in all kinds of capacities, from field agents to office staff to evidence analysis to legal advisors to certified public accountants involved in investigating financial crimes. It’s a long list of people, many of whom have had long careers in the FBI doing the work of law enforcement, some of it drudge work that isn’t fun to do, but must be done if crimes are to be investigated and criminals are to be caught and put in prison. Many of these people in the FBI are very smart. Some FBI agents have law degrees. The minimum requirement is a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, accounting, forensic science, and other professional fields. They must have at least two years work experience in some form of law enforcement. Employment in the FBI is highly competitive. Only 20 percent of those seeking jobs with the FBI are accepted to begin the process of meeting employment qualifications. Many are eliminated by failing writing tests, interviews, medical and physical fitness exams, background checks, or field training schooling at the FBI Academy. As few as two to three percent of applicants meet all the requirements and become FBI agents.

My point is, the FBI isn’t a number like Patel’s 7,000. It’s people. They know stuff. They read the newspapers. They watch the news on TV. They are well-informed. When Kash Patel describes them as people who are just “looking for the next government promotion,” they know he is describing himself, not them.

The FBI is full of expert bureaucratic in-fighters. The people who reach positions of leadership are in charge of hundreds of employees under them and budgets in the millions that they have to fight for. Some fight for the FBI budget in Congress, some fight for departmental budgets inside the FBI. They’re not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

They see Kash Patel coming, and they’re not going to lie down and take it from this sniveling little fool.

Bureaucrats are experts at delay, obfuscation, dodging orders, putting things off for another day, flooding the zone with paperwork, overloading the system with unmanageable data, creating streams of seemingly important but useless data. You name it, they can do it. Kash Patel will land at the FBI, and he won’t know whether he’s coming or going. His instinct will be to hire and surround himself with other Trump toadies like Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, the other Trump national security council official who provided Nunes and Patel with the fake secret documents that failed to prove Obama tapped anybody’s “wires,” least of all Donald Trump’s.

The problem with loyalists is their predictability. Patel will lash out without thinking, make assertions that cannot be proven, flaunt conspiracy theories that are dead letters on arrival. The problem is, he will be at the head of an agency that is evidence-based by its very nature, employing thousands of people who have spent their lives being tested in courts of law, where telling a lie can get you put in prison.

Loyalty is not a measure of a person’s worth unless that loyalty is to something greater than oneself. Patel will imitate the man who put him in power. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s a piss-poor way to run a railroad, or the FBI, as the saying goes.