Meet The 22-Year-Old Twit Charged With Keeping America Safe From Iranian Sleeper Terrorists!
We feel so safe!
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. The United States launches an unjustified attack on a foreign nation with a majority-Muslim population. And no matter whether the attack achieves whatever its goals are or not, the federal government warns the public that there might be revenge attacks by sleeper cells living quiet lives running bodegas in New York or something. But now those cells have been activated, so we all need to be alert and to watch for anything suspicious and also walk around in our daily lives with our heads on a swivel so if you see something, say something.
We’re hearing some of this kind of stuff in the wake of this weekend’s bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. But just in case those sleeper cells really do come alive and set in motion their revenge plots exist, we can thank the Lord that Emperor of the Firmament and All the Heavens Donald Trump has put a hyper-qualified official into a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security job overseeing some of the department’s terrorism prevention efforts, just in case.
And by hyper-qualified, we mean the dude is a 22-year-old MAGA boob who used to work at the grocery store.
Everyone meet Thomas Fugate, a man whose face in his official photo practically shouts, “Put your hands over your drinks!” ProPublica ran a story on Fugate in the long-ago days of three weeks ago, when it felt like just one more atrocity in an administration that is made up of nothing but atrocities. But it seems newly relevant now if one wants to think about how seriously to take all the fearmongering and rah-rah-rah chest-thumping coming out of the White House.
Seriously, did he think arching that eyebrow made him somehow look more adult? Or did he once have a terrible accident involving an exploding can of Axe body spray, and now his eyebrow is permanently frozen in that position? If it’s the former, pffft, nice try, kid. If it’s the latter, we apologize for mocking his disability.
According to ProPublica, Fugate is now a DHS official “overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention.” This includes “an $18 million grant intended to help communities combat violent extremism.” He also oversees the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, which is supposed to prevent “hate-fueled attacks … and other forms of targeted violence.”
This is a big job for a dude who just graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio a year ago and whose LinkedIn page notes that most of his leadership experience comes from serving as the secretary general of a Model United Nations Club. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has called attention to the fact that Fugate’s previous jobs include ringing up groceries and landscaping.
Imagine, in a few short years you go from asking if someone had any problems finding the peanut butter or the cereal to running an office tasked with tracking down drug cartels.
Fugate did also intern at the Heritage Foundation at some point. And he appears to be a world-class suck-up, having spent his first post-graduation months traveling to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Donald Trump’s 78th birthday and Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.
To be fair, extreme sucking up is the main qualification one needs to advance in Trump World. Any other experience is considered woke, and therefore suspect.
We are very excited to see what new and innovative ways to head off extremist attacks in the wake of the Iran strikes this inexperienced and callow little twerp comes up with. Did he spend the weekend brainstorming and then go into the office on Monday and suggested dumping roofies in Iran’s entire water supply? Just asking!
ProPublica asked DHS for a little more detail on Fugate’s job and got the following response:
A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.
“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”
He was an aide in IBS and did so well that they put him in charge of an office that once had 80 people, but now has fewer than 20 thanks to the administration’s insane cutbacks. Which means he likely inherited an office dealing with low morale as it scrambles to do the same amount of work.
ProPublica reports that security experts have two theories for why Fugate got this job. One is that it’s mostly a resume-boosting title to reward his sucking up, but the office is such a mess that he doesn’t actually have much power.
The other theory is that Fugate is a MAGA true believer who is mostly there to wind down CPPP’s operations, tossing the remaining employees and their years of counterterrorism experience in the trash as the government reorients its entire modus operandi around Donald Trump’s instincts.
We favor the second explanation, for the simple reason that it is dumber and more short-sighted, and we generally count on the Trump administration to always take the dumber and more short-sighted path.
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I'll just say out loud what everyone is thinking.
What's to prevent a group of foreign terrorists from going to some outdoor supply stores, donning masks, grabbling an unmarked van and pushing their way into a place pretending to be ICE where they proceed to plant a bomb or other device?
It’s rob schneider