Presenting Your New FBI Second-In-Command: Wingnut Meathead Dan Bongino!
Something about Caligula wanting to appoint his horse as a consul.
Dan Bongino, one of the meatier meatheads in all of MAGA-land, is set to be the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Clyde Tolson to Kash Patel’s J. Edgar Hoover. Huge congrats to Bingbong on ascending to a job whose standard-bearer was one of American history’s most devoted lickspittles.
Christ. We never thought we would write words like this in this particular order, but: this appointment is so incredibly disrespectful to the FBI, which does very serious work and needs and deserves better leaders than a grifting try-hard clown and a sentient muscle shirt covered in Vaseline stains.
It is also disrespectful to the entire concept of good government, though we suppose that horse is out of the barn for the foreseeable future at this point.
Donald Trump made the announcement himself Sunday night with a post on his dumb social media site:
In case you are wondering, no, this is not a Senate-confirmed position, so we will all be deprived of the joy of seeing Bongino try to explain to the Senate Judiciary Committee why he thinks “libs are the biggest pussies” he has ever seen.
What is your favorite part of Trump's announcement? Ours is definitely the bit about the incredible sacrifice Bongino is making in giving up his podcasting career. In Trump’s mind there is no higher skill than the ability to yammer incessantly about made-up conspiracy theories so long as lots of people are listening to you.
And podcasting has been probably Bongino’s most successful venture as an adult. His show on NRATV lasted for a year. Fox News dumped his ass after nearly a decade of polluting their airwaves. When you suck too much for Fox News, you must really suck.
Bongino also ran for both the Senate and the House and lost multiple times in two different states. He ineptly tried to get around a ban on YouTube, which resulted in a permanent banning. He was an early investor in Parler, the right-wing social media site that was going to be one of the original wingnut alternatives to Twitter and which lasted for about ten minutes before collapsing. He sued The Daily Beast over its coverage of his firing from NRATV, and lost so thoroughly that not only did the judge dismiss the suit, he ordered Bongino to pay $31,000 to cover the Beast’s legal fees.
Such a record definitively qualifies a person to be the second-in-command of America’s largest law enforcement agency despite his remotely relevant law enforcement experience being all of four years on the NYPD and a decade in the Secret Service.
Bongino never held a supervisory role at either of those law enforcement jobs. His most notable accomplishment during his decade in the Secret Service was reportedly exaggerating his role and importance in order to sell his memoir.
This is important, too. Traditionally, the deputy director has been a career FBI agent, someone who knows the ins and outs of an organization with 38,000 employees. Someone who has come up through the ranks and commands the respect of coworkers. Some nameless bureaucrat who puts his head down and does the work while the director deals with a lot of political bullshit. Someone who cares more about the Constitution than the person who appointed him.
For that last one, think Mark Felt, Nixon’s Deep Throat. Think Andrew McCabe, who was driven out of the FBI in Trump’s first term for the extraordinary sin of doing his job properly, and who had to sue the federal government over his dismissal, which came one day before he was going to retire and qualify for a pension after over 20 years of service to the Bureau.
An experienced deputy director seems particularly important when the new FBI director is a neophyte with zero ties to the Bureau and a conspiracy theorist’s Art-Bell-infused ideas about how the place works. But as Josh Marshall said after the news broke on Sunday night, the best thing you can say about Bongino is that he makes Patel look “moderately well qualified.”
Bongino is such a bad choice for this job that wags on social media spent Sunday night wondering if we have reached the “Caligula appoints his horse as a consul” stages of the Trump presidency yet, an entire 35 days into it. (Is Caligula’s horse worse than Dan Bongino? We say neigh!)
In short, Dan Bongino is an extraordinary bullshit artist who has now bullshitted his way into a job requiring actual responsibility and management skills, which he will likely put to work proving that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by some unholy combination of the Deep State, communists, and the Freemasons.
After all that, we still find it hard to fully express how insane it is to choose Bongino for this position. Even in an administration that is basically affirmative action for mediocre-at-best buttwads like Patel and Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem, this one really stands out.
Here you have a guy who has encouraged potential witnesses in FBI investigations to not cooperate with the FBI. (Specifically there, the one about the secret Russian payments to MAGA podcasters to get their Russian message out there.) Here you have a right-wing nut whose biggest qualification is sucking up to Donald Trump, parroting his positions: hatred of vaccine and mask mandates, the Russia investigation, the Deep State. A guy who has bought into election denialism, decried all of the president’s felony indictments and convictions, and agreed with Trump on literally every other controversy of the past decade.
The perfect Trumpist, in other words: an unqualified sycophant who, whatever he lacks in brains, makes up for in bombast.
On the plus side for criminals, there has never been a better time to commit crimes that the FBI might be tasked with solving.
Please help keep Wonkette supplied with liquor and beta blockers.
I once made Bongo Boingo come unglued as he was ratioed to hell and back for being stupid enough to attempt to clap back at me when I humiliated him for his claims that the Nazis were socialists. He finally deleted the entire tweet after I wrote: “Dude, we can all hear that forehead vein pulsing. Calm down before you have a stroke.”
It was fun. But he blocked me. And then shortly after I started receiving rape and death threats from his super “traditionally masculine” followers.
Recall when we were worried that Trump 2.0 would surround himself with competent advisors?