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When a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts last year, conservative podcaster Dan Bongino made a veiled threat on social media. “The irony about this for the scumbag commie libs is that the cold civil war they’re pushing for will end really badly for them,” he wrote. Liberals, Bongino said, had been playing at revolution and would now get a taste of the real thing. “They’re not ready for what comes next.”

I suppose he was right about one thing: We’re not ready. On Sunday, Trump announced that Bongino, a former Secret Service agent turned far-right pundit, would be deputy director of the FBI. A man who once claimed that his sole focus was “owning the libs” will now be second-in-command at the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, a position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. Last year on his streaming show, Bongino cackled about the idea that America has a system of checks and balances, saying, with wild, angry eyes, “Power. That is all that matters.” He’s about to have an ungodly amount of it.

Bongino’s boss, of course, will be Kash Patel, the Trumpworld enforcer whom the supine Senate confirmed as FBI director last week. During his confirmation hearings, Patel insisted that, despite publishing an actual enemies list of people he considered deep state villains, he had no intention of turning the FBI into an instrument of retribution. It seemed obvious at the time that he was lying; making Bongino his deputy simply rubs it in our faces. If you wanted to turn the FBI into a Trumpist Praetorian Guard, Bongino is exactly the kind of guy you’d hire.

The new deputy director of the FBI cut his teeth as a talking head with frequent appearances on the Alex Jones show. He then had a show on NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now-defunct streaming service. Eventually, Bongino became a near-constant presence on Fox News, thrilling a first-term Trump with his apoplectic denunciations of Trump’s foes and, later, his stolen election conspiracy theories.

Bongino and Fox parted ways in 2023 — he says over a contract dispute. He continued to build influence on right-wing video platform Rumble, a company he owns a lucrative piece of, which also hosts Steve Bannon, self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate and white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Angelo Carusone, president of watchdog group Media Matters for America, said that even among the right-wing broadcasters with whom Trump has staffed his nascent administration, Bongino stands out as a conduit between the fever swamps and the president. Now Bongino is in a place to turn wild notions from the right-wing internet into pretexts for federal investigations. Before Trump’s inauguration, for example, Bongino said the FBI was “hiding a massive fake assassination plot to shut down the questioning of the 2020 election.” It is hardly far-fetched to think he’d use this phantasm as an excuse to harass Democrats.

In writing about our country’s rapid self-immolation, I try to ration Hannah Arendt references, lest every column be about the ways “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951, foreshadows the waking nightmare that is this government. But contemplating Bongino’s ascension, it’s hard to avoid the famous Arendt quote, “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Trump could have found a smoother and more sophisticated ideologue to help him transform the FBI into a tool of his will, perhaps someone from the Claremont Institute ready to put an erudite spin on authoritarianism. He wanted the jacked-up hothead.

This administration professes a devotion to merit-based hiring, blaming diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for fostering mediocrity. It should go without saying, however, that excellence is of little interest to the Trumpists, who delight in scandalizing a meritocracy that spurned them. Writing of the conditions in which both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin arose, Arendt described a spirit of deep, corrosive cynicism and nihilistic glee at the inversion of old standards. “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest,” she wrote. Sound familiar?

We’re in an uncanny interregnum where Trump and his coterie are laying the foundation for autocracy but have yet to fully consolidate their power. The liberal democracy most of us grew up taking for granted is brittle and teetering, but its fall still feels unthinkable, even if it also seems increasingly inevitable. Perhaps this is one reason Democrats, with a few admirable exceptions, seem so frozen. People who’ve spent their lives working within a system of laws and civic institutions may be particularly unsuited to respond to that system’s failure. But an FBI run by Patel and Bongino is a sign that the system — which for all its manifold flaws has provided Americans a level of stability uncommon in history — is falling apart.

On his show last month, Bongino gloated over the angst Trump’s nominees were causing career civil servants, cheering on the president’s “total personnel warfare.” Then he took out two plastic toy robots: an orange one to represent Trump and a blue one he called “liberal screaming Karen.” He used the Trump robot to beat the lady one, smashing it over and over. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “This is how we fix this place.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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