Kashing Out

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, May 08, 2026

 

Trying to choose the worst member of the president’s Cabinet is like trying to choose the best Beatles song. There are so many stellar contenders that your answer will differ hour by hour, depending on your mood.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a strong pick, an avatar of dark-age populist kookery bent on hollowing out America’s defenses to infectious diseases. If the hantavirus comes ashore and the bodies start piling up because the U.S. can’t quickly muster a response, RFK will lock down the title of “absolute worst” for posterity.

 

Pete Hegseth is another fine choice, for reasons I’ve explained many times before. Unqualified for his job, destructive to his department, and sadistic in his enthusiasm for war crimes, he’s essentially the platonic ideal of a Trump appointee.

 

And then there’s Kash Patel, a chud of unusually pristine purity.

 

The FBI director is unlike Kennedy and Hegseth in an important way. For better or worse (mostly worse), the latter two have agendas about which they care passionately. Kennedy is a crusader against vaccines and a proponent of healthier eating. Hegseth is a culture warrior keen to rid the Pentagon of vestiges of “diversity” and codes of conduct that limit “lethality.”

 

Patel has nothing like that. There’s nothing he seems to yearn to do with his job except keep it, and the perks that come with it.

 

Frat boy.

 

That means making the president happy, of course. And he’s tried to do that.

 

Under Patel’s leadership, the FBI has purged agents who investigated Donald Trump during the last administration, rifled through its files for dirt on the White House’s enemies, harassed MAGA hate objects with embarrassingly flimsy indictments, and doggedly pursued the truth of what really happened in the 2020 presidential election. (Spoiler: Joe Biden won.)

 

All of that reflects Trump’s agenda, and Patel has dutifully moved forward with it. But beyond that? His only priority, as far as I can tell, is to be a big shot and to enjoy the trappings of bigshottery.

 

According to reports, he assigned an FBI SWAT team to protect his girlfriend, has ordered federal agents to drive her friends home when they’re drunk, and commandeered one of the agency’s jets to visit her. In a separate instance, the FBI’s evidence team was late in responding to a mass shooting because Patel had taken a jet to Florida the day before.

 

He leveraged his quasi-celebrity status to get through the door to the locker room at the Winter Olympics after Team USA won gold in men’s hockey, where he was caught on video drinking a beer with the boys. The president wasn’t happy about that—but it wasn’t the splashiest news this year involving the director and alcohol. Last month The Atlantic claimed that Patel’s “drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government” and that on several occasions “his security detail had difficulty waking [him] because he was seemingly intoxicated.”

 

Patel filed a defamation suit against the magazine after the article was published. The Atlantic responded to that with a second story published Wednesday, alleging that the director is known to “travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon” bearing his name, title, and the FBI shield. (Supposedly, he’s gifted bottles to FBI staff and civilians, never mind that the agency frowns on alcohol use.) That’s not the only example of Kash—or Ka$h, as he often dubs himself—treating his job as a “branding” opportunity. And by no means is it the most embarrassing.

 

For all his obsequiousness to Trump, some of Patel’s most abusive moves have been about protecting himself, not the president. After the New York Times published a story about his girlfriend receiving federal protection, the FBI reportedly began investigating the reporter who wrote it for “stalking.” A separate probe was allegedly launched to sniff out the sources for The Atlantic’s account of his drinking, even though that story doesn’t involve classified information. And, er, despite the fact that Patel claims the report is a lie.

 

The latest, as I write this on Friday, is that the director has ordered two dozen former and current members of his security detail to be polygraphed to determine if they’ve been leaking about him. Per MS NOW, Patel “walled himself off from some senior bureau leaders this week” by ducking meetings with them, seemingly paranoid that every encounter with his deputies risks creating humiliating new leaks that will finally lead the president to say enough’s enough.

 

A Dispatch colleague cut to the heart of Patel’s persona when he described him this morning as “a frat boy sycophant trying to live it up as long as his dad keeps giving him the keys to the house in the Hamptons.” The man who calls himself “Ka$h” may or may not be the worst member of Trump’s Cabinet, but between his vacuous servility, adolescent antics, and horribly cringy habit of self-promotion, he’s assuredly the purest chud in this administration.

 

Why does he still have a job?

 

Apathy.

 

The answer has three parts. The first is that, for all his faults, Americans don’t much seem to care that he’s in charge of federal law enforcement. There’s no discernible Kash Patel backlash of which I’m aware.

 

That’s what distinguishes him from Kristi Noem.

 

The now-former head of the Department of Homeland Security committed many of the same sins that Patel has. Like him, she was an unusually shameless self-promoter. Like him, she enjoyed flying around on taxpayer-funded jets a bit too much. Like him, she was (allegedly!) involved in a romantic relationship that generated bad headlines for the White House. And like him, the chaos she created inside her agency badly damaged morale.

 

Noem wasn’t fired because she embarrassed the president, though.

 

She was fired because Trump needed a fall guy for public fury over the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis during which federal agents killed two Americans. "Everything I've done, I've done at the direction of the president and Stephen” Miller, Noem reportedly told a confidant after the second killing. No matter: Trump wanted a scalp to show voters that he agreed things had gone too far, and Noem was a lot more expendable to his operation than Miller was.

 

The FBI hasn’t yet suffered a black eye like the one DHS sustained in Minnesota. An Iranian terror attack on U.S. soil would change that, especially after Patel fired a bunch of counterintelligence agents days before the Iran War began to punish them for their prior work investigating Trump. But absent some spectacular failure, civically comatose Americans seem more or less fine with letting him turn the FBI into a laughingstock whose highest priority is hassling anyone who makes him, or the president, mad.

 

Loyalty.

 

The second part of the answer has to do with loyalty. In an administration teeming with toadies who compete aggressively to lick the president’s boots, Patel appears to have earned a special place in the president’s heart for the depth and duration of his devotion.

 

That’s what distinguishes him from Pam Bondi.

 

The now-former attorney general was also a Trump crony of longstanding, having lent her legal expertise to the “rigged election” nonsense in 2020, but she didn’t work for the president’s first administration. Patel did, joining the National Security Council in 2019, then being promoted to deputy director of national intelligence a year later, and advancing to become chief of staff to the secretary of defense during the chaotic post-election period in 2020.

 

His meteoric rise would have continued, too, if Trump had had his way. In December 2020 the president was preparing to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, but he backed off when then-director Gina Haspel threatened to quit if the appointment went through.

 

What did Kash Patel, a man with comparatively little federal experience, do to convince the president he was worthy of these very important positions? Exactly what you suspect: He fed Trump’s grievances about the “deep state.”

 

Patel was a principal author of the memo that his then-boss, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, released in 2018 alleging abuses in how the Justice Department surveilled and “unmasked” Trump associates. Surrounded at the time by institutionalists like James Mattis and John Kelly, the president lacked advisers who were eager to go on offense against the DOJ and FBI for probing his campaign’s ties to Russia. In Patel he found a kindred spirit, a character willing to challenge his antagonists within the federal bureaucracy.

 

That’s why the president was so keen to move him up the ranks at the Pentagon and CIA. “Trump regarded Patel as somebody who he could trust to do whatever he asked, without challenging, slow-walking, questioning his judgment or asking too many annoying questions,” Axios reported in 2021. Kash would be the president’s eyes and ears inside the upper echelons of the “deep state,” riding herd on those whom Trump believed had conspired against him to rig the 2020 election.

 

Patel was a Trump 2.0 guy in a Trump 1.0 world, in short, and the president never forgot it. He’s forever searching for new Roy Cohns, the kind of amoral “fixer” who’ll nurse his grudges and follow any order without qualms, and few came closer to fitting the bill during his first administration than the current director of the FBI. That’s why Bondi was ultimately dispensable while Patel (so far) is not, never mind that Bondi’s failure to persecute Trump’s enemies was surely due in part to Patel’s failure to build cases against them.

 

One of them had ascended to a Roy Cohn tier of toadying in Trump’s eyes, the other hadn’t. He won’t part lightly with the former.

 

Saving face.

 

I can’t prove it, but it’s likely that Kash Patel was the very first person the president had in mind to join his next Cabinet as he campaigned for reelection.

 

“Get ready, Kash. Get ready.” Trump uttered those words all the way back in December 2023 in a speech to the New York Young Republicans Club, with Patel in attendance. He had already made clear months before that “retribution” would be his highest priority if he returned to office. And there was one man whom he trusted above virtually all others to execute on it.

 

Why wouldn’t he? In addition to encouraging Trump’s “deep state” vendetta during his first term, Patel spent the MAGA interregnum putting together an enemies list (which includes The Dispatch’s own Sarah Isgur) and writing a children’s book(!) about Democrats’ scheme to delegitimize the president by tying him to Russia. Title: The Plot Against the King.

 

Installing Kash Patel atop the FBI would be a victory for Trump twice over. It would be an operational victory, implanting a crony whose loyalty is beyond reproach into the beating heart of the “deep state.” But it would also represent a moral victory for a president who had been burned not once but twice before by FBI directors.

 

During his first term, Trump asked for James Comey’s “loyalty” and was enraged when Comey opted to pursue the Russiagate probe anyway. He replaced him with Christopher Wray, no doubt believing that a handpicked appointee would get the message and prioritize the president’s political interests. His reward for that, after he left office, was watching Wray’s FBI build two separate federal cases against him for meddling with the 2020 election and concealing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

 

Trump wasn’t about to let himself be bitten a third time. The point of his second administration (besides keeping himself out of prison) is finally getting to do things his way, to govern how he wanted to during his first term but was kept from doing by RINOs and assorted traitors. “Kash Patel, FBI director” is the president doing things his way. He vanquished the “deep state.” He got the guy he wanted all along.

 

Annnnnnd … that guy has turned out to be every bit the unfit, unprofessional, embarrassing yutz that Trump’s critics claimed he would be.

 

How can the president bear to concede that, which is what firing Patel would amount to?

 

Kash Patel is populism in microcosm, a demagogue with a modest talent for identifying the foibles of the ruling class who, upon tasting power, instantly demonstrates that he’s worse than they are in every way. The president will fire him eventually, I assume, as Trump probably has some theoretical limit to how much shame he’s willing to let his deputies cause him, and Patel will inevitably exceed it. But when the axe falls at last, it’ll feel like a verdict on this entire administration: America wanted to see what would happen if we let populists have the run of the place for once, and the result is so ugly that even Trump can’t pretend otherwise.

 

As reluctant as the president normally is to hand scalps to his enemies, imagine how much more reluctant he must be to hand them this one. Scalping Patel will be like scalping MAGA itself. Ironically, by stubbornly sticking with his FBI director for now as the political pain mounts, he’s mirroring how (most of) his own voters are handling his own failures on Iran and the cost of living. Given a choice between confessing that they made a terrible mistake and reluctantly supporting an awful status quo to save face, they choose face.

 

All the rest of us can do is try to look on the bright side. Each new Trump “deep state” appointee tends to be more loathsome than the person they replace, as Todd Blanche is presently demonstrating. We’ll be lucky as a country if the most repellent thing about Patel’s successor is that he goes on benders more frequently than Kash (allegedly!) does.

 

In the meantime, we have an answer to the question, “How much incompetence is Donald Trump willing to put up with in an agency head in return for absolute loyalty?” This much.