“FOR MY FRIENDS, EVERYTHING; FOR MY ENEMIES, THE LAW.”

If you want to assemble infrastructure for an authoritarian government, this is what you do.

"Enshittification" was a good word to describe Trump’s goals, though I personally go with "kakistocracy" (In case you’ve forgotten or didn’t know, the word is Greek, and refers to “government by the least-qualified or unprincipled citizens - government by the worst men”).

But even Kakistocracy doesn’t fully capture what Charlie Sykes called “the dazzling craptacularity of this moment.” What we are witness to is the utter preposterousness of what the most damaged psyche in history wants to do to “get revenge” on all those who ignored him as he pressed his nose against the glass door to social acceptance, forever excluded from “polite society.” He wants to blow it all up for their crime of not recognizing him as the glorious genius he alone knows he truly is.

As completely preposterous as the incompetent sex trafficker Matt Gaetz was as Attorney General, or the skeevy chode (called out as such by his own mother) Pete Hegseth is as Secretary of Defense, or the science-denying scumbag RFK Jr (called out as such by the rest of his relatives) is as Secretary of Health and Human Services, or the Russian asset (they say so themselves) Tulsi Gabbard is as Director of National Inelligence - that a dedicated fanatic like Kash Patel can be nominated to run the FBI is genuinely scary.

But “scary” is the point - a feature, not a bug. Trump’s predecessors in office all tried with mixed success to sell hope or unity; the return of happy days; called us to a higher purpose; even presented their hopes as a plea to the better angels of our nature.

Instilling fear is Trump’s goal. It’s the message Trump’s buddy Elon Musk now puts out in a steady stream on Xitter (that’s pronounced “Shitter”): “Be afraid.” “We are coming after you.” “We are now the law.” “Judge Dredd is coming.”

Over the past three weeks since the election, Trump has released the names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves; beginning with some relatively “conventional” choices, he began the weekend after to unload bombshell after bombshell. The goal was to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Baanon puts it, with the goal of paralyzing Republican Sentorial opposition and to also overwhelm the limited political attention span the American public possesses.

But beyond all the others - from the absolutely unqualified to the ideological nightmares - his Saturday night post on (Un)Truth (Anti)Social, announcing the nomination of Kash Patel as Director of the FBI shoots from kakistrocracy through enshittification, craptacular and preposterous to score a bullseye at Truly Outrageous.

A Patel nomination to a position in law enforcement or intelligence has lurked as a possibility going back to the end of Trump 1.0. Most believed he could only be placed in position as a Number Two who would not face the senate approval he could not get. That Trump waited till now, and made the nomination at the level he did, shows his belief that he has created enough outrage and exhaustion with his other nominations, and is now free to scream Fuck You to all. This isn’t just a “Fuck You!” to law enforcement, a sharp stick in the eye to professionalism. This is a “Fuck You, You Can’t Do Shit About This!” to John Roberts and the other traitors on the Unsupreme Court who decided to put Trump above the law. It’s “What The Fuck Do You Think About That - Boy?”

Kash Patel is absolutely dangerous.

He is Reinhard Heydrich leading the Sicherheitsdienst.

For Trump, nominating Patel serves several goals. It demonstrates he is taking his razor-thin 1.6% election win as a mandate to rule as he pleases; Patel is proof he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks and that those who think Susie Wiles will bring any order to this chaos are deluded. Second, this lets him show that the objections of senior elected Republicans are of no consequence, that he can flatten them politically at will. Even knowing what his first term was like, enough Americans chose to return him to office; he has taken that narrow decision as a license to do whatever he wants.

Patel’s nomination is shocking in many ways. Like the other preposterous, outrageous senior Trump nominees, his only qualification is his willingness to do Trump’s bidding without hesitation. Patel has no ideological or religious beliefs like Vought, which provide a rough guide to what can be expected from him, thus allowing opposition to organize. Patel’s only goal is to please Donald Trump, and to achieve this he will literally do anything.

Trump has daily demonstrated his ability to be worse than any opponent can imagine. Now he will have a servant who is will never question any one of his master’s terrible whims or outrageous beliefs. A servant in control of federal law enforcement, willing to turn it loose on whatever target the sick mind of Donald Trump chooses. In an administration full of loyalists and sycophants, Patel will be exceptional in his devotion, his priorities always subject to his mercurial master’s insane wishes.

Patel was recognized as the danger he was by nearly everyone in the upper levels of the first Trump administrtion. During the final days of Trump 1.0, when he thought to name Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted chief of staff Mark Meadows and said, “Over my dead body.” When Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, Director Gina Haspel threatened to resign; Trump relented only after Mike Pence led an intervention.

What wouldn’t a lackey like Patel do, if asked or ordered?

Patel later wrote in one of the three books he has written in the four years since Trump left office that he “wouldn’t sit quietly and accept their actions to stonewall direct orders from the president.”

Trump has promised to learn from his mistakes. When he returns to the White House in 50 days, there will be no Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he sets out t o gain his revenge against his political enemies. There will be Patel - whose true faith and allegiance belongs not to a nation, but to one man.

“Kash, I know you’re probably going to be head of the CIA,” Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast a year ago, this December. “But do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in pretty short order, the first couple of months, so we can get rolling on prosecutions?”

Patel responded, “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you.”

Russians speak of the “power ministries,” those departments possessing significant legal and coercive capacity. In the United States, those “power ministries” are the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community. Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions who will follow his orders, unbound by the law or the Constitution.

According to one longtime advisor, Trump once said of Patel,“A lot of people say he’s crazy. I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.”

Peruvian strongman Óscar R. Benavides once stated a simple operating principle for authoritarian crony government - kakistocracy: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

We have been warned. Trump has clearly told us, “Expect the worst.”

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