The dynamic duo of deranged

Trump's No. 2 at the FBI, Dan Bongino, is an unhinged match for crazy-eyed Kash Patel

By Sam Bellamy

Our stable genius, whose perception of reality is shaped largely by what he watches on TV, has now named 21 Fox News personalities and contributors to top posts in his new administration.

This is the federal government equivalent of a Major League Baseball team calling up the most directionally challenged children in a T-ball league and the most inebriated players in a beer-bellied men’s softball league. But this is what 49.7% of the popular vote for Trump gets us. (By the way, that’s a 1.5 percentage point lead over Kamala Harris and one of the smallest margins of victory ever but somehow still a “mandate” in Trump’s mind.)

The latest prospect from Fox to get the call from Trump is Dan Bongino, who will serve as deputy FBI director. Apparently naming crazy-eyed Kash Patel to lead the agency wasn’t punishment enough for the men and women in the bureau who’ve investigated Trump in the past decade. Another fanatic was needed to create a dynamic duo of deranged.

Bongino served four years as a New York City police officer and 12 as a Secret Service agent, including stints on the security detail for George W. Bush in his second term and Barack Obama in his first.

Bongino resigned from the latter job to make an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate from Maryland in 2012 and lost twice more in races for the House of Representatives, first from Maryland in 2014 and then from Florida in 2016.

Ordinarily, a fellow like this would be deemed a “loser” in Trump world, but somehow those failures – and his Fox News gig and subsequent podcast career – make him uniquely qualified to help guide the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

You may recall Bongino gained a bit of notoriety during his campaigns for office when he claimed to possess secret information overheard during his time near Obama and boasted that he’d listened to “high-level discussions.” None of that was well received by Secret Service colleagues, who criticized him for breaking confidentiality and trading on the agency’s name.

In 2013, Bongino became a regular guest on the vile Alex Jones’ Infowars, joining episodes where the latter promoted disgusting conspiracy theories about the slaughter of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that led to the harassment of grieving parents. Jones, of course, is a star in Trump world, appearing at campaign events with Trump and bully apprentice JD Vance.

As Wired magazine recounts in a great piece about his background, Bongino proclaimed on Infowars that Democrats weren’t managing the crisis at Sandy Hook but engaging in “crisis-leveraging [and] using a national emotional crisis to get you to believe things that simply aren’t true.” He also declared, without proof, that CIA agents were ordered to stand down during the terrorist attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya.

Bongino specialized in wearing ill-fitting t-shirts and promoting ill-conceived theories on Fox News before shifting back to podcasts.

Bongino began hosting his own podcasts and later scored a show on the National Rifle Association’s TV station, where he blasted the Mueller investigation into the Trump administration’s ties to Russia. Bongino called it “the biggest scandal in American history” – referring not to allegations of Russian meddling in our election but to Democrats trying to get to the bottom of Trump’s dealings with Vladimir Putin.

Over time, Bongino became something of a radio star among conservatives fond of conspiracies as he filled in for Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and was chosen to succeed Rush Limbaugh.

But it was probably Bongino’s work on Fox News that won Trump’s admiration. On a Saturday night show called Unfiltered, Bongino spread lies about mask mandates during COVID, gave QAnon nutjobs a wider audience, promoted fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson’s pet theory that there’s a conspiracy to replace white men in America with people of color and – of course – claimed that Trump really won the 2020 election.

In 2023, Bongino left Fox News for undisclosed reasons and joined Rumble, a video streaming site whose investors include Vance. There, he’s continued his batshit commentary, including regular attacks on the FBI he now helps lead.

As Wired notes, Bongino’s appointment to serve with Patel has been received warmly among conspiracy theorists. “Trump has brought together the dream team, the Avengers,” one prominent QAnon promoter wrote. “Get your popcorn ready.”

At various times, according to NPR, Bongino has called FBI agents “thugs” and argued the agency has been “weaponized” against conservatives. "The FBI is now a fully corrupt organization," Bongino said in 2022. "This agency serves no good purpose anymore. The agency needs to be disbanded.”

Bongino has called America under the FBI “a police state” and labeled former FBI Director Christopher Wray – a Trump appointee – a “jackbooted thug” and “totalitarian despot.” Bongino also has said Republicans should ignore search warrants from the FBI and Trump should ignore judges who rule against him.

In a pretentious 2013 memoir, Bongino described Obama as “a wonderful father and a wonderful man and he was very, very nice and very kind to me” and said he would have sacrificed his life for the president, which is, of course, an expectation of all Secret Service agents.

More recently, though, Bongino has said Obama and Joe Biden should be investigated and imprisoned. “Spygate, Obama was in charge. Collusion hoax, Obama's in charge,” he said. “The Hillary email scandal, Obama's in charge. The bribery scandal, Obama's in charge. There's a common thread. This isn't a conspiracy theory. What did I just say that's not factually accurate?"

Bongino also has called for investigating and/or imprisoning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley (treason, specifically), now-Sen. Adam Schiff and federal prosecutor Jack Smith, among others.

And to give you a crystal-clear impression of Bongino’s grip on reality, there’s his claim that Democrats are possessed by demons.

“Demon energy is real,” he said. “Demons aren't these horn-looking people with spike tails. That's just in the movies. Demons are real. They're possessed by some energy and they're here on earth now. I want you to see what one of them looks like: [U.S. Rep.] Pramila Jayapal, who is one of the heads of the liberal portion of the Democrat caucus. She's a congresswoman and a lunatic, by the way.”

All of this makes Bongino a perfect Fox personality, a perfect Trump appointee, a perfect partner for Kash Patel and a perfect nightmare for our country.

Popcorn? No, thanks. I’ve lost my appetite.