I was busy ignoring politics and focusing on college football Saturday, so it was only around 3 a.m. Sunday morning, when I was sleeplessly scrolling through social media, that I saw the first mention of Donald Trump nominating Kash Patel to be his FBI director. It wasn’t instantly clear to me whether this was truth or parody, but a second mention within 30 seconds or so confirmed two things. One, it was true; two, we have entered a reality in which we can’t be sure the news isn’t satire.
It won’t be a joke, though, once Patel is confirmed and takes office. And he likely will be confirmed: He has enough of a résumé to make it through. He’s worked at the Justice Department and the National Security Council, on the House intel committee, and as a federal prosecutor. How professionally he performed in those positions is a matter of debate. Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr wrote in his memoir, apropos Trump’s desire late in his first term to name Patel his A.G., that Patel “had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.”
But he has the quality that matters most: He’s a one-thousand-percent Trump loyalist who has pledged to come after Trump’s real and perceived foes in the political and media worlds. He’s called the media “the most powerful enemy” of the United States of America and has vowed: “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, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
We’re about to enter a world where the rule of law is going to be turned inside out—where everything is converted into its bizarro-world version. It’s a world the conservative movement has been building for 50 years. It took Trump to dare to say the things that no other Republican president would quite say—about how the entire legal apparatus of the United States government is illegitimate and corrupt. But Trump said those things, and he opened the floodgates. For the next four years, we will be living, assuming Patel’s confirmation and that of Pam Bondi as attorney general, under a justice system where the following black-is-white presumptions will hold true:
I could go on, but you get the idea. Everything is the opposite of what your lying eyes saw for themselves, America. It involves prosecutors, investigators, lawyers, and politicians. But complicit in all of it is the media, which has since Watergate set the terms by which Americans have come to believe that investigators and journalists are the white hats and Republican presidents the bad guys. (And by the way, speaking of Watergate, don’t think that’s over either. Haven’t you read the latest? It was “the first deep state hoax,” and Nixon was completely innocent.)
If you’re wondering exactly how Trump, Bondi, and Patel might go after these enemies, wonder no more. Yes, we have due process in this country, and a Bill of Rights, and a body of case law and precedents that give defendants their rights. That, we all know.
But we have something else in this country that almost no one knows about. We have dozens or hundreds of laws that grant presidents emergency powers under all kinds of circumstances. Many of these laws are archaic. Some have never been invoked, because we’ve never had a president who would think of doing such a thing. Others have been invoked, but in extremely limited and temporary circumstances, such that the invocation was no threat to civil liberties or the Constitution and the public didn’t even notice.
But these tools are out there. Earlier this year, the Brennan Center for Justice counted 150 statutory powers at a president’s disposal in case of different kinds of national emergencies. Some of these aren’t quite things we really have to lose sleep over. But others are. And always remember this, as we prepare for Trump 2.0: The Insurrection Act is vaguely-enough worded that a president could call private militias into federal service. Indeed, Stewart Rhodes defended his actions on January 6 by saying he was just waiting for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and deputize the Oath Keepers to stop Congress certifying the election results.
The Patel nomination is the clearest signal yet—and there have been several already that are plenty clear!—that Trump intends to use the FBI and the Justice Department for purely personal purposes and to subvert reality to such an extent that it will change Americans’ understanding of what justice even is. And that is not a joke.
