The twisted "Deep State" of Kash Patel

A deep dive into a twisted worldview

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It can be hard to envision what the next Trump administration is going to look like in part because we’ve not been forced to inhabit the mental universe of his supporters for such a long time. That universe is so detached from reality that it takes time and conscious effort to learn its contours, kind of like learning the fictional details of your favorite novel or TV series.

And I for one had gotten a bit out of the habit of living in this upside-down world over the last four years. It was nice to have a sane president who wasn’t telling people to take horse medicine or that the Clintons were murdering people. Now, with a weary sigh, we are having to relearn all of the crazed lore of Trumpworld.

I had a disturbing reintroduction recently when I read Kash Patel’s book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Democracy. Patel, you may recall, is Trump’s nominee to be FBI director, and currently looks like he has a shot at being confirmed.

You might also remember Patel from Trump’s first administration, when he was a minor figure who even Trump acolytes did not want to see gain more power. When there was a suggestion in the first term that Patel might be made the number two figure in the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr said it would happen “over my dead body” and that the “very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality”.

Or you might remember the story, told in Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir, about how Patel nearly botched a hostage rescue mission in Africa by lying about whether he had obtained the right for Seal Team Six to fly over Nigeria en route to their target. He hadn’t, but he said he had - potentially putting the special operators in harm’s way.

Now, Patel might get one of the most important jobs in federal law enforcement - the job that used to be held by J. Edgar Hoover. And it’s clear both from his record and the book that he wrote that this would be really bad news for the country and potentially the world.

Grievance monger

The key to understanding Patel’s worldview - and much of MAGA’s - is the idea of the “Deep State”, the conspiracy that Patel claims is destroying America.

Contrary to a common misunderstanding, this is not just a conspiracy in the government. Patel certainly has a lot of hatred for government officials and bureaucrats, but they’re only one part of the Deep State conspiracy. Included in it are also Democrats, “yellow journalists”, “Big Tech tycoons” and “non-governmental organizations”. Together they represent the “politicization of core American institutions” at the expense of “equal justice and national security”.

In Patel’s telling, the Deep State is a malevolent and “evil” force, but it also doesn’t seem to exist for any particular reason except to oppose Donald Trump. Patel doesn’t really probe the origins or the goals of the Deep State and almost every concrete complaint he has against it concerns something that it (in his made up world) did to Donald Trump. Even in 2020 - 24, when it should surely have been at the height of its powers with a Democrat in the White House, it’s not really clear what the Deep State was actually doing except for extremely slowly bringing some doomed criminal charges against Trump.

Why then does Patel identify so strongly with Trump? I think here we get to the root of the matter. To hear Patel describe his career is to hear the story of a life defined by exactly the sort of grievance against a vaguely-defined left-wing establishment that has come to make up Trump’s own political identity. According to Patel, the Deep State is out to get people like him just because of who they both are - it’s a zero-sum game of identity, like the ongoing war between cats and mice.

But if Trumpism is always a stew of grievances, then Patel’s particular recipe is unusual and revealing. Like many people on the far right, he ascribes his radicalization to having spent time in left wing environments. For Stephen Miller, it was Santa Monica, California. For Kash Patel, it was working as a public defense attorney in Miami with “crazy” colleagues who, in accordance with good right wing stereotypes, wanted to let criminals off the hook and hang victims out to dry. He also throws in some complaints about federal agents framing innocent victims for good measure, a nod to anti-establishment leftism and horseshoe theory.

But where Patel really distinguishes himself is the obvious class basis of his grievance. Hearing him tell the story of his own life, it’s clear that the forces of the Deep State are defined by the elitism and snobbery that they direct at people like Kash Patel, the son of Indian immigrants who grew up in a house occupied by dozens of members of his extended family.

In his book, these forces appear in many guises - as the elite law firms that wouldn’t give him a job; as the desk-bound bureaucrats who held him back from properly enforcing the law when he became a prosecutor; as “woke” officers not fit to lead salt-of-the-earth “regular” soldiers; and as higher-ups in the Department of Justice who wouldn’t back him up when he got into dust-ups with the media because they were too concerned about politics.

It turns out that, as with Donald Trump, what really makes the Deep State the Deep State isn’t what it’s doing to America - it’s what it’s done to Kash Patel. No wonder the two men see eye to eye.

What to do about it?