Trump’s FBI Pick Marks Clear “Authoritarian Takeover,” Expert Warns

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, is essential to the president-elect’s takeover, and will allow him to use the full force of the U.S. government against anyone Trump decides is an enemy.

On Saturday, Trump nominated Patel, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Defense Department, to replace the FBI’s current director, Christopher Wray, who still has more than two years left in his 10-year term. Trump appointed Wray in 2017 after unceremoniously firing James Comey.

During an interview on MSNBC Saturday, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols voiced his concerns about Trump’s “incredibly dangerous” prospective Cabinet of sycophants, including Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, Pam Bondi, and now Patel—a champion of the president-elect, with his penchant for “deep state” conspiracy theories and making threats against the press.

To Nichols, Patel’s nomination demonstrates not only a direction for Trump’s second administration, but also an accelerating velocity.

“You have the makings of, you know, a not-so-slow-motion authoritarian takeover of the United States government,” Nichols said.

In a subsequent piece published Saturday in The Atlantic, Nichols wrote that Patel’s appointment was part of Trump’s plan to transform the FBI into an “excellent instrument of revenge against anyone Trump or Patel identifies as an internal enemy—which, in Trump’s world, is anyone who criticizes Donald Trump.”

Trump, having nominated loyalists to serve as the heads of his intelligence, legal, and law enforcement agencies, “eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution,” Nichols wrote.

By nominating Patel, and the rest of his motley crew of conspiracy theorists and alleged sexual predators, Trump is removing the guardrails on his second administration.

Last week, Elon Musk—rearing up to fire federal employees he deems wasteful en masse as the head of the Trump administration’s planned DOGE commission—put a number of workaday government employees on blast to millions of users on X.

At the time, The New Republic reported that his behavior was not “just cruel, it’s dangerous.” Indeed, CNN reported Wednesday that those Musk singled out have been inundated with hate, leading others to fear that they too will have Musk devotees sicced on them.

Several federal employees told CNN that “they’re afraid their lives will be forever changed—including physically threatened—as Musk makes behind-the-scenes bureaucrats into personal targets.” Others said the specter of being targeted by Musk “might even drive them from their jobs entirely.”

One target of Musk’s posting spree last week was a woman who works at the International Development Finance Corporation. Her role, an official told The Wall Street Journal, involves “identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.” She had her job deemed “fake” by Musk—seemingly because her title, “Director of Climate Diversification,” contains words that tend to raise right-wing culture-warrior hackles.

Facing a barrage of negative attention, she “has since gone dark on social media, shutting down her accounts,” reported CNN.

Others whom Musk and his fans went after include senior advisers for climate and environmental justice at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as a chief climate officer at the Department of Energy.

Last month, CNN reported that Musk “promised a gentle touch” as the head of DOGE—a commission TNR’s Matt Ford described this month as itself a symbol of “inefficiency and waste in government” that “cannot achieve its stated ambitions for legal, constitutional, or practical reasons”—but his insatiable itch to post apparently takes precedence over his word.

With its newfound electoral mandate, Donald Trump’s team is debating on whether to attack or invade Mexico, as the president-elect promised on the campaign trail.

“How much should we invade Mexico?” one senior Trump transition member told Rolling Stone. “That is the question.”

Trump has reportedly been gathering “battle plans” to attack drug cartels in Mexico since early 2023, with or without Mexico’s permission. Now he is president-elect, and even mainstream Republicans are on board with the idea. His nominees for secretary of defense and secretary of state, Pete Hegseth and Senator Marco Rubio, respectively, have spoken favorably of U.S. military action against Mexico, as has his “border czar,” Tom Homan. 

One source close to Trump told Rolling Stone about a plan for a “soft” invasion of the country, in which U.S. special forces would assassinate cartel leaders covertly, an idea Trump was in favor of earlier this year. The magazine spoke to six Republicans in all who have privately discussed Mexico with the president-elect and briefed him on different proposals. 

These actions vary in their level of force, including drone strikes and airstrikes against cartel targets such as drug labs, sending military advisers and trainers to Mexico, sending “kill teams” to the country, using cyberwarfare against drug lords and their organizations, and the assassination plan. 

Trump has told Republicans privately that he plans to tell Mexico to stop the transport of fentanyl into the U.S. within months otherwise he’ll deploy the military. This would seem to fit into the tariff threat he made against Mexico, Canada, and China on Monday, when he warned the three countries to stop the flow of migrants and drugs into the United States. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum didn’t take Trump’s words well, and she probably won’t like U.S. forces deploying in the country either. 

In his first term, Trump proposed to “bomb the drugs” in Mexico, according to his former national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Thankfully, nothing came of it. Now,  in addition to the presidency, Trump has captured the Republican Party, much of the judiciary, and both chambers of Congress. His Cabinet and staff appointments are made up of sycophants and people much less likely to confront or correct him. In the next four years, there won’t be much standing in the way of Trump’s violent “solutions.”

The Republican Party’s majority in the House of Representatives is looking meager.

Three House races remain outstanding as of Wednesday—two toss-up races in California’s 13th and 45th districts and one in Iowa’s 1st district that’s leaning Republican, according to CBS.

But if current results hold, the GOP will have a record-small majority—220 seats to Democrats’ 215—CNN data journalist Harry Enten reported Wednesday morning. “You have to go all the way back since the Herbert Hoover administration to find an even smaller majority after November elections,” he observed.

And the majority could grow even narrower with the resignation of one Republican representative and the likely resignations of two more.

Representative Matt Gaetz has already resigned from his seat after Donald Trump nominated him for attorney general. Gaetz has since withdrawn as Trump’s pick in light of sexual misconduct allegations but said he does not intend to join the upcoming Congress. Representatives Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz, whom Trump has nominated to join the incoming administration, are expected to resign in January.

Those resignations would deflate the GOP’s majority to 217–215. In that event, CNN anchor John Berman noted, in the weeks or months before the vacated seats are filled, a single Republican defector could sink a bill. Enten observed that that has not been the case in 100-plus years.

This is just the latest development throwing cold water on Republican narratives about a 2024 landslide. While Trump crowed about his purported “unprecedented and powerful mandate” on election night, as more votes have been counted, it has become clear that Trump did not win a majority of the popular vote, and his popular-vote margin over Kamala Harris has shrunk considerably.

Trump’s pick for special envoy to Ukraine wants to force Ukrainians to negotiate with Russia by holding aid hostage.

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday announced he has selected retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg to be his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, a position focused on ending the two-year-long war. Kellogg previously served as both national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Council chief of staff during Trump’s first term.  

“I am very pleased to nominate General Keith Kellogg to serve as Assistant to the President and Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Keith has led a distinguished Military and Business career, including serving in highly sensitive National Security roles in my first Administration. He was with me right from the beginning! Together, we will secure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH, and Make America, and the World, SAFE AGAIN!”

Last spring, Kellogg proposed forcing an ultimatum on Ukraine: Engage in peace talks in order to keep receiving aid. The plan, which was put forward with the help of Fred Fleitz, his successor as chief of staff at the National Security Council, would also force Russia to the negotiating table by agreeing to hold off on Ukraine’s admission to NATO. Under the plan, the cease-fire would take place along existing battle lines.

Kellogg’s views align well with an incoming administration that seems to have little interest in providing aid to Ukrainians, even as Russia is advancing through the country faster than ever.

Vice President–elect JD Vance is similarly opposed to more assistance. South Dakota Governor and Homeland Security secretary nominee Kristi Noem is opposed to more assistance as well, saying that the war is “Europe’s fight, not ours.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has come up with another conspiracy theory—that Democrats are stealing a very close election race in California. 

In California’s 13th congressional district, the votes are still being counted, and Republican Representative John Duarte fell behind Democrat Adam Gray by a narrow margin Tuesday night. To Greene, this means that something nefarious is going on. 

“Democrats are stealing another House seat! Elections nationwide should be one day, paper ballots, and require proof of citizenship with ID!!” Greene posted on X Wednesday morning. 

California has fully embraced voting by mail, instituting it statewide since 2022. As long as ballots are postmarked by Election Day, they are allowed to arrive no more than a week afterward in order to be counted, an increase from three days afterward in 2022’s midterm elections. That year, half of the state’s votes were counted after Election Day, meaning that a long wait time to count votes is not suspicious. 

In Republican-run states, though, it’s rare for such allowances to exist. In Greene’s home state of Georgia, for example, mail-in ballots aren’t universal but have to be specifically requested well in advance. Ballots have to be received within three days of Election Day, even if the voter is overseas or in the military.  

Greene and her fellow conservatives seem to hold the laughable opinion that the easier it is to vote, the more likely that Democrats and the left are fixing elections. In fact, making voting more widely accessible allows greater participation from the people who are poorer, don’t have easy access to transportation, work long hours, or are disabled, posted overseas, or any number of other valid reasons. 

Even in states like California, things could be made easier through various reforms, such as making Election Day a national holiday. But such efforts have been consistently opposed by Republicans, who have long seen higher voter turnout as a boost to Democrats. Maybe now that Donald Trump and the GOP actually won the popular vote in 2024, they will stop trying to restrict voting access.

The richest man on earth wants to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Elon Musk wrote on X in response to an error-riddled clip of Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen talking about how much he hates pro-consumer regulation on the Joe Rogan show. In the video, Andreessen tells a shocked Rogan that the CFPB is debanking people and companies for “having the wrong politics.”

In reality, the CFPB has put forth measured, bipartisan policy that protects from that very situation.

Director Rohit Chopra recently stated his clear opposition to politically motivated debanking of conservatives and Christians.  

“The CFPB put out a legitimately good rule that went after banks over debanking users based on political views,” reporter Ryan Grim noted. “Now VCs and Musk who don’t like the CFPB for other reasons are straight up lying to whip people into a frenzy and defang the CFPB. The message: they think you are stupid and can’t read and are going to make your life worse in order to enrich themselves.”

Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, will head the Department of Government Efficiency, and is dead set on wiping away large swaths of vital regulation, mostly to benefit people like himself. The CFPB seems to be the latest thing on this chopping block.

“You put a billionaire in charge, and shockingly he finds that an agency which fights for consumers against bank fraud is one of the first government functions that needs to go,” wrote Bernie Sanders adviser Faiz Shakir.

In a disturbing post on X, a Trump-endorsed candidate for the House of Representatives targeted and invoked an anti-Muslim trope against two Muslim members of Congress.

Florida state Senator Randy Fine, who is running to fill the vacancy in Florida’s 6th U.S. congressional district, singled out Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar on Tuesday. Quote-tweeting an endorsement from the Republican Jewish Coalition, Fine posted, “​​The ‘Hebrew Hammer’ is coming. @RashidaTlaib and @IlhanMN might consider leaving before I get there. #BombsAway.”

Tlaib and Omar are two of just three Muslim members of Congress, and the only two Muslim women.

Fine has a history of using demeaning rhetoric against Muslims and Palestinians and trafficking in Islamophobic tropes. In the past, he has said that “we have a Muslim problem in America” and that “while many Muslims are not terrorists, they are the radicals, not the mainstream.”

In August 2021, when Fine was a representative in Florida’s state House, the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a complaint against him with the House Public Integrity and Ethics Committee, alleging that Fine “violated his duty as an elected official” by “encouraging his constituents to run over people at Palestinian advocacy protests,” “call[ing] for the annihilation of the Palestinian people,” and direct-messaging a Floridian to “blow yourself up,” among other instances of “egregious conduct.”

In September, Fine took to X to cheer the death of 26-year-old American citizen Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, an activist reportedly killed by the Israeli forces while peacefully protesting illegal settlements in the West Bank. “Throw rocks, get shot. One less #MuslimTerror ist. #FireAway,” Fine wrote.

Donald Trump threw his support behind Fine’s candidacy last week, referring to him as an “America First Patriot” in a Truth Social post.

Senior advisers to Kamala Harris’s campaign joined the liberal podcast Pod Save America this week to offer their takes on why their candidate suffered a crushing defeat this election—and seemed to have no real humility about where they went wrong.

Stephanie Cutter, one senior aide who sat down for the joint interview, said the vice president was correct in her refusal to set herself apart from President Biden during the presidential race. Cutter said that Harris “felt like she was part of the administration, so why should she look back and cherry-pick some things that she would have done differently, when she was part of it?”

Cutter added that the thinking within the campaign was that if Harris broke with Biden on a specific issue like immigration, stories would come out from administration staffers questioning why she didn’t take different stances in meetings or challenge specific policies to the president.

Eventually, Harris settled on a prevailing campaign strategy that vice presidents almost never break with their presidents, with the exception of Mike Pence with Donald Trump. Cutler and the podcast hosts, former Obama administration staffers Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor, then laughed over a “murder” and “ripping up the Constitution” exception.

The clip has drawn indignation and vehement criticism on X for being tone-deaf to voters’ concerns.

One commentator pointed out that there was a good example of a vice president who broke with a president besides Trump and Pence: Hubert Humphrey with Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 election, amid Americans’ outrage and exhaustion over the Vietnam War.

There are many policies in which Harris could have and should have broken with the Biden administration during her campaign, whether it was over steadfast U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza or the flawed approach to immigration. But Cutter’s revelation about the Harris campaign’s internal discussions show that there’s also a greater problem: groupthink among Democratic staffers and party leadership. Until the Democrats can express a willingness to dump so-called “conventional wisdom” and aggressively address the issues voters care about, they won’t be able to win again. The hosts of Pod Save America don’t seem to be getting it.

Democrats forgot to read the fine print on a bill and spoon-fed a huge victory to Republicans who want to kill the IRS.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the IRS’s tax enforcement fund, which allowed the IRS to better audit corporations and the wealthiest households, is now $20 billion in the red—leaving the fund’s future up in the air.

In 2022, when Democrats had a trifecta hold over the government, they put $80 billion toward the IRS, which was supposed to help the agency hire, modernize, and enforce through the next decade. When Republicans took the House back in 2023, they started making cuts to that fund to protect their rich friends and corporate interests, placing a $1.4 billion cut and then another $20 billion cut into deals they made with Biden last year.

This year’s stopgap funding bill—meant to keep the government open through December 20—kept the same $20 billion cut in the text. Congressional Republicans noticed that the Democrats didn’t notice its inclusion and watched silently with glee as yet another massive slash was made to one of the most important agencies we have.

“Our concern right now is that because of this risk to the IRS and the uncertainty of it, the IRS is going to potentially have to make dramatic decisions about stopping hiring,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told the Journal. “They are running low on enforcement dollars today.”

Adeyemo also noted that the cuts will force the IRS to do 2,000 fewer large corporate audits over the next five years and 6,000 fewer audits of wealthy individuals.