What The Hell America!

ON SUNDAY, FBI DIRECTOR KASH PATEL and his deputy, Dan Bongino, made a fairly astonishing plea to the MAGA faithful during a joint appearance on Fox News: Stop expecting Hillary Clinton to be arrested for murdering Jeffrey Epstein, they stressed, because Epstein killed himself.

The next morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened up her press briefing by calling on Liam Cosgrove, a reporter from conspiracy-theory blog Zero Hedge, who proceeded as if that Fox News segment had never aired at all.

After offering a meandering wind-up about a Clinton White House staffer he implied was murdered, Cosgrove said he wanted to talk about “the most famous Clinton-related ‘suicide’” of all, “which is that of Jeffrey Epstein.”

“There are,” he added, “still a lot of questions around that case.”

It was, on the one hand, an utter waste of a White House briefing room question. Leavitt quickly deflected it back to the Justice Department. But it also illuminated one of the defining threads of Trump’s second term in office: The conspiracists whom Trump has long fostered—and who, in many ways, are the lifeblood of his political movement—are growing impatient.

That was certainly the subtext of Bongino’s public statements, and not just those he delivered on Fox News. The deputy FBI director has been among the most senior officials willing to try to directly engage those in the MAGA movement who have, for years, been insistent that the world is controlled by a powerful human-trafficking cabal, and that sinister forces within the government conspired to undermine the first Trump administration by concocting the Russia probe.

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Bongino has pleaded with them for patience and repeatedly insisted that he and Patel are doing behind-the-scenes work that would satiate their frustrations. But that work has not materialized. And on Sunday, he seemed almost distraught in trying to explain why. “In some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there,” he said in talking about the theory that Trump assassination attempts were actually attempted hits by Deep State actors.

To some extent, Bongino himself is to blame for his predicament. That it is an article of faith for the right that Trump’s assassination attempts were part of a nefarious plot or that Epstein was murdered—presumably by Democrats—is owed in part to people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino suggesting as much prior to joining the administration.

But instead of being given a degree of credibility and trust from the conspiracists, Bongino is now being treated as a “deep state traitor” for telling them that the wild theories he used to preach and they still collectively believe in aren’t true. It’s a plight facing the broader administration, and really, the whole country.

Here’s what happens when the kooks have the power.