The Show Must Go On

On Wednesday, Kash Patel held his first call as FBI director with the bureau’s 55 field offices. 

According to sources who spoke to ABC News, at one point he asked his new deputies “to give him a chance to prove himself as their new leader,” a sensible request from someone whose moral, temperamental, and intellectual fitness for the job is in grave doubt.

Then he told his deputies that he’d like the FBI to develop a relationship with the UFC.

By “UFC,” he didn’t mean some alphabet-soup government agency like the ATF or IRS. He meant the same thing everyone means when they use that acronym. The head of the FBI, in explaining his vision for the agency, considered it a priority to carve out a role for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

When I read that, my skin got hot from the flush of embarrassment I felt for everyone involved. Patel’s goal of earning the respect of his underlings as a serious law-enforcement officer will not be met, I fear.

An interesting question is why, exactly, he’s keen to introduce the UFC to the FBI.

Maybe he’s so immersed in right-wing culture that the UFC is his primary frame of reference for physical fitness. If he wants his agents to be in better shape, who else would he turn to for the job but some hulking dudes he saw on TV beating the tar out of each other inside a cage?

Maybe he’s trying to impress his boss, an ardent fan of the sport. It’s a shrewd ploy, if so: Bringing the UFC in to train the FBI is exactly the sort of superficial theater of “toughness” that Donald Trump would equate with effective government.

Maybe it’s a grift. Dana White, the head of the UFC, is a major Trump booster and donor, enough so to have introduced the president before his acceptance speech at last year’s Republican National Convention. Seemingly every other Trump crony is getting rich(er) off of his administration; why shouldn’t White get a cut of taxpayer money in the form of “fees” from the FBI?

Or maybe this was just part of the show.

Trumpist politics has always been a show. Trump is a game-show host by profession and has been a national celebrity for 40 years. His administration is full of television personalities. He’s been known to choose high-ranking political appointees based on their looks. He routinely teases major decisions to create dramatic suspense, as any showman would.

Before he was a UFC superfan, he was a WWE enthusiast who occasionally made cameos inside the ring. As many critics have noted, pro wrestling might be the biggest influence on how he practices retail politics: His taste for pugilistic spectacle and simple hero/villain soap operas has brought millions of voters into politics who didn’t bother with the stuff before 2016.

Populists expect a show from their president. There’s nothing entertaining about announcing new physical fitness requirements for the FBI, but announcing that their favorite UFC stars might be showing up to whip “the deep state” into shape? That’s imagination-capturing. That’s a show.

Can Trump and his flunkies sustain the show for four years without hurting their own support?

A very special episode.

Thursday was a big day for sex-trafficking in the United States.

Two “good” sex-traffickers (alleged sex-traffickers, I mean!) were headed home to America, freed from captivity in Romania reportedly at the White House’s behest due to their outspoken admiration for the president. Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi was preparing to publish the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the most notorious sex-trafficker in U.S. history and a buddy of liberal luminaries ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates to, er, Donald Trump.

The publication of the files had “Trump show” written all over it.

It was hugely suspenseful, promising the spilling of government secrets about unimaginable moral corruption. And it had unusually potent hero/villain potential. Here at last would be proof that not only is America’s liberal establishment chockablock with horrendous pedophilic perverts—Trump is the only Epstein pal who restrained himself, evidently—but that the rotten DOJ helped suppress the evidence of that establishment’s depravity.

Forget pro wrestling. This was the final episode in a gripping mystery series. And it isn’t the only mystery show the Trump administration has under production: The president has promised to reveal what the federal government knows about everything from political assassinations to UFOs.

That’s what populists signed up for. Last week, Bondi told Fox News that the FBI’s Epstein files were “on [her] desk” and would be released soon; on Thursday a group of MAGA influencers were called to the White House to receive the first tranche of documents from administration officials, a sort of victory ceremony for febrile populists over their deep-state enemies.

But there was nothing in the files. The final episode was a bust.

The documents contained “less than 200 pages of previously released flight logs, an evidence log and a heavily redacted list of contacts,” per the Miami Herald. Of course they did, an NBC News reporter who’s been covering the case claimed afterward. The names of Epstein’s associates are already public knowledge; contrary to MAGA belief, there’s no reason to think any additional “list” is forthcoming.

As news of the letdown spread online, Trump allies ranging from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna to Laura Loomer to Dave Portnoy couldn’t contain their disappointment. “Why is the release of the Epstein files always a sh-t show?” Portnoy asked.

Inviting well-known populist social media “personalities” to Washington to formally receive the documents struck me as a clever attempt by the administration to blunt the backlash it knew was coming. Bondi must have realized that she had nothing juicy and reasoned that getting popular activists like Chaya Raichik to participate in the reveal would make fans of those activists reluctant to call it a complete failure.

And yes—it is tremendously depressing to think of the attorney general of the United States needing to hide behind the credibility of the person who runs “Libs of TikTok.”

If that was Bondi’s game, though, it backfired. Raichik and the White House’s other populist guests were so tickled to be singled out for recognition that they resorted to posing for the cameras, all smiles, with the documents in front of the White House. And the fact that they received invitations while rival influencers like Loomer were snubbed incentivized the latter to attack the files as an embarrassing failure of which they were glad not to have been part.

By the end of the day, an anxious Bondi had sent a letter to Patel scapegoating him and the FBI for supposedly not turning over all of the Epstein files. Patel then turned around and scapegoated the FBI’s field office in New York for holding back information—a convenient target, as New York is also where federal prosecutors recently staged a mini-rebellion against Trump administration corruption. (A source “close to the FBI” told the Miami Herald that the New York office turned over everything it had on Epstein.) In no time at all, MAGA media figures like Glenn Beck were demanding that the DOJ’s New York operations be padlocked.

And so, as luck would have it, the “final episode” in the Epstein show turns out not to have been final. Now there’s a new episode scheduled, rooting out the Manhattan-based moles inside the Justice Department who are still hiding the secret “list” that will at last expose Epstein’s many Democratic partners in crime.

The show must go on. It always does.

Getting canceled.

Is there a point, hypothetically, at which populists might begin to tire of the show?

I think it depends on what we mean by “populists.”

There’s a large segment of committed Trump supporters who’ll never tire of it. I’m on record as believing that his job approval won’t settle durably below the low 40s no matter how insanely he behaves, for the simple reason that there really are that many Americans who’ll rationalize anything he says and does.

He has a demagogue’s—and screenwriter’s—genius for crafting storylines about the hero’s journey past adversity created for him by nefarious enemies. He and his band of Avengers will never run out of villains to battle. It’s not a coincidence that so much of DOGE’s work, which should be a boring matter of bean-counting and budget-balancing, has been promoted with wild conspiracy theories about cultural enemies (including Jeffrey Epstein!) receiving payoffs from the federal coffers. Thanks to the president’s trusty sidekick Elon, even the dry work of fiscal rebalancing is an outrageous revelatory spectacle.

The show will go on. MAGA diehards will keep watching.

But not all populists are MAGA diehards. Take Portnoy, the original “Barstool conservative,” whose politics have always seemed driven less by admiration for Trump than antipathy to progressive cultural pieties. His complaint on Thursday about the “sh-t show” around the Epstein files came packaged with several other points. “What’s the point of booting out illegals and criminals while somehow becoming a safe haven for the Tate brothers?” he asked. “Why is Crypto in the toilet if Trump is crypto king? How far does [Tesla] stock have to crash before Elon goes back to work?”

I don’t think Portnoy minds the show. He probably enjoys it. But he doesn’t enjoy it so much that the show alone will keep him satisfied if everything else starts going sideways. On the contrary: The worse things get, the more annoying the show might seem.

That’s the real political risk for Trump in matters like the Epstein files. No one will care if the soon-to-be-revealed Kennedy assassination records turn out to be another sad-trombone confirming that Oswald acted alone—if inflation is cooling off, if deportations are ramping up, if Trump seems to be fixing the things Americans imagined he would fix when they reelected him. The public will tolerate seeing his suspense series turn into The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults if life is good.

But if the economy dives, if the immigration crackdown is slow-going, if we end up with a measles epidemic while America’s top health bureaucrat begs people not to vaccinate their children, Americans won’t be in the mood for a show. And if Trump insists on giving them one anyway, they’ll demand that it at least be entertaining. “He might have tariff-ed us into a recession, but at least he blew the lid off of Epstein’s co-conspirators!”

If the president can’t even do that, Portnoy types will be left feeling bitter and wondering what they got for their votes. The lameness of the show will become the lens through which Trump’s more significant failures are interpreted, less a form of daily entertainment than a chaotic distraction designed to channel their anger away from the White House.

Some populists who end up bearing a special burden from his policies—if they were DOGE-ed out of a federal job, say, or if their Medicaid was cut under the new Republican budget—might even begin to wonder if the show is more fictional than they’d been led to believe. What if … there aren’t any secret Epstein files? What if that was just something that Trump and QAnoners told them to keep them tuning in?

If you want the people to let you run the government like a circus, you have to deliver a few clowns.

Great television.

As fate would have it, as I was writing this column, the president and vice president got into a sustained argument with the president of Ukraine. Not behind closed doors; in the Oval Office, in front of the cameras. 

What did Donald Trump say when it was over? Quote: “This is gonna be great television, I will say that.”

Even at a moment of enormous international import, an inflection point for the crumbling Atlantic alliance that’s ruled international politics for 80 years, it’s all still a show.

I’m too much of a pessimist to believe that this administration will ever truly run out of ideas for new episodes and risk losing that 42 to 45 percent of the population that’s tuned in for a fight. There’ll always be another villain to hiss at: Today it’s Volodymyr Zelensky, tomorrow it might be the Supreme Court for declaring that Trump’s powers as president aren’t limitless. What a phenomenal drama it’ll be when the president declares that he’s no longer bound by the judicial branch and the courts need to figure out what to do about it!

A Dispatch colleague told me that Thursday’s DOJ faceplant over the Epstein files created a neat symmetry with my column about the Tate brothers. If the repatriation of the Tates was disappointing to “respectable” conservatives, he said, the dearth of evidence about a vast left-wing child-trafficking conspiracy in the Epstein documents was disappointing to less respectable ones. The president lost ground with both wings of the right on the same day.

It’s a smart point. But are those less respectable ones really disappointed? Certainly they’re not disappointed in Trump.

You can write the screenplay for the next episode of this show as easily as I can. Bondi and/or Patel will fire some New York employees as sacrificial lambs for failing to produce the “full” Epstein documents, which will placate the MAGA audience for a while. Eventually, though, they’ll start asking again where those documents are and why they still haven’t been uncovered. Instead of blaming Trump, they’ll start asking dark questions about whether Bondi and Patel might be quietly abetting a sinister deep-state effort to embarrass our president by suppressing the information he vowed to expose. “Agency capture!” populists will call it.

You’ve got to admit: The heroic attorney general and FBI director being in on the conspiracy would be a hell of a plot twist in a suspenseful drama about a villainous deep state.

My guess, though, is that Bondi and Patel will protect their right flanks by introducing new villains into the plot. If the audience gets restless about the lack of new information on Epstein or JFK, indicting James Comey or John Bolton or Mike Pompeo or some other bad guy from a previous season on some nonsense offense will keep them entertained.

There’ll always be another villain to hiss at. That might not be enough for Dave Portnoy, but it’s plenty good enough to keep that 42 to 45 percent of loyalists from hissing at Trump.

In fact, as of mid-Friday afternoon, I’d say that yesterday’s Epstein files flop is already a distant memory for the right. Today’s new episode with Zelensky really was “great television,” a crowd-pleaser so unifying that even the most hawkish conservatives in the party are lining up to jeer at Ukraine’s president. It’s a tremendous political asset to Trump and his team that there’s a new melodrama every day, sometimes more than once a day, for his supporters to get sucked into lest they dwell on the duds, like the return of the Tates, that they found less entertaining.

Only 47 more months to go. This must be what it’s like to binge Netflix in hell.