Instead of actually showing up for his hearing before the Judiciary Committee, Kash Patel should have propped up a TV playing the video of "It Wasn't Me" on a loop for six hours. Donald Trump's nominee to head the FBI has a long, well-documented history of being the looniest sort of conspiracy theorist. Still, when confronted with his own words by Senate Democrats, he denied it all with the insincerity of the cheating narrator of Shaggy and RikRok's 2000 hit song. Democrats were visibly frustrated by Patel's gaslighting, but one has to feel even sorrier for the nearly 40,000 FBI employees who will likely soon be working for this sorry man. Trump obviously picked him as a direct insult to them, especially as lurid lies about FBI agents are a favorite mode of conspiracy content for Patel. This hearing comes on the tail of two weeks of Trump waging all-out war on the largely anonymous staff at the FBI and larger Justice Department, from pardoning over 1,500 Capitol rioters to mass firing prosecutors who investigated Trump's attempted coup.
They're lashing out at the idea of competence that maddens them.
The DOJ is getting hammered hard, but this is merely part of what is shaping up to be Trump's efforts to purge the federal government of employees who do anything but fight wars and deport migrants. It started with firing "DEI" workers and instructions to everyone else to rat out coworkers for harboring the forbidden pro-diversity views. Seventeen inspectors general were also illegally fired. There were escalating announcements of illegal funding halts, culminating in an outrageous effort to stop most federal grants and loans, which was such a disaster Trump was forced to walk it back. Then federal workers got an email, clearly copied from billionaire Elon Musk's similar malicious campaign against Twitter employees, pressuring them to resign and implying they could be fired if they don't.
This is all being spun by the Trump administration as an effort to save money and reduce government "waste," but no one should be fooled. The sadism of these efforts belies the psychological damage motivating people like Musk and Russ Vought, the Project 2025 author Trump nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). MAGA is certainly a racist and sexist movement, but it's crucially also a movement of bullies lashing out at people whose skills and talents remind MAGA folks of their own insecurities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unhinged MAGA hatred of federal workers, a group largely known for being humble and hard-working, reminding MAGA leaders of their own lack of basic virtues.
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Musk has spent months now, under the auspices of leading the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) in an endless grouse-fest with his Twitter followers about how federal workers are supposedly lazy parasites. There is an unmistakable protesting-too-much quality to this obsession, the source of which is not mysterious. Who else but a bunch of losers has the time to sit around on Twitter bellyaching about the imaginary lives of bureaucrats? Certainly not the federal employees, most of whom have no time for Twitter nonsense because they're busy funding medical research, organizing infrastructure improvements or inspecting food safety.
Vought is not as famous as Musk, but his public appearances are fueled by the same petulant loathing of people who annoy him by being smart, being good at their jobs, or not having a bunch of weird sexual hangups. Undercover activists pretending to be his allies recorded Vought bragging about his secret Project 2025 plans last year. While the result is undoubtedly unnerving — since he has real power — there's also an element of cringe comedy to his yearning to be a supervillain. That same vibe of resentful mediocrity is shot throughout the videos created by Project 2025 meant to train Trump's political appointees in how to bully their underlings. The main tone of the videos is whiny, as the hosts complain endlessly that career federal employees look down on them. The outside viewer will sympathize with the federal workers, of course, because it's impossible not to roll your eyes at these ignorant Trump-loving clowns.
The hatred of federal workers is part of the larger MAGA antagonism towards scientists, academics, artists, journalists, or anyone who has developed expertise in any field but con artistry. Many federal jobs, especially the bureaucratic offices most heavily targeted by the would-be purge, are filled by people who have spent years becoming experts at what they do. In contrast, Trump's political appointments are a celebration of the slacker and the intellectually incurious. There's Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who appears to have been pushed out of every job he's had but the barely-a-job role of being a substitute Fox News host. Or HHS Secretary nominee Robert Kennedy, whose medical degree comes from the School of Making Crap Up. Or reality TV star Sean Duffy, whose non-qualification to run the Transportation Department was on full display Thursday after a fatal plane crash in D.C.
Thank you, Real World: Boston star Sean Duffy.
— Rebecca Fishbein (@bfishbfish.bsky.social) January 30, 2025 at 8:56 AM
The people put in charge of managing federal employees are, as noted at Futurism, "so inexperienced that their qualifications sound like a surreal joke." Wired reported this week that leadership at Trump's Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which controls employment for the whole federal bureaucracy, now includes a 21-year-old intern of tech billionaire Peter Thiel and a Musk intern who graduated high school in May. Yes, that would mean he's still a literal teenager. Trump also appointed an OPM lawyer who tweets stuff like "I need a woman who looks like she got punched" and "slaves owe us reparations." The point of all this is to inflict so much mediocrity and immaturity on federal workers that they quit.
The good news is that the peevishness seems to be backfiring, at least in some cases.
Anonymous posters on a Reddit board for federal employees have been coaching each other to stay put and not give in to the childish bullying. "I’m going to keep doing my job until someone drags me out of me POD," one poster wrote. "You can tell President Trump that if he needs me, I’LL BE IN MY OFFICE!!!!!" wrote another. "It took me 10 years of applying and 20 years experience in my field to get here," one woman added. "I will not be pushed out by two billionaire trust fund babies," presumably speaking about Musk and Trump, both who were raised by wealthy fathers.
The fetish for elevating the unworthy over the deserving is hardly unique to MAGA. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in the New York Times this week, authoritarians throughout history prefer the inexperienced and unqualified to those who know what they're doing. Part of it is that it's easier to extract loyalty from losers, or as Ben-Ghiat delicately puts it, "Inexperienced individuals may be doubly dependent on the leader and vulnerable to the influence of the leader’s allies." But it is also about this grudge that fascistic mediocrities hold towards people who are smarter or more skilled. Journalist Dorothy Thompson remarked upon it when she saw Adolph Hitler:
He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.
She also wrote a famous article called "Who Goes Nazi?" for Harper's in 1941, which centered on how much the fascist urge is rooted in a loser's desire for petty vengeance. "Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi," she wrote, suggesting it instead attracts bitter, empty people. "Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi," she concluded.
In this truly unbalanced assault on federal workers, we can see again the truth in Thompson's observations. No doubt actual federal workers are a diverse bunch, and some aren't great people, just as with any organization. But the concept of the federal worker has great symbolic resonance, as the icons of people who work hard and serve their country — not for big paychecks or fame, but simply because they can and it's the right thing to do. That image of self-assuredness that comes from nothing more than a job well done must be maddening to MAGA types who, for whatever reason, can't or won't find such security in themselves. So they're lashing out at the idea of competence that maddens them. Unfortunately, real people — normal, imperfect, but mostly decent real people — will pay the price for this MAGA psychodrama.
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