The Kash Patel Girlfriend Controversy Couldn’t Get Any Dumber, Except It Just Did

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Gather around. Here is a useful heuristic to understand the shabby, campy, and uniquely unserious nature of this incarnation of the Trump presidency.

For the past several weeks, much attention has been paid to Alexis Wilkins, the 27-year-old country-singer girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel. This alone is unusual. Generally speaking, FBI directors are not meant to be understood as tabloid celebrities with rich personal lives. But the scandal that has enveloped the both of them is even more chintzy, in a perfectly Trumpian way. Basically, since getting sworn in to the role, Patel has used a Gulfstream jet owned by the agency to buttress his vacation time. This includes flying to concerts at which Wilkins is performing, and to a luxury hunting lodge in Texas called Boondoggle Ranch. This is the sort of controversy that raises a lot of questions—about taxpayer dollars, Patel’s ego, and why the current administration seems to be permanently occupied by manchildren stuck in various stages of arrested development. But Patel, for his part, has decided to address the charges head-on in the only way he knows how: Step in front of a podcast microphone, on a couch next to his girlfriend, and dress down the haters and losers.

The show in question is The Katie Miller Podcast, and, naturally, it is hosted by Katie Miller, wife of skull-measuring psychopath and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. The podcast has platformed a cavalcade of regime-boosting sycophants, and Patel is no different. Between whining complaints about the press (hi, Kash!), boasts about his threadbare criminal justice bona fides, and mandated tributes to the genius of Donald Trump, he uses the opportunity to settle some scores. Miller asks Patel about the claims that he is mishandling FBI resources in service of his personal life, a credible accusation that he nonetheless finds completely outrageous. “If I was actually abusing [the jet], I would actually be seeing every one of her shows,” Patel says. “I think I get to, like, 15 percent.” Hilariously, the episode of the podcast opens with solemn text embossed on a black screen, informing viewers that the interview was recorded before the horrific mass shooting at Brown University. As of this writing, the FBI has yet to apprehend a suspect. (Update, Dec, 19, 12:09 a.m.: The suspect has been found dead in a storage unit. Unfortunately, the rest of this story stands.)

As we just described at Slate, Katie Miller is a mind-numbingly dull interviewer, but this thing still goes on for 50 minutes, and it’s completely dominated by pablum. At one point, Miller asks Wilkins if she disagrees with Patel on anything significant. She stumbles over the potential political ramifications of the query before informing listeners that the FBI director likes spicy food, while she does not. Scintillating stuff.

Miller, who is adjacent to the conspiracy network that animates the MAGA media ecosystem, also opens up a discussion about whether Wilkins is an Israeli spy. Apparently, this is an assertion that gets batted around in the dankest corners of fascist Discords. (Among the comments underneath the YouTube video for a vibeless Wilkins track called “GRIT,” one reads, “This is exactly what I imagine Mossad agent singing country music would sound like.”) Wilkins responds by saying that she has never been to Israel.

If there is one theme throughout the dialogue, it is Patel laying the blame for all of his grievances at the feet of the fourth estate. In that sense, he’s following a well-worn track laid out by Trump. But Patel’s demeanor is genuinely baffling. My favorite of these swipes is when Miller asks Patel when he might get engaged to Wilkins. He retorts by saying that he won’t “let the media determine the speed in which this relationship moves.” What? What are you talking about, man? I implore every boyfriend reading this to give that line a shot the next time the topic of marriage comes up: “The New York Times doesn’t control me!!” Let me know how it goes.

I guess this is what counts as damage control in the spiraling psychedelia of Trump 2.0. It doesn’t seem likely that the fiasco surrounding Patel’s chartered flights is going to stick for long, if only because this version of the White House has made highly visible corruption a defining aesthetic. Only months ago, we learned that border czar Tom Homan accepted a bag of $50,000 in cash from FBI agents, and we breezed right past it. I mean, yes, Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee are probing Patel’s flight logs, which could surface more-embarrassing information. But I’m not holding my breath over here.

Maybe none of this is really damage control at all. Sometimes it really seems as if Wilkins is the first girlfriend Patel has ever had. The idea that he needed to appear on Miller’s podcast with Wilkins to “clear the air” or whatever belies a more visceral purpose—to issue another reminder, for the American people, that the FBI director is getting laid. There is a bushy-tailed earnestness in the way Patel trumpets this information, a spiral-eyed mania of a man who, at last, is on the receiving end of positive interaction with a woman and wants to rub it in our faces. Frankly, once you understand the cretins in Trump’s orbit through that framing, a lot about this current moment begins to make sense.