The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump

Why Kash Patel is exactly the kind of person who would serve in a second Trump administration

A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.

When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. “Life looks really shitty from behind bars,” Milley reportedly told Patel. (Patel denies this.)

When Trump entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, “Over my dead body.”

When, in the final weeks of the administration, Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the agency’s head, threatened to resign. Trump relented only after an intervention by Vice President Mike Pence and others.

It wasn’t a question of ideology. He wasn’t a zealot like Stephen Miller, trying to make the bureaucracy yield to his agenda. Rather, Patel appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump. Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion.

This was what seemed to disturb many of his colleagues the most: Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all—his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow. (Patel disputes this characterization.)

Most Americans had no idea Patel existed, yet rarely a day passed when administration leaders weren’t reminded that he did. In a year and eight months, they had watched Patel leapfrog from the National Security Council, where he became senior counterterrorism director; to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he was principal deputy to the acting director; to the Department of Defense, where his influence rivaled that of the acting secretary himself.

But in the officials’ warnings about the various catastrophic ways the rise of an inexperienced lackey to the highest levels of government might end, all Patel seemed to detect was the panic of a “deep state” about to be exposed. Such officials understood, as Patel later wrote, that he “wouldn’t sit quietly and accept their actions to stonewall direct orders from the president.”

Patel was ultimately denied a role at the pinnacle of the national-security establishment, but Trump has promised to learn from his mistakes. Should he return to the White House, there will be no Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he seeks revenge against his political enemies. Instead, there will be Patels—those whose true faith and allegiance belong not to a nation, but to one man.

“Get ready, Kash,” Trump said before a gala of young Republicans this past December. “Get ready.”

From the November 2023 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on how General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

A cursory appraisal of Patel’s activities since the Trump administration might suggest that his days as a senior official in the United States government are behind him—that Patel, like countless others on the right, has learned the art of commodifying his association with the former president.

There is, for example, merch: “the official K$h wine!” ($233.99 for six bottles) and the Fight With Kash Punisher Intarsia Reversible Scarf ($25), which Patel wore for his remarks at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. There are TAKE A LAP RHINO tank tops ($35), JUSTICE FOR ALL #J6PC tees (also $35), and Kash Krew Golf Polos ($50–$53).

There are the books. Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy is Patel’s account of his years fighting the “corrupt cabal” of federal officials trying to take down Trump. And in The Plot Against the King, a children’s book, Patel tells the story of a wizard named Kash who sets out to save King Donald from the sinister machinations of Hillary Queenton and a “shifty knight.” Head over to fightwithkash.com, and for a “special low offer” of $19.99, one can purchase playing cards (“the collector’s item of the century”) featuring the story’s characters; the king card belongs to “Kash, the distinguished wizard and corruption combatant.”

There is at least one song: Patel produced “Justice for All,” a version of the national anthem sung by jailed January 6 defendants and played by Trump at his first 2024 campaign rally. Patel professes to make no money from the song or the merch—he says proceeds go to January 6 defendants and their families, or to the Kash Foundation. Few details are available about the charity, but according to Patel, it has funded meals for needy families and defamation lawsuits on behalf of Ric Grenell, Patel’s friend and former boss at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Daniel Bostic, a “Stop the Steal” activist. (Just as this article was going to press, most of the merch was removed from Patel’s online shop.)

All the while, Patel churns out promotional content on Truth Social—for a conservative cellphone carrier (“Freedom in cell phones, switch today”) and a Christian payment processor (“Why not just give your money to the enemy, or switch now”)—and hawks pills that he says “reverse” the effects of COVID vaccines (“Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get healthy”).

He has also worked as a national security adviser to Trump (bringing in more than $300,000 over the past two years from the former president’s Save America PAC, according to campaign-finance records) and as a consultant for Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social ($130,000 last year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing). In addition, Patel has spoken of work abroad, though public paper trails are hard to come by—he has claimed, for example, that he worked as a security consultant for Qatar during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, in Doha.

Nevertheless, Patel has at times vented that he deserves more, according to two people I spoke with. “He complains about money all the time—like, he doesn’t have any money, can’t make any money, nobody will hire him,” a longtime Trump adviser told me. “Anybody who was as big of a deal as he was in the past administration would come out and they’d be on the board of Raytheon and Boeing.” (This person, like many of the nearly 40 Patel associates I spoke with for this story, requested anonymity for fear of retribution. Patel, who declined to be interviewed, denied this through a spokesperson.)

From the time Patel left the administration, he appeared committed to finding opportunities to reinforce his loyalty to Trump. In spring 2022, after the FBI opened a criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of federal records at Mar-a-Lago, Patel insinuated himself into the story, telling Breitbart News that he witnessed Trump verbally declassify “whole sets of materials” before leaving the presidency. The claim ensured a starring role for Patel throughout the probe—ending with Patel testifying before a federal grand jury in exchange for a grant of limited immunity. More crucially, Patel’s assertion to Breitbart seemed to preview Trump’s own approach to the case: In August, shortly after federal investigators executed a search on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s office claimed that, as president, he had a standing order that any materials moved from the Oval Office to Mar-a-Lago were considered declassified. It did not appear to bother Patel that numerous Trump officials flatly denied the existence of such an order.

That October, the far-right personality Benny Johnson asked Patel on his podcast how he would respond if Trump offered him the job of FBI director in a second term. Patel leaned back, laughed, and waved off the question, but a minute later he decided to chime in after all. “Yes, to answer your question, of course,” he said. “Who would turn that down?” Some in Trump’s orbit acknowledge that Senate confirmation is unlikely for Patel—that if he were to lead an agency, it would probably be in an acting capacity. On a podcast in November 2023, Donald Trump Jr. floated the idea of installing Patel as an “interim” attorney general at the outset “just to send that shot across the bow of the swamp.”