The Mordor Bureaucrats - Part 1

Every dictator needs enablers. And every dictator gets them.

As a lifelong Lord of the Rings nerd (my father read them to me when I was four, and the memory of hearing that world brought to life in my Dad’s James Earl Jones-level bass voice is wonderfully Proustian) I once wondered, just who ran the place. Tolkien doesn’t address it deeply, but it wasn’t just the Nazgul on Slack.

I promise not to beat this analogy to death, but Tolkien wrote Sauron as an authoritarian ruler who concentrated power in his own hands. He established Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, as his seat of power; think of it as a kind of Mar-a-Lago in the land of fire and ash. Hitler’s rise and World War II were ever-present in his awareness.

Sauron's armies consisted mainly of orcs, trolls, evil men of the East, and other dark creatures. He bred and trained these forces to serve him without question. The orcs were his foot soldiers and workers, ensuring his will was enforced throughout Mordor and beyond. This was always the gap for me. Sauron and the Nazgul are at the top, and the Orcs are at the bottom, but I suppose high fantasy gets to elide the middlemen.

Evil takes organization and discipline. Evil needs a structure; otherwise, it’s mere chaos.

Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and the Chinese Communist Party are all examples of the rich power of the bureaucracy of evil. The Nazi’s various -amt’s and -diensts in their org chart of evil were too numerous to imagine. I knew a guy from the DIA once upon a time whose entire job was understanding Soviet military and industrial bureaucracies.

No, the bad guys in every autocratic model need more than cannon fodder and red shirts (or, rather, in the case of today’s bad guy, red hat) minions.

They need clever, able, agile bureaucrats. They need more Wannsee than 1/6, more deliberate and amoral than passionate and loud. No, they need the men who will organize and provoke the violence more than those who carry it out. There are always plenty of muscle types but rarely plenty of brains.

It’s easy to think Trump’s second term will be run by the Charlottesville Incel Nazi boys or the January 6th Trumpabteilung, but that’s not the case. The people running Trump’s next administration are, by and large, not stupid. That seems like a low bar, but many are pretty bright — some frankly brilliant if evil — and utterly loyal. They will not hesitate to implement his will.

You should know a few of the names below when considering how Trump’s next administration will function in the brave new era ahead if we are foolish enough to re-elect him.

The Apparachicks

Many of this herd of monsters aren’t entirely unfamiliar with the government. Some have served in high office, either appointed or elected, and many know how to push and pull the levers of government to achieve their ugly ends. These men trouble me most about a second Trump term; bureaucratic infighting and shenanigans are relatively invisible to Americans, and with the stroke of a pen, a Secretary of State Grennell or SECDEF Kash Patel can do untold harm.

White House Chief of Staff Steve Bannon should put the fear of God in you. Knowing both men, I think Sloppy Steve can sell Trump on it. As one of the few people Trump ever forgave for a slight or an embarrassment, Bannon has branded himself as the most passionate of the Trump True Believers, an inspiration and ideological architect of the autocratic nationalist populism of Trump. He’s the Sayyid Qutb to Trump’s Bin Laden. He wants White House Chief of Staff; he learned in the first go-around that anything else is meaningless without true power over the paper flow.

Attorney General Stephen Miller. I mean…why bother with just DHS when you can corrupt the entire DOJ and FBI to persecute Trump’s real and imagined enemies? Miller is a crafty and truly broken human, and he will go where he can do the absolute maximum damage. It’s DOJ, in my book.

Ric Grennell wants the State Department so badly he can taste it. Grennell started as a kind of jovial right-wing troll and has morphed into a fierce nationalist-populist monster eager to stoke far-right allies overseas. Expect Vladimir Putin to have a fierce new ally in Foggy Bottom when Grennell is installed.

Kash Patel, who was briefly assigned as Chief of Staff at the Pentagon in the fading days of Trump 1.0, is a radical and dangerous ally of Steve Bannon, came out for Devin Nunes’s insane Congressional operation and has parlayed his limited national security experience into a fast track for CIA Director. Patel is a wildcard, and his stock in Trump’s orbit is sky-high after this quote made news last week:

"We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media ... we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections ... We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice, and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators ... Because we're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”

Johnny McEntee, the child who somehow became Trump’s personnel director in the first term, is clearly on a fast track to either hold that job or — Lord save us all, and Steve Bannon decides to stay outside the White House — the Chief of Staff assignment. On Earth 1, Chiefs of Staff are Serious People. In Trumpworld, loyalty and obedience — which McEntee displays in spades — are the only currency.

Kris Kobach, America’s most passionate hater of immigrants, a Build Duh Wall fanboy, and a Trump world favorite at varying times, seems to be the natural fit for the Department of Homeland Security. I can tell you from experience he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, but he is smart enough to be an eager gauleiter for All Things Border.

Seb Gorka, the Dragon Of Budapest, Musk Lord of Fairfax County, and Mustang Driver have an iffy PhD and pretenses to be the alt-right Henry Kissinger. Expect Seb to shoot for National Security Advisor.

Part 2 coming soon…