Dan Bongino once succeeded Rush Limbaugh. Now he needs to act more like him. | Opinion
Dan Bongino, a popular radio host, podcaster and former talking head for both Fox News and the National Rifle Association has been tapped to manage the day-to-day operations of the 33,000 staffers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He’s never managed anything larger than a U.S. Senate campaign, and he failed at that.
It’s as if George H.W. Bush appointed Rush Limbaugh, whose time slots Bongino took over, as deputy secretary of state. Limbaugh, of whom I have been a fan since my head was full of mush, would of course have been wildly unqualified. But Limbaugh also had one characteristic that Bongino is going to need in this job that doesn’t require Senate approval.
Yeah, Bongino has experience as a New York City police officer and years at the pinnacle of responsibility for Secret Service agents – safeguarding the lives of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But none of that prepares you to be the deputy director of the FBI. The bureau has dozens of U.S. field offices, sprawling international operations and responsibilities that range from gun crime to counterterrorism.
As No. 2 for the newly confirmed director of the FBI, Kash Patel, Bongino will be a key architect reconfiguring an agency that the duo say has been grossly mismanaged and overly politicized.
That’s the party line from Donald Trump, who has had a grudge against the FBI since agents of the bureau lied to get intelligence surveillance warrants in the course of investigating perfectly reasonable questions about ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia. Putting a pair of questionably qualified outsiders in charge of the FBI is payback for that and a slew of other offenses, real and imagined, of which the president accuses the FBI.
But loyalty to the Trump party line is often at odds with reality. In Bongino’s new role at the FBI, if he does his job properly, he’ll be in the reality business. In his career so far, he’s shown no appetite for telling Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear. Just the opposite, in fact.
The most egregious of the Trumpy lies that Bongino has espoused in recent years is the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. Bongino’s repetition of the lie had real world consequences too. The pro-Trump protester who was shot to death by police during the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was a Bongino fan — she retweeted him more than 50 times in the last year of her life, including lies about the stolen election.
It takes independence to stick to the facts even when your boss is going off the deep end. As one of the radio conglomerate designated successors to Limbaugh, Bongino should look to his predecessor for examples of just what that would look like.
There was a moment in the George W. Bush administration when the president appointed an undistinguished party loyalist and White House lawyer named Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Limbaugh led the conservative chorus telling Bush he had made a mistake. Limbaugh called the president “weak” on his show for not appointing a strong, intellectual conservative in the mold of Antonin Scalia for the slot on the high court. Truth-telling by a loyal radio host won the day when conservative stalwart Justice Samuel Alito was appointed instead.
Like Bongino, I owe a lot to Limbaugh. My first brush with opinion journalism fame came when he quoted from a column I wrote at my Iowa college paper. When Rush was at his peak in the 1990s and early 2000s, he espoused a consistent conservatism that was firmly grounded in reality even as liberal elites sneered at him and the crazy-sounding things he said that were ultimately validated.
But Limbaugh knew that standing up to liberal elites wasn’t the only quality that made a conservative great. A great conservative needs enough independence to stand up and tell powerful Republicans when they stray from reality.
That’s a quality Bongino will need in his new role at the FBI, but it’s one I’m afraid my fellow Limbaugh acolyte sorely lacks.
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 6:06 AM with the headline "Dan Bongino once succeeded Rush Limbaugh. Now he needs to act more like him. | Opinion."
