Bulwark Takes - Dan Bongino Doomed? The MAGA Mob Is Out For Blood

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Andrew Egger and Will Sommer unpack the tensions with FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino from MAGA influencers over unmet expectations such as promised high profile arrests of Tom Hanks and Oprah, rising swatting incidents and pizza deliveries, and his continued tweets that he’s “working on it” with no results.

Hi, this is Andrew Egger with The Bulwark. It can be hard sometimes when you are one of the MAGA figures who's been put in to the government, supposedly, to do incredibly based stuff all the time and make all of the MAGA people's wildest dreams come true. It can be tricky because you have a spotlight on your work and people might start looking around saying, hey, what's going on?

Where's my based MAGA outcomes? Where are the people arrested that I've been looking to see arrested? What's going on in Donald Trump's White House? Dan Bongino, deputy director of the FBI, former right wing podcast host and kind of extended MAGA Trump world infotainment universe figure is having that problem these days. Here to talk about it, Will Sommer, our great reporter on the whole wild and woolly right wing media space. Will,, our great reporter on the whole Wild and Wooly right-wing media space. Will, what's going on with FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino these days? Yeah, sure. So Dan Bongino is taking this, you know, this former talk radio host,

podcast guy, he's taking this kind of strange approach where he's constantly tweeting, everyone's stop bugging me. I'm working on it. I'm working on it. You can't see what I'm working on. And so that got me interested. More recently, he's been posting basically that the heat is on him because a bunch of right wing influencers, some people at Infowars, some people with Instagram accounts, I believe a guy named Gunner Eagleman, they all got swatted. And so now Dan is on the case and they're saying, hey, why haven't you caught this guy yet? i did not know that that had happened to my boy is it gunner i like gunther or something well there's there's gunner thorderson and gunner eagleman so there's two kind of like two similarly named maga influencers yeah yeah okay well i had not heard that that had happened to this so this is such a strange thing right i

mean like swatting is a horrible, horrible phenomenon. It should happen to nobody. I assume people kind of know it's this kind of like weaponized crank calling, basically, where people call a police department and say, hey, you know, there's a violent crime taking place at this guy's home. Go check it out in tactical gear right away. It's violent. It can be dangerous. People answer their door and there's a SWAT team outside. It's a horrible thing.

Shouldn't happen to anybody. Can you explain a little bit of background on why this is kind of a thing in MAGA media right now, why people have this on the mind and what they're expecting Dan Bongino to do about it? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, you know, as you said, I mean, so these are these incidents where, you know, it's often weirdly in this case been preceded by a lot of unsolicited pizza deliveries and sort of in a creepy way. It's like in a bunch of InfoWars, people got hit and an employee of theirs was recently murdered, like in an actual murder unrelated to this. And so then they start getting pizzas in this guy, dead guy's name.

And then suddenly the cops come and it's very sinister stuff. And so, you know, not unreasonably, they've been expecting some FBI action. Now, I think, you know, I think the reality is these things, even in the best case, probably take a couple of months to track the person down. But, you know, they're getting mad and they're saying Dan Bongino is useless. And this is kind of blending in with the larger idea. I mean, in the case of some conspiracy theorists, I mean, they thought there were 50,000 indictments waiting of kind of deep state figures and no one's been charged. And so this is kind of feeding into this broader discontent that Dan Bongino is really kind of taking head on and, you know, for better or for worse.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, on a certain level, you almost have to feel a little bit bad for Bongino here. Maybe. I mean, maybe you don't. I don't know. I'm just trying to tease all this through in my mind because it's like on the one hand, yes, like presumably they should be looking into these swattings. Presumably they are to some degree. He obviously is out here saying, give me some patience. Give me some time. We're going to deal with all this stuff. But at the same time, because like you mentioned just a minute ago, there's there's this much broader, wilder kind of world of right wing conspiracy. is coming type people who are expecting success for Bongino and Kash Patel and the rest of Trump's

federal law enforcement to look not just like we're going to get to the bottom of these swattings, but we're going to start perp walking all of the enemies of the regime that we've been waiting to see arrested publicly through the public square, right? Like Liz Cheney in chains, Benny Thompson in chains. I don't know who all else counts as the Tom Hanks. Oprah. I mean, it's a very expansive list, right?

Right. Right. And so if you're Bongino, you're already kind of like, you have a lot of these people who are pre-primed to think you must be doing a bad job just because that stuff hasn't happening. And then you add on to that the difficulty of supervising the actual criminal investigations of true actual criminality for this audience that's like increasingly who's expecting you really to deliver, but also is increasingly hostile, you know, based on the stuff that's not happening, the wild stuff that they expected

you to be able to deliver. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, he's also has a lot of scrutiny. I mean, there's so much scrutiny of the FBI from the right after years of these whistleblowers, you know, who are claiming, oh, the FBI is out to get Trump people. Then him and Bongino and Kash Patel are promoting people who have been implicated as kind of like Trump haters, I think often baselessly. And then suddenly there's this whole universe of FBI whistleblowers now with podcasts who can say, you know, Bongino's betrayed us. Yeah. So there's basically like two ways of looking at it as far as I'm concerned. The one

is that, I mean, how far off the reservation are we? Maybe we'll just talk about this first. Like, is this the kind of stuff that we want the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be spending his time? Like, are these the people, these InfoWars guys, are these the people who we want him to wake up thinking, how do I please these guys today in my role in this very prominent role in federal law enforcement? No, I wouldn't say so. I mean, I think that's like, you know, in the past, we've had very buttoned down FBI directors, and then the deputy director of the FBI is supposed to be even more buttoned down. I mean, this is the guy who runs the show really behind the scenes. And instead, you get Dan Bongino, who is tweeting, like every other day at this point for a month about saying, hey, you know, haters back off. I'm working on it. You can't see it. There was one point he said, if you think I just came to D.C. for a vacation, like you're out of your mind. I mean, like real kind of trash talk. You know, the other thing I get into in this this newsletter is he tweeted,

you know, there's an article coming out about me in The New York Times. It says I got owned on the wrestling mat by one of the FBI's fitness instructors. The truth is, I was only hurt a little bit. I'm sorry. That's so good. That's so good. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. Keep going. He said the Times is going to say that I was injured. But in fact, it's a bit of a swelling. Now, this Times reporter, he essentially calls him a pencil neck. He's like, this guy could never understand the need to get out and spar on the mat. I mean, this is like, I should say, this is like a 500 word tweet.

You know, this guy could never understand why sometimes I got to mix it up with the troops. And like, yeah, did I get hurt a little bit? Yeah. Well, this guy's the sparring instructor and I'm not. So it's not really fair. Right. And as you get into when this New York Times profile

comes out, I mean, it's it is like a footnote of a footnote of like a completely different story. It's not like an expose on Dan Bongino that's getting rolled out here. Right. Well, I was so excited that he announced this story and everyone's waiting for it because I was thinking, you know, this is going to be the Bongino on the loose story about him just getting, you know, thrown at the walls or whatever by FBI instructors. And then suddenly it comes out and you know, there's got to be some backstory here that's like really hilarious. But the way it's written, that's it, you know, it's like several FBI employees thought Bongino came off the worst for wear or something like that, which is just

like the I have to imagine the actual situation, perhaps a little more graphic if it made it into the times at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's a cool it's a nice little vignette. And I'm glad that Dan Bongino was willing to bring it to our attention. And it's the same it's the same phenomenon. Right. I mean, it's like he is in there to be like the the the MAGA fantasy of like what what a real like based hard charging, like take no prisoners, you know, kind of renegade would be in this role and finally deliver us the kind of outcomes we've been looking for. And it's just this fantasy is impossible to live up to for anybody. I mean, like I'll stick up for Dan Bongino here. I'm very confident he's he's working as hard to make the InfoWars people happy much harder than anybody.

I would be remotely comfortable in that position. You know, InfoWars people happy, much harder than anybody I would be remotely comfortable in that position. InfoWars people, eat your heart out. I'm sure he's doing a great job for you guys. You should lighten up on Dan Bongino a little bit. But this is also like, I mean, it's not just him, right? This is kind of a phenomenon that we've been seeing, I wouldn't say across the Trump administration, but there's been a number of examples. I mean, you recently wrote about how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been getting a lot of blowback from like former hardcore RFK Kennedy Jr. people because he's, I mean, was it chemtrail stuff? Was it vaccine stuff? Can you talk a little bit about what's going on with that? Yeah. So it's kind of a combination. They're after him for several

reasons. One, he hasn't done anything about the chemtrails. These are of course the imaginary chemicals sprayed by airplanes. I think comedian, the gentleman in half-baked, was complaining, you know, he looked up in the sky and he said, you know, RFK, they're spraying Tampa today. You gotta rescue us. And then amid this Texas measles outbreak, RFK finally kind of grudgingly says, yeah, your kids should probably get the measles vaccine. And they're saying, no.

Yeah, well, it would be a little less fun for us if they were all really happy. So I guess there's something to be said for the schadenfreude of like they don't get necessarily their perfect outcomes either. Although if they just stopped and looked around, maybe they'd be a little grateful because they honestly they are. Again, you guys, the Trump administration is working really hard to please you specifically. And maybe you lighten up on them a little bit. He's making us mad. He's owning us. Focus on that. Focus on how owned we are. You know, give Dan Bongino a little bit of a break or whatever. One last thing. I know you got to I know you got to run. I guess. Why do you think it is? I'm just this is just thing I'm batting around in my mind. Why do you

think it is that guys like Bongino and RFK, like these these secondary figures, even though they have like humongous amounts of like MAGA street cred, they get like accountability from the cranks in a way that it seems like, you know, Donald Trump never really does. Trump Trump is always kind of like hovering above this. Nobody ever kind of comes around demanding that that he, you know, deliver on on this or that insane kind of right wing crank world expectation. Is that true? Maybe I'm wrong about that. Well, no, I think it is true. I think you're right on. I mean, I think it's because Trump's the big dog, right? I mean, he's kind of proven that that, you know, he can win no matter what. And, you know, people have have tried to mess

with them and they've been destroyed. And so I think as a result, it's, you know, the blame will always fall on someone like Dan Bongino or or, you know, some random or even Pete Hegseth or whoever. But they're never going to be able to really challenge Trump directly. Yeah. Yeah. Poor guys. All right. Well, thanks, Will. Thanks for coming on to talk about all this. You can read it all and even more that we didn't get around to talking to in his false flag newsletter out today on the Bulwark dot com.