The FBI Director Just Went Snorkeling Over a War Grave
David Shuster on Kash Patel's VIP tour of the USS Arizona—the sunken battleship where 900 Americans died at Pearl Harbor, where oil from the wreckage is still called "the black tears of the dead."
By David Shuster
There are some Trump cabinet secretaries who dishonor government service by their venality, others by cowardice, and still others by simple stupidity. Kash Patel has managed to achieve all three distinctions simultaneously and with the confidence of a lunatic cannonballing into the shallow end of history.
In the old days of U.S. Presidential administrations, long before Trump and his lackeys turned every institution into a stage for self-promotion and every office into a species of lifestyle celebrity, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was expected to exhibit at least the theatrical appearance of sobriety, discipline, and restraint. The job carried a faint ecclesiastical quality.
The FBI director resembled a stern Presbyterian deacon who disapproved of jazz music, dancing, and pleasure generally. Our nation did not require the FBI director to be virtuous. We merely required the FBI head to understand that this post is a solemn public trust, not the director of a taxpayer-funded bachelor party.
Kash Patel has missed the distinction entirely.
The reports swirling around him keep accumulating with the hideous magnificence of excrement backing up in a clogged toilet.
There are the allegations Patel used FBI aircraft to ferry his twenty something country singing girlfriend to Penn State University so she could belt out the national anthem at a wrestling match.
There are the reports of additional FBI flights ferrying Patel and his girlfriend to a George Strait concert in Philadelphia, where the couple watched from a $50,000 luxury suite. Who paid? Patel won’t say.
There are the accounts in The Atlantic alleging episodes of such enormous Patel intoxication that associates could not wake him, and eventually summoned a SWAT team to break down a door.
Then there are the allegations that Patel inflated FBI arrest statistics.
Every third-rate regime in history has survived for a time by falsifying numbers. Soviet wheat yields, Mussolini’s trains, corporate earnings reports, attendance figures at county fairs — all belong to the same tradition of institutional bunk.
But there is something especially pathetic in a federal police director allegedly puffing arrest totals like a nightclub owner exaggerating turnout on opening weekend.
And floating on top of the whole septic stew is the image of Patel drinking beers with the Olympic gold medal winning hockey team. Patel presides over the FBI, not like a a serious guardian of the nation’s chief law-enforcement apparatus, but rather akin to a divorced, regional-used-car dealer, celebrating a sales milestone at a Buffalo Wild Wings.
Yet all these offenses, dispiriting as they are, pale beside the obscenity of the Pearl Harbor episode.
According to reports, Patel participated in a snorkeling excursion at the USS Arizona memorial in Hawaii.
That’s right. Patel took a VIP snorkeling tour, arranged just for him by the U.S. Navy. It included swimming near the the wreckage of the U.S.S. Arizona, where 900 sailors and marines died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The USS Arizona is not a marina attraction. It is not a theme park lagoon. It is not the sort of place where one straps on flippers and seeks “an experience.” It is a war grave.
American sailors and Marines remain entombed in that sunken battleship to this very hour. Oil still seeps upward from the wreckage — the so-called “black tears” of the dead — and every halfway-civilized person instinctively understands that the place belongs not to tourism but to reverence.
To go snorkeling there as a recreational activity displays precisely the kind of spiritual illiteracy that marks societies in decline. It suggests a man incapable of perceiving there exist places where the living are obliged to lower their voices, remove their hats, and suppress the modern Trump urge to convert every sacred site into personal content.
The Trump administration might as well stage jet-ski races through Arlington National Cemetery, install a zip line over Gettysburg, and distribute margaritas at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. These abominations would differ from Patel’s USS Arizona snorkeling only in degree.
Indeed, the nearest analogies are almost too grotesque to imagine. Snorkeling at Pearl Harbor belongs in the same category as rock climbing the 9/11 Memorial, parasailing above the white headstones at Arlington, or surfing the breakers off Omaha Beach while shouting “Cowabunga!” at the ghosts of the Normandy invasion dead. The offense lies not merely in bad taste but in the annihilation of instinct — the inability to feel the hush demanded by sacrifice.
Patel’s defenders insist his USS Arizona excursion was “respectful, educational, and properly coordinated.” Such arguments thoroughly miss the point. Civilization depends less on written rules than on inherited reflexes. A healthy society does not need to issue formal regulations prohibiting drunken karaoke in cathedrals or beer pong atop gravestones. We should all simply know better.
Or we once did.
The truly astonishing aspect of the Arizona affair is that it required no conspiracy, no corruption, no hidden memorandum. It required only the collective moral vacancy of the Department of Justice leadership and the Trump White House. Not a single official in this administration was willing to say, “no, that would be disrespectful.”
But modern Washington, D.C. under Trump does not produce custodians of institutions. It produces performers. The contemporary cabinet secretary regards every institution and memorial as a prop in the endless production of self promotion. The military becomes branding. The FBI becomes transportation. National cemeteries become scenery. Historical tragedy becomes experiential tourism for Trump VIPs with security details.
You can see the disease and moral rot everywhere under Trump. Trump MAGA politicians film campaign commercials at disaster sites, despite voting to reject FEMA grants for other states. Trump tech moguls and oligarch bros speak of civilization as though humanity were a software platform awaiting monetization. The Trump era worships access and visibility above everything else. Nothing can remain sacred because sacred things impose limits, and modern Trump narcissism regards limits as tyranny.
So, the Trump FBI director treats bureau jets like a spoiled teenager borrowing daddy’s convertible, while simultaneously cultivating the public image of a hard-charging suave patriot.
It is all branding, no ballast. The Roman emperors eventually reached the stage where they appointed horses to office. Trump has settled for appointing social climbers whose moral core is an insult to donkeys.
It is tempting to dismiss Kash Patel simply as another vulgar climber produced by a vulgar Trump age. Yet that would let the Trump culture escape indictment. Cabinet secretaries like Patel do not just emerge from nowhere. They are manufactured by an administration that has replaced honor with publicity, dignity with spectacle, and service with self-display.
This Trump crew doesn’t ask whether an official possesses gravity, wisdom, restraint, or moral seriousness. Trump and his team ask whether the cabinet secretary is willing to “fight,” can trend on-line, and get under the skin of democrats and anti-Trump republicans on cable news.
The result is government by self-promoting self-centered buffoons like Kash Patel who mistake swagger for competence, visibility for greatness, and immoral perks for gravitas.
History teaches us that republics don’t perish only from invasion or economic collapse (though the U.S. is leaning into testing the latter). Sometimes, great republics simply decay into vulgarity. Their ruling class loses the capacity for shame. Their institutions become costumes. Their sacred places become playgrounds. And eventually the citizens themselves forget there was ever supposed to be a difference between a statesman and an imbecile.
At that point, the barbarians are no longer at the gates. Like Kash Patel, they are holding security clearances.
Cliff’s Note: Shuster names what’s really happening. What most media won’t even whisper—Trump’s rot is cultural. “Inherited reflexes”—lowering a voice at a war grave. Not donning flippers. Those reflexes weren’t taught to most of us.
They were modeled by those we admired, absorbed without a lesson. When those who run our institutions defile them, they crumble. Buildings stand. Titles remain. But not what the titles were meant to protect.
Independent media that calls it out—a republic “decayed into vulgarity,” can only be funded by the those who feel the hush. Please Subscribe: $60/year, so we can continue to name the rot. A few bucks to our Ko-fi if a subscription’s too much. If everyone who feels the hush gives $5—we keep producing pieces by a writers who feel it too.
The barbarians are at the gate. We don’t have to invite them in. We have to invite them out.
—Cliff
This administration becomes worse with each passing day, no each passing hour. The lack of appreciation for what resemble expected human values and virtues is beyond the scope of those who are "in charge." Each person is an embarrassment to the office held. From the very top to the bottom no one who hold office brings a sense of propriety. These four years in particular make us appear weak, vulnerable, crude and incapable to acting in thoughtful meaningful ways. I am ashamed.
one more sad and sorry lack-of-character in the carnival barker's regime daily reaching new lows now snorkeling in a cemetery - an not just any cemetery. a military cemetery. a WW2 military cemetery. daily trying to find the words for the new lows these lowlifes gift us with. indecency + hubris characterize the whole lot of them.