In January, Bongino finally did leave the F.B.I. Trump had told reporters that he thought Bongino “wants to go back to his show”; Bongino soon announced that he would. Appearing, again, with Hannity, Bongino defended his prior contention that some jobs traffic in facts and others in opinions. “I don’t know why this was hard for, again, these full-diaper media morons to understand,” he said. Regardless, he seemed to agree when Hannity proclaimed that “the real Dan Bongino’s back.” This past Monday, Bongino returned, on Rumble, a YouTube competitor that is popular among right-wing content creators, and was palpably in his element—at least, until his stream cut out. “Rumble is under attack, this show is under attack,” he said, after the feed was restored. “This is what these scumbags do.”
In reality, the gulf between Bongino the free-range opinionator and Bongino the fact-constrained lawman may not have been as wide as all that. His show always claimed to be rooted in reality—its tagline was “Get ready to hear the truth about America, on a show that’s not immune to the facts”—even if that claim itself was not; after Bongino suggested, on “Hannity,” that his opinions weren’t relevant to his F.B.I. work, he criticized members of the media for pushing the Russia “collusion hoax” and said that, if Trump weren’t President, “we may not have a Republic.” (This is without getting into the reports, from inside the Bureau, that Bongino was obsessed with posting on social media, at the expense of pressing operational matters. On his show this week, Bongino responded that social media is integral to the F.B.I.’s work in the digital age, adding that his detractors “can go fuck yourself.”) For all the talk of distinct roles, U-turns, and the “real Dan Bongino,” the most interesting question, to my mind, isn’t whether Bongino changed during his hiatus from right-wing podcasting. It’s whether right-wing podcasting has changed on him.
As chance and Justice Department foot-dragging would have it, Epstein was very much in the news when Bongino made his comeback, on Monday. He addressed the case, and his role in it, a little over halfway into his show. “Leadership involves frequently being misunderstood, and having to make decisions that’s gonna piss someone off,” he said. “I wanted to see the files, folks. I said, ‘Don’t let it go.’ I meant it. We got elected. We looked at it. The file was not—what was in there was not what we thought would be in there.” Two of Bongino’s competitors got into the latest dump of Epstein files much more directly (depending on your definition of “direct”). Candace Owens—whose podcast was, by at least one metric, the fastest-growing right-wing offering as of late last year, and has recently been home to increasingly baroque theorizing about the assassination of Charlie Kirk—opened her show on Monday by derisively asking, “Are we still talking about the Epstein files?” She then proceeded to do so via an extended disquisition involving Sigmund Freud, his “B’nai B’rith Freemason boys,” and child-abuse rituals. Later, Nick Fuentes described Epstein as “first and foremost, a Jew,” then scoffed at Owens for getting distracted by the occult. He also called her a “Johnny-come-lately antisemite.”
In recent months—amid the leadership vacuum left by Kirk’s killing, and particularly since the former Fox host Tucker Carlson made the inflammatory decision to record a podcast with Fuentes—much ink has been spilled on emerging schisms between the most important commentators on the right, some of them around issues such as U.S. support for Israel and the overt tolerance of antisemitism, some of them viciously personal, most of them both. This week, The Hollywood Reporter taxonomized who is fighting with whom, and drew them into the broad camps of “MAGA Moderates” (Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro) and “MAGA MANIACS” (Owens, Carlson, Megyn Kelly). Apparently, the “moderates” can now be said to include Alex Jones, the notorious Sandy Hook truther. Indeed, much of the spilled ink has attested to the rapid radicalization of the MAGA media firmament, especially the growing momentum of Fuentes among young people who once saw Kirk as their lodestar. (Kirk, it should be noted, reportedly loathed Fuentes.) Because MAGA is the sort of world in which a person can host a podcast one day and lead the F.B.I. the next, these ructions would seem to matter for the broader post-Trump direction of the right, at a moment when that question is itself starting to matter. Owens and Fuentes have both been critical of Trump; the latter, in particular, has cast Trump’s Administration as unserious, even a betrayal. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman who stepped down in January, has decisively broken with him. Last week, she stated that MAGA was “all a lie.”