2025 was going to be Karate Man’s year.
It’s January 7 and Dan Bongino had some advice for the listeners of his self-titled radio show. He leads with news that Facebook is caving in to the incoming Trump Administration and eliminating its fact checkers. Bongino is hyped — he is always hyped — and launches into a monologue that is one part Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, and one part man mumbling to himself as he pisses behind a dumpster. His tone is the audio version of an about-to-be-flagged end-zone dance.
This is odd because Facebook has been his happy accomplice for years, helping Bongino reach social media heights that led Politico to proclaim in 2020 that “Dan Bongino leads the MAGA field in stolen-election messaging.” It was Facebook that stood by him in 2022 after Google and Youtube banned him for peddling misinformation about Covid-19. Still, in the Bongino World, even co-conspirators have to be viewed with suspicion. The former Secret Service agent counsels his listeners to hold off on celebrating until it is clear Facebook is truly in retreat. His advice is both specific and universal.
“Just hold. Karate man holds, because the karate man is patient and he only feels pain on the inside.”
Bongino then shows footage of Kamala Harris presiding over the official ratification of the Electoral College vote and describes it as “just glorious.” He strikes a martial arts pose and lets out a noise reminiscent of the character Scatman Crothers played on the vaguely racist 1970s kids cartoon Hong Kong Phooey.
“Total karate man style, defeating the single worst presidential candidate of any party in modern or not so modern American history.”
He then shares the secret of why MAGA is dominating Democrats in the political wars.
“They’re emotional when they should be focused on problems,” says Bongino.
He gazes into the camera with cold dark eyes.
“Don’t make that mistake.”
Oops.
Trump named Bongino to be the FBI’s deputy director two months later, a position that did not need Senate confirmation. Now, he is Kash Patel’s sidekick and running the day-to-day operations at the federal law enforcement agency that he has been kicking the shit out of for years. Now, Bongino was well placed to unveil the truth of the deep state’s involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein pedo trafficking scandal and the sexual predator’s purported death by suicide in 2019 while in federal custody. After all, Bongino had maintained the official story was bullshit for years.
“Listen, the Jeffrey Epstein story is a big deal, please do not let that story go,” said Bongino on his show in 2023. “Keep your eye on this. There are a lot of people who are knee deep in the Washington swamp who are not telling you the truth about serious allegations out there that Epstein may have had video and audio of people out there doing things they shouldn’t have been doing.”
He paused for a moment, his eyes darting about as if he expected the Deep State to break into his studio, bag him up, and dump him out of a Blackhawk helicopter in the North Atlantic. He spoke slowly.
“You should be asking yourself the question, how is it that all these people, the CIA director, the Obama fixer, Bill Clinton, all intersected with Jeffrey Epstein.”
He did not mention Donald Trump’s multiple intersections with Epstein, despite their well-known, years-long friendship.
Bongino’s appointment meant ‘The truth will out’ was no longer an aphorism, but the law of the land.
Well, at least that was the plan. Turns out that Dan Bongino can’t handle the truth. On May 25, a nearly catatonic Bongino joined Patel for an interview on Fox News with Trump stenographer Maria Bartiromo. Patel went first and said that, yeah, uh, Epstein killed himself. Bongino chimed in with all the enthusiasm of a hostage in a proof of life video.
“He killed himself,” said Bongino in a mumble. “I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.”
You could see Bongino’s soul leaving his body in real time. This led to introspection. Unfortunately, Bongino did said introspection live on Fox And Friends.
“I gave up everything for this,” said Bongino a week later. Dressed in a suit, he looked much smaller than the nasal-cartilage-deficient bad ass in a too-tight ‘Don’t Get Dead’ t-shirt that is still available from the Dan Bongino shop for $30. “If you think we’re there for tea and crumpets — I mean, Kash is there all day. We share — our offices are linked. He turns on the faucet, I hear it.”
Bongino seemed on the verge of a ugly, public cry. He continued talking.
“I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife — not divorced, but I mean separated. It’s hard, we love each other.”
Bongino had hit rock bottom. No, sorry, my bad. It turned out there were a few thousand more fathoms to drop in his personal Marianas Trench. On July 10, the Justice Department and the FBI released a joint memo asserting there was no Epstein “client list,” even though Attorney General Pam Bondi had stated in February that she had a list of Epstein’s clients on her desk and, subsequently, handed out news-free Epstein binders to right-wing influencers/dupes.
Bongino’s conspiratorial followers went batshit. A few days later, Bondi and Bongino reportedly engaged in a loud argument at the White House with Bondi allegedly accusing Bongino of leaking damaging information about her to right-wing media while Bongino shouted back she had botched the Epstein roll-out.
Dan Bongino didn’t show up for work the next day. He went full sulk. To paraphrase himself, Bongino had become emotional and not a problem solver. Currently, his political viability and sanity seems to be hanging by the thinnest shred of spaghetti.
This is what happens when you do not listen to Karate Man.
THE LIST OF TRUMP APPOINTEES that have no business having access to a government car much less access to government secrets is long and numerous and they don’t all work for the Defense Department. Still, Dan Bongino running ops at the FBI was whatever the opposite of 4-D chess-level shit that Trump is purportedly playing against his foes.
I have spent much of my time since Dan Bongino took his infamous personal day compiling a short history of the martial arts expert, reading his six books, listening to multiple episodes of his radio shows and reviewing coverage of his political campaigns. Why? The short answer is I hate myself, but it also seems important to understand the history and disposition of the man responsible for running the daily operations at one of the world’s most-feared law enforcement agencies, especially at a time when American politics disconnects from reality more each day.
Let’s start with his disposition.
It’s 2016 and Dan Bongino is running for Congress on Florida’s west coast. Depending how you count them, it was either his fourth or fifth race in two states since 2012. (There’s video of Bongino during one of his Maryland campaigns lambasting Americans who move to friendlier political states and urging them “do not cede ground.”)
Bongino was originally running in the 18th congressional district on the other side of the state where he had recently bought a home, but switched to the 19th congressional district when a congressman announced his retirement. While perfectly legal, it did leave Bongino in the position of not being able to vote for himself since he was registered a hundred miles away. Reporters brought this up as well as his lack of financial support in his new district. Bongino wasn’t handling it well, at an earlier campaign event he lost it with a citizen questioning his motives, offering to take things outside. He then talked with Politico’s Marc Caputo about his residency on the phone and offered him some advice.
“Hey, shut the fuck up!” Bongino shouted. “Go, fuck yourself, you piece of shit. You don’t know why I moved to Florida, you motherfucker.”
(Granted, this was after Caputo had called Bongino a “professional candidate” who might need medication.)
This was not Dan Bongino’s first day at the anger rodeo. In 2018, Bongino was on a panel discussing the deep state at Politicon, a gathering of pundits and hot-take artists with David Frum and others. Bongino didn’t like the questions coming from historian Vince Houghton, the moderator.
“You’re a lousy moderator,” shouted Bongino.
Houghton lost it.
“You’re an idiot, you’re a moron and you’re deranged!”
Bongino stormed off the stage, but not before chucking a bottle of water in the general direction of Houghton.
The same year, Bongino had a book signing where, according to the New Yorker, someone asked how he handles “the frustrations you encounter daily.”
Bongino laughed.
“Who said I handle them? You’re not aware of my notoriously horrible temper and disposition?”
It was a classic I’m joking, but I’m not really joking scenario.
LOSING HIS SHIT was not part of the original Dan Bongino bio. As he tells it, he grew up above a bar in Queens where his mom’s enormous boyfriend beat the crap out of him repeatedly. (This inspired him to turn to martial arts to protect himself.) He endured and went to college before becoming a NYPD cop.
After four years, he became a Secret Service agent and served on both George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s personal detail. Somehow, Bongino parlayed an honorable but generic Secret Service gig into a lucrative career as an expert on the deep state.
Bongino’s lack of shame was a key component. Bongino’s first book deals with his Secret Service years. Bongino, in his own account, seems less than great at his job. His detail momentarily loses Bush on a Paris bike ride. Jenna Bush’s purse gets stolen at a restaurant. The blooper reel continues. He’s always getting sick on assignment. Obama gives him a dirty look for texting while driving the president through Arlington Cemetery.
The sketchiness continued after Bongino left the Secret Service in pursuit of media and political glory. He departed in 2011 and immediately launched a campaign in Maryland for the U.S. Senate eschewing entry level work. Bongino leveraged his Secret Service experience for exposure throughout the campaign. In April of 2012, Bongino did a series of interviews about a Secret Service scandal in Colombia involving a prostitute. On CNN, he called the Secret Service’s behavior “disgraceful.” In other interviews, he mentioned that he had been in contact with agents on the ground. What he didn’t disclose was that his brother Joe was one of the Secret Service agents on the Colombia detail. CBS News issued an on-air clarification the day after his appearance on the network’s morning show.
Despite his foibles, Bongino became the go-to guy for TV bookers whenever the Secret Service was in the news, often getting up in the middle of the night and driving from Maryland to New York City for morning hits. In 2014, the head of the Secret Service resigned after a man with a gun made it into the White House and The New Yorker tagged along with him between media appearances.
“I thought it was from the Onion,” said Bongino, criticizing his former colleagues. Bongino then talked about the skills a Secret Service agent needs. “We’re like the MacGyvers of federal law enforcement.” Bongino comes off in the story as self-deprecating — perhaps unintentionally — especially when he admits he kept his 917 cell number after moving from New York to Maryland after seeing how hard Carrie Bradshaw took it when she gave up her number on Sex and the City.
Over time, Bongino’s take on the Secret Service lost any of his Forrest Gump-adjacent tone and just got mean. Last year, he testified before a congressional committee on the Secret Service’s performance during the assasination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. He offered a grim analogy.
“You’re in a mall parking lot, it’s 97 degrees, and you leave a kid in there and you close the door,” said Bongino. “Did they intend to kill the kid? Probably not. But how stupid do you have to be to do that?… Layered intent, layered incompetence like that is absolutely intent.” (He offered no proof of intent.)
Bongino’s take on Obama has also evolved. In his first book, Bongino describes Obama as a family man who he simply disagreed with politically, but soon he was insisting the former president was an existential threat to the American way.
Soon, his media trajectory switched from CBS and The New York Times to a guest on Alex Jones’ show, where the griftcaster declared Bongino made the establishment quake because “They’re so scared of him and what he knows.”
Bongino leaned into that image in his second campaign. Bongino told ABC News that “I was behind the scenes for 12 years… I’ve been in the room during some of the most important conversations.” He then added, “If there was one event that helped make up my mind, the most visceral was the Obamacare debate. The public doesn’t have any idea how many deals were cut on that.”
Bongino’s fellow agents called bullshit, saying he did not know what deals were cut either because agents are not in the room during political discussions. No one in the right-wing ecosystem seemed to mind.
BONGINO’S OWN WORDS describe a man so desperate to make his mark that his last book is entitled, The Gift of Failure. In one of the book’s highlights, Bongino and his wife are watching Grey’s Anatomy one night. Bongino is around 30. He tells her that he wants to go to medical school. She has her concerns.
“Uhm, this is not the kind of thing you just, like, decide while watching Grey’s Anatomy on the couch. I think you better kind of think this thing through.”
Bongino is undeterred.
“I have. While watching Grey’s Anatomy. I want to go to medical school.”
Bongino spends a year studying for the MCATs at night between his day job protecting presidents. He takes the test. He claims he did well, which I guess could maybe be true. He applies to exactly one med school, the University of Oklahoma where he thinks he has a connection. He doesn’t get in. He shuts it down, recounting it is “hard to relive this moment even as I write this now.”
No doubt.
Bongino is self-lacerating about his ambition, but, again, it’s unclear if he is in on the joke. He laments that he should have run for governor instead of Congress in 2014 and calls eventual winner and fellow Republican Larry Hogan a “weak, sniveling little guy,” despite him managing to win statewide in deep blue Maryland twice.
Bongino actually came close to pulling a major upset in his 2014 congressional race, convincing himself from early returns he was going to win before losing by a single point. He bemoans he would have won if he had not taken two weeks off during the campaign to contemplate a radio job. (Why he would take two weeks off is unclear. In an earlier book, Bongino blames his loss on he and his wife being sick for the last two weeks of the campaign.)
In 2022, Bongino is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and berates his body for failing him. He concentrates on the disease’s 20 percent fatality rate, not the 80 percent who survive the cancer. He only comes out of his spiral when Donald Trump calls him before surgery.
“Hi Dan, it’s your favorite president.”
BONGINO HAD EARNED that presidential call. After his carpetbagging loss in Florida, Bongino found his true calling: his own podcast, an intoxicating blend of bile and unprovable bullshit. It wasn’t just incoherent ranting, there was a method.
In 2021, Bongino told the New Yorker that his wife Paula kept track of what hit the best: “She’ll be, like, ‘Dude, you are slaying it today,’ because she has these metrics on the Excel spreadsheet.”
Bongino’s success is much like a fast food chain’s secret sauce. It’s just your standard mayo and ketchup blend with an extra cup of sugar blasted into the mix to keep you jacked up as you devour another Whammy burger. Bongino deftly turned every conspiracy theory that came down the Crazy Town turnpike into an exponentially crazier story.
Let’s go back to that January 7 show. Toward the end, Bongino goes into a long guitar solo about the still unknown identity of the suspect who planted a pipe bomb outside of Democratic National Committee headquarters on the day of the January 6 riots. Bongino insists the bomber was an insider and a FBI false flag operation.
“I am absolutely certain this is the biggest political scandal of our time, and that the FBI has been hiding a massive fake assassination plot to shut down the questioning of the 2020 election,” says Bongino. He grins at the idea that his friend Kash Patel is about to be confirmed as the new FBI director.
“They know it’s going to come out the second Kash gets sworn in.”
I feel I have a professional obligation to inform you the plot was not exposed on Kash Patel’s first day or his 100th day.
Sometimes, Bongino lets his guests say the cuckoo stuff. Shortly after the 2020 election, Bongino had noted truth teller Rudy Giuliani on to sow election doubt. Bongino nodded along as Giuliani made a love connection between Dominion’s Smartmatic voting machines and the Maduro government in Venezuela with quick stopovers linking Dominion to George Soros and the Black Lives Matter movement. Giuliani claimed votes were being counted by Venezuelans and they were doing the counting in — heavy sigh — Barcelona.
“We’re basically having our votes counted by Venezuelans who are close to our enemy,” claimed Giuliani.
“That’s insane,” shouted Bongino.
He was right, it was insane, just not quite in the way Bongino meant it. Giuliani was subsequently sued by Dominion for $1.3 billion and was ordered to pay two Georgia election workers $148 million for defamation in other fact-free stolen election rhetoric.
Still, it worked. Bongino’s audience grew and he started to walk and talk with a swagger. He claimed gossip aggregator Matt Drudge had gone soft so he started the creatively titled The Bongino Report. (It was not a smash hit.) Bongino then threatened to quit his show when parent company Cumulus Media enforced a vaccine mandate, despite the fact Bongino himself had been vaccinated. In a now-familiar routine, Bongino didn’t show up for work for a week. He crumbled when it became clear Cumulus wasn’t backing down. Bongino scored a weekend Fox show in 2021 called Unfiltered. Two years later, Bongino demanded more money when his contract was up. Fox didn’t care; they just canceled his show.
Mostly, the Bongino bluster paid off. In 2021 — after years of pushing MAGA bullshit ranging from vaccine and election misinformation to an incomprehensible book called Spygate on how Trump was framed in the Russian collusion scandal — Bongino was tapped to take over Rush Limbaugh’s spot on AM radio.
His first guest? Donald Trump.
A LONG TIME AGO, I was on assignment and found myself in an EA-6B Prowler flying through the Cascades. The pilot started fucking with me a bit. We dipped into a canyon and were heading directly toward a canyon wall at 450 mph.
“This is a box canyon,” said the pilot into his mic. “If we were in a Cessna we’d be dead in about ten seconds.” He paused for a moment. “But we’ve got Pratt & Whitney engines.” He pulled back on the stick and our jet shot straight up. We cleared the box canyon with maybe a hundred feet to spare. (It goes without saying I puked into a white garbage bag.)
Currently, Dan Bongino is in a box canyon of his own making. We are about to find out if he’s going to pull out of it or go splat. His situation seems desperate. He spent years peddling Epstein scandal garbage and now he’s boxed in by Trump — who’s decided it’s all a hoax. His followers’ withered minds are contemplating whether Deep State truth teller Bongino is actually part of the Deep State.
There was only one thing he could do: double down on the bullshit. Last weekend, Bongino emerged from the darkness with a cryptic post on X.
“During my tenure here as the Deputy Director of the FBI, I have repeatedly relayed to you that things are happening that might not be immediately visible, but they are happening,” he wrote. “The Director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations. It is a priority for us. But what I have learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters, has shocked me down to my core. We cannot run a republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned…”
X blew up. The cranks that deserted Dan Bongino rushed back to his side.
“We have a right to know what it is that ‘shocks Dan Bongino to his core,’” wrote James O’Keefe, a fellow flim-flam man who has spent the past two months beating the crap out of Bongino and Patel for selling out the QAnon adjacent community. “Many people probably can’t handle that truth, but at this point more harm would come from not having it.”
But go back and read Bongino’s post. It has all the substance of bodega-bought ramen. It also sounded familiar to me. Then it hit me: He was running a play he’s run before. I went back and looked up an interview Bongino did in 2012 when he first started trashing Barack Obama. Asked about his change of heart about the president, Bongino gave a thousand-yard stare before responding.
“It’s worse than people know,” said Bongino. “They’d be shocked, scared, if they knew everything.”
Bongino is just re-writing his own script. Any day now, he is going to join Tulsi Gabbard, a fellow shame-free Trump official, and insist that Barack Obama is an American traitor who strangled the republic into a coma all because he was jealous of the genius that is Donald Trump. Bet on it.
It’s too corny to work, right? Maybe, but let me leave you with the words of Dan Bongino last year after Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies.
“Laugh now motherfuckers. You’ll be crying soon.”
