Meet the Maga insurgents taking over at White House

How much damage could the anti-establishment agitators in the new administration do? Gabriel Gatehouse reports

- Gabriel Gatehouse

The weeks leading up to today's inauguration of Donald Trump have been strange for me. I've spent many years investigating the paranoid underbelly of American politics. I've hung out with people who believed in a sprawling conspiracy theory called QAnon - which held that the levers of power had been captured by a cabal of satanic paedophiles. Others believe in a vast plot to steal the 2020 election. They’re convinced America is in the grip of a shadowy and malign Deep State.

These people were once on the fringes. They would occasionally poke their heads above the parapet – as they did on 6 January 2021, when a mob of enraged Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington DC. Mostly though, they existed beneath the surface of mainstream America.

But since Trump’s victory in November, I’ve been tracking the nominees and appointments to his new administration. Again and again, I’d recognize names and faces from my time on the weirder fringes of the Maga world.

Take Kash Patel, for example, a government lawyer who had crossed my radar during Trump’s first term in office. Patel had won Trump’s trust thanks to his efforts to discredit investigations into links between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin. (To be fair, the narrative that Trump was a Russian agent, which emerged from the Steele dossier and consumed the American media for years, was massively overcooked.)

I last came across Patel in 2022. He’d left government service and was enjoying a moment in the spotlight telling his story on Maga-inflected podcasts. He had written a children’s book called The Plot Against the King. (No prizes for guessing who the king is. I’ll give you a clue: the villain of the story is a character called Hillary Queenton who tries to bring him down by alleging he cheated by working with the “Russonians”.)