In the 2008 comedy Role Models, Paul Rudd’s character, completing a community service sentence through a Big Brother-like program, tries to understand his awkward teenaged mentee’s interest in medieval-themed live-action role-playing (known in the community as “LARPing”). At the movie’s climax, Rudd joins other grown costumed adults spouting flowery verse as they pretend to fight each other with faux armor and foam weapons in a Los Angeles park. It’s quite ridiculous and very funny.
I’ve been reminded of those LARPing scenes several times recently with the news about some of the Trump administration’s top law enforcement and security officials who have appeared in the field, performing their duties with agency-appropriate clothing and gear—and always with a camera in tow, ready to post on social media.
Just this week, FBI Director Kash Patel’s behavior has been under scrutiny thanks to a new report authored by an anonymous group of former and current FBI officials. Written to appear like an intelligence assessment, the 115-page report is labeled a “pulse check” on the FBI over the last six months and cites specific sources currently working at the FBI. The overall conclusion is that the agency is a “rudderless ship” and that Patel is “in over his head” in the job. The report is addressed to the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, though a Senate aide tells me the report has not been formally presented to the committee. A spokesman for the House committee did not respond to my questions about whether they had received the report.
The analysis, which the New York Post’s pro-Trump columnist Miranda Devine first reported on, includes a number of embarrassing anecdotes about Patel, including one source describing multiple incidents when Patel traveled to Utah earlier this fall after the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. According to the source, after the FBI director’s plane landed in Provo, Patel “would not disembark from the plane without an FBI raid jacket.” The agent describes a scramble amid the investigation into the shooting to find a suitable and size-appropriate jacket, which belonged to a female FBI agent. Furthermore, Patel went on to insist that two Velcro shoulder patches be obtained before he would emerge from the plane.
The same source confirmed to the report’s authors the contemporary reporting back in September that Patel went on what the new report’s inside source describes as an “expletive-laden tirade” about the FBI personnel’s supposed mistakes in the Kirk shooting investigation. The source also said that the deputy director, Dan Bongino, later called the Salt Lake City field office’s special agent in charge to apologize.
On his very active X account, Patel obliquely addressed the jacket incident on Monday, saying he had been “looking for a Youth Large” before going after Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, who had mocked Patel for wearing the jacket “to cosplay as someone in charge.” The next evening on Fox News, Patel responded to the report with host Laura Ingraham, calling the jacket story “100 percent false” and said his donning of the raid jacket was his way of “honoring my men and women at the FBI.”
“One of my agents handed me a jacket and said ‘Hey boss, you should probably wear this, we’re going into the command center,’” Patel said. “And then another one handed me the SWAT team badge of the unit that was protecting the area where Charlie was assassinated. I wore that with pride.”
But regardless of how Patel came to wear the jacket, his preference for field gear over traditional suits reflects not just his own fashion sense but an administration-wide prioritization of performativeness and presentation in line with Trump’s own image consciousness. There’s a reason why the State Department this week rechristened the congressionally funded Institute of Peace with the president’s own name and Trump is planning for a new monument outside Arlington National Cemetery reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe.
And given the second Trump administration’s energetic activity in realms of law enforcement, the military, and immigration, we’ve witnessed quite a bit of LARPing in the field. There’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s well-documented workouts with the troops, which have earned him the sobriquet, “the influencer secretary.” In September, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, participated in a training session with the Army special forces. (Gabbard is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve.)
It may have all started with Kristi Noem. Back in February, the secretary of Homeland Security got on horseback and patrolled the southern border with Border Patrol agents. Later that spring she began joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on their raids across the country, wearing protective gear and sometimes wielding her own firearm. (On her official X account in April, Noem posted a video of herself speaking about the operations while flanked by two ICE officers. The barrel of the rifle she was holding was inadvertently aimed at the head of one of the officers.)
Noem perhaps solidified her position as the face of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement when her penchant for in-the-field performance was lampooned on South Park this summer. That episode hasn’t seemed to stop her flashy approach to the job that emphasizes the performative. In August, DHS released a recruitment video that looks like a music video for a hip-hop song, featuring trucks with ICE decals and wraps rolling through the streets of Washington while Da Baby’s 2019 track “TOES” plays.
And that attitude to performance appears to be trickling down. The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff has written that Madison Sheahan, the 28-year-old deputy director of ICE, is featured in several framed photos of ICE raids that hang outside the agency’s executive offices. Sources told Miroff that Sheahan had been asking for her own firearm and badge, despite having no experience in immigration enforcement prior to joining the agency this year. Miroff reported in August that “ICE officials have been working out an arrangement that would grant Sheahan limited customs-inspection authority to have a firearm she could carry inside federal buildings,” though a DHS spokeswoman told the magazine that Sheahan does not have a service weapon.
The LARPing, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do much to endear these political appointees to their employees. According to Ben Terris of New York magazine, some officials at ICE called Sheahan “Fish Cop” because of her previous experience running Louisiana’s department of wildlife and fisheries. According to that Atlantic article, one frustrated ICE official dismissed Noem’s flamboyant rap videos and publicity stunts as “cowboy sh-t.” And if the anonymous report about the FBI reflects wider views in the agency, there is a lot of consternation about the “unfortunate obsession” Patel and his leadership team have with social media, with one source telling the report’s authors that Patel and Bongino need to “stop talking, stop posting, and just be professional.”
