Dan Bongino is the Real Idiot

A former FBI deputy director's distorted worldview isn't expertise—it's occupational damage

A new article meant to stir MAGA sympathies instead only reveals how stupid and ignorant Dan Bongino, the former FBI Deputy Director, truly is.

Bongino just went on Hannity to call the media “a big, full diaper” and rant that he’s “tired of these idiots” who dare to point out that violent crime was already falling before Trump took office. He dismissed journalists as “people who’ve never spent a day wearing a badge. Never kicked in a door. Never arrested some child predator or some bank robber or some gang member.”

Here’s the thing, though. Bongino is forgetting what it’s like when all you see is crime. If your job is focused on stopping and preventing crime, then that is all you see. And that creates a very obscure vision of the world.

When I was younger, I knew this cop who was just a few years older than me. Although at the time he seemed way older—I didn’t realize then that he was only a few years ahead of me. We served together in the military. During one of our drills, he mentioned to others he was planning on leaving the force. He said he realized he was starting to distort his view of the world and humanity. As a cop, all he saw was the worst in people. He said it had started to make him think everyone was a potential criminal. And he knew in his heart of hearts that wasn’t true.

That man, who was in his early twenties, was decades ahead in self-awareness and maturity than someone like Dan Bongino will ever be.

There’s actually a name for what that young cop recognized in himself. Criminologist Jerome Skolnick called it the “working personality” of police officers back in 1966, and the research has held up for nearly sixty years. The core idea is simple: the constant exposure to danger and the authority police carry creates a distinctive worldview. Officers develop what Skolnick called a “suspicious comportment”—they start seeing potential threats and potential criminals everywhere. It’s not a personal failing. It’s an occupational hazard.

Research describes how officers develop “perceptual shorthands to classify certain individuals as potentially violent based on inputs such as language, dress, gesture, or not ‘belonging’ within a street scene.” The danger element isolates them. The authority reinforces that isolation. And over time, many develop what researchers have documented as cynicism, distrust of citizens, and an “us versus them” mentality. Some studies link this to compassion fatigue—the same phenomenon that affects trauma doctors and crisis counselors. Except cops experience it while carrying guns and making split-second judgments about who’s dangerous.

My friend on the force saw it happening to himself. He had the self-awareness to say: this job is making me see everyone as a suspect, and I know that’s not reality. So he got out.

Dan Bongino served as an NYPD officer from 1995 to 1999 in the 75th Precinct—East New York, Brooklyn, which he’s described as “very busy” during a drug war. Then he spent twelve years in the Secret Service, where his job was literally to identify and neutralize threats to the president. That’s two decades of professional training to see danger everywhere. Two decades of his brain learning that anyone could be the threat.

And then he became a right-wing media personality whose entire brand was built on identifying enemies and dangers—the deep state, the FBI, the “demon energy” he claims infects Democrats. He spent years telling millions of listeners that elections were stolen, that shadowy forces were conspiring against Trump, that the whole system was corrupt and dangerous.

Is it any wonder that man thinks America is a hellscape of crime when the actual data shows the opposite?

Let’s get into those facts—something Bongino hates because facts don’t play well on podcasts built around fear and outrage.

The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, released a report in January showing that the homicide rate dropped 21% in 2025 across 35 major cities. That’s the lowest murder rate since 1900. The largest single-year percentage drop in homicides ever recorded. Eleven of thirteen crime categories fell compared to 2024. Nine of those categories—including aggravated assault, robbery, and carjacking—dropped by ten percent or more.

And here’s the part that makes Bongino foam at the mouth: violent crime was already falling to a two-decade low during Biden’s final year in office. The Council on Criminal Justice has been tracking this. By 2024, most violent crime rates had already returned to where they were in 2019—before the pandemic spike. Sexual assault, domestic violence, and robbery all saw double-digit decreases.

Adam Gelb, president of the Council on Criminal Justice, put it plainly: “We’re seeing big swings in criminal justice policies, programs, and rhetoric, big advances in crime-fighting technologies, and big social, economic, and cultural shifts all happening at the same time. It’s extremely difficult to disentangle and pinpoint what’s actually driving the drop.”

In other words: it’s complicated. Multiple factors. Nobody gets to claim sole credit.

But Bongino isn’t interested in complexity. He wants to pretend Trump single-handedly saved America from a crime apocalypse that wasn’t actually happening by the time Trump took office.

The pandemic drove a spike in homicides in 2020 and 2021. Researchers attribute this to job losses, stress, service disruptions, and fewer people on the streets creating opportunities for violence to go unchecked. Once those pandemic factors eased, crime started falling—under Biden. The water got turned back on for prevention and intervention programs, as one criminologist put it. Community violence intervention programs, funded by Biden’s administration, helped rebuild trust with police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

Bongino doesn’t want you to know any of this. Because knowing it would mean admitting that Biden’s policies worked. That crime trends are complicated. That his years of screaming about dangerous cities and a collapsing civilization were—to use his own preferred framing from December 2025—just “opinions” he was “paid” to have.

That’s right. When confronted about his past conspiracy theories on Fox News, Bongino actually admitted: “I was paid in the past for

my opinions, that’s clear, and one day I’ll be back in that space. But that’s not what I’m paid for now.”

So all those years of claiming the 2020 election was stolen? Paid opinions. Promoting the debunked “2,000 Mules” conspiracy theory? Paid opinions. Suggesting Democrats had “demon energy”? Opinions someone paid him to have.

The human rights group Avaaz named Bongino one of the top five “superspreaders of election misinformation” in 2020. YouTube permanently banned him in 2022 for violating pandemic misinformation policies. He wrote a book promoting the disproven “Spygate” conspiracy theory. He suggested the FBI was complicit in the January 6th pipe bombs. He cited Sidney Powell as a reliable source on Dominion voting machines—Powell has since pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with election duties.

This is the guy calling journalists “morons” and “dipwads” for accurately reporting that crime was falling before Trump took office.

The cops Bongino claims to represent—the ones who actually wear badges today—deserve better than a spokesman who can’t distinguish between his professional training to see threats and the actual state of the world. The young officer I served with understood that his job was distorting his perception of reality. He had the integrity to step back.

Bongino never developed that self-awareness. He built a media empire on the distorted worldview his law enforcement career gave him, then called everyone else stupid for not sharing his fear.

That’s not intelligence. That’s not insight.

That’s a man who looked at his occupational trauma and decided to monetize it.

Fuck Dan Bongino.