Dan Bongino spent two hours on Monday telling his audience he wasn’t going to over-explain himself. He then proceeded to over-explain himself for the whole two hours.

The longtime conservative personality and former Deputy FBI Director’s return to podcasting after less than a year in government was meant to be a victory lap. It instead resembled the deposition of a man on the margins, watching a movement that seems to be leaving him and others behind. Bongino, who left the Trump administration in early January, relaunched his show on Rumble with President Trump calling in live. Unfortunately, the call briefly knocked the stream offline, with Bongino claiming that the show was “under attack”.

Eventually the show got back on the road. But the tone throughout was defensive, rather than triumphant. “One of the cardinal rules of leadership and leadership positions is don’t over-explain yourself,” Bongino told his audience. “I did what I did. If you’re a supporter and you like it, you like it. If you don’t and you hate my guts, it’s not that I’m going to convince you either.” He then spent the next 90 minutes doing precisely what he’d sworn off.

The targets of his ire were left strategically vague. Bongino railed against “black-pillers, life-losers, grifters and bums” who had “hijacked” the conservative movement. He accused unnamed critics of being “doomers under the frame of accountability” who “didn’t do shit” while he served in government. He told FBI leakers they could “go fuck” themselves. But he named nobody.

This warrants notice because the MAGA media landscape has spent the past several months eating itself. Tucker Carlson’s friendly October interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes triggered denunciations from Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, and Mitch McConnell. The Heritage Foundation’s president defended Carlson and faced internal resignations. Candace Owens pushed conspiracy theories about the death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Bongino, who delivered an emotional tribute to Kirk during the broadcast, addressed none of this directly.

When Trump called into Monday’s broadcast, Bongino’s tone shifted to pure obsequiousness. “The way you just let us cook, Mr. President, you said, ‘go get them. Go get them, boys’,” he gushed. “I tell everyone in the media, if you work for him and you’re in the room with him, he demands results. You want a friend, get a freaking dog.” Trump offered a bit of backhanded praise that landed somewhere between endorsement and eulogy: “I think maybe I’d rather have you where you are [i.e., podcasting] because very few people can do what you do.”

The deeper issue concerns what will happen when the man Bongino so lavishly praised is no longer around. The 2028 primary will be a free-for-all, and the factions currently tearing at each other over Fuentes, Epstein and antisemitism will have no unifying figure to keep them in orbit. The Groypers, the Carlson-adjacents, the Shapiro institutionalists, the remnants of the Tea Party, and whatever Bongino represents will be fighting for control of a movement that was always more big-tent coalition than coherent ideology.

Bongino seemingly wants to be the guardian of the original MAGA, the pre-Fuentes, pre-black-pill version that believed in law enforcement and loved Trump without irony — deciding which voices belong in the movement and which are “cancers killing the host.” But that centre may not hold. The assaults from the people he refused to name will only intensify as the party battles over its post-Trump future. If Bongino sounds defensive now, while Trump is still in office, imagine how he’ll sound when that protection evaporates.

“The Podfather is back,” Bongino announced. “And I’m here to take back this movement.” The question is whether there will be a movement left to take back — or whether it will have already moved on.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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