The lack of standards for top law enforcement has insidious consequences.

“For the very concerned media — yes, I love America and was extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted Gold Medal winners on Team USA, invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment with the boys,” FBI director Kash Patel posted on X on Sunday night. He was referring to viral footage of himself — apparently drunk or well on his way to becoming so — partaking in booze-soaked festivities in Milan following the men’s Olympic hockey final, which the U.S. won against Canada 2-1. Even on a less eventful weekend, the sight of America’s most powerful domestic-law-enforcement official chugging from a bottle of beer, screaming at the top of his lungs, and showering players with the remainder of his foamy beverage might raise doubts about the state of public safety. But a lot was happening this weekend that deserved the FBI director’s attention. A few hours earlier, Patel had been photographed inside the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, where, while watching the game, he had announced on X that the bureau was “dedicating all necessary resources” to investigating a shooting that morning at Mar-a-Lago. President Trump was not at his Florida residence at the time of the apparent attack but at the White House, where his administration has been plotting military strikes against Iran that could provoke retaliatory incursions on U.S. soil — a prospect the FBI will be largely responsible for preventing. Watching the 45-year-old Patel jump up and down like a drunken frat boy while these crises unfolded did not inspire much confidence that they will be quickly and competently resolved.

Normally this would be almost universally considered a bad thing, but since Trump reassumed office last year, it has sort of been the point. Federal law enforcement today functions mainly as a blunt tool for enforcing the president’s whims, which are nominally focused on curbing illegal immigration, though recent attempts to prosecute Democratic officials and seize voter records from a Fulton County, Georgia, election hub suggest more varied objectives. Whatever the tasks at hand, the core feature of these efforts has been impunity — the idea that federal agents answer only to Trump and therefore won’t be held accountable when they begin, say, executing U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. But the broader and more insidious effect has been a near-total collapse in standards of any kind for the Feds beyond their sycophantic obedience to this one erratic and delusional man.

In fact, rather than minimize it, Trump effectively put Patel’s unseemly behavior front and center at his State of the Union address on Tuesday. After bragging about how “our military and police are stacked” and taking credit for a decline in murder rates that was already well underway before he took office, the president paraded the men’s hockey team across the stage to raucous applause.

The collapse in standards is best personified by the people Trump has appointed his top cops — a murderer’s row of preening sadists who would apparently rather troll online and orchestrate photo ops than effectively enforce the law. Under Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security has devoted the nation’s vast immigration-enforcement apparatus not to rounding up violent criminals, as was repeatedly promised, but to stretching the parameters of who is deportable — a category that has come to include legal U.S. residents, pro-Palestine university students, and seemingly anyone who’ll help her meet Stephen Miller’s exorbitant quotas. As a result, Noem has earned less attention for her policing prowess than her vanity and dishonesty; her smear campaigns against Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both killed by federal agents in Minnesota, were rivaled only by her photo shoot at CECOT, El Salvador’s megaprison, in their indiscriminate conflation of everyday people with terrorists she wants tortured or dead. And lest anyone mistake her for a decent person warped by bad incentives, Noem also reportedly had a U.S. Coast Guard pilot fired for neglecting to bring her favorite blanket onto a flight.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, meanwhile, has used her lofty perch to play Whac-a-Mole with the president’s constantly shifting fancies. Back when Elon Musk was running DOGE, that meant menacing people who vandalized Teslas and smearing them as domestic terrorists. Lately, it has meant obscuring Trump’s presence in the Epstein files, most recently deflecting lawmakers’ criticism of her handling of the documents by dismissing Representative Jamie Raskin as a “washed-up loser lawyer” during a House Judiciary hearing. Bondi’s underling Harmeet Dhillon, who one advocate recently summed up as “all about clicks and PR,” has spurred a mass exodus from the DoJ’s storied civil-rights division by shifting the office’s focus to right-wing hobbyhorses such as banning trans athletes from women’s sports and combating the alleged persecution of white Christians. Dhillon recently announced she would investigate Renee Good’s wife instead of her killers, claiming without evidence that the grieving widow was affiliated with antifa.

Then there’s Patel himself, whose signature moments as FBI director — prior to his Milanese booze shower on Sunday — were his premature and ultimately incorrect announcements that suspects had been apprehended in the killing of Charlie Kirk in September and the shooting of two students at Brown University in December. He is widely seen as a punch line: A viral X meme highlighting the FBI director’s debauchery over the weekend recently advised Nancy Guthrie — the kidnapped 84-year-old mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie whose abduction the bureau is helping investigate — that she may have to wait a little longer to be rescued.

These people may be the ideal torchbearers for a White House that responded to this weekend’s hockey result by immediately posting a photo of a bald eagle drowning a Canada goose. But they clearly have no business leading law-enforcement agencies by any conventional standards of fitness. And there have been no consequences for their ineptitude. On the contrary, Trump seems more checked out of the presidency than ever — increasingly willing to delegate and not nearly so embarrassed as he once was by hires who reflect poorly on his decision-making. This is a defining tragedy not just of his reelection but of the failure of even his most vocal adversaries to establish substantive checks on law-enforcement conduct. Recent Democratic efforts at police reform have not only fizzled but have been supplanted by full-throated reinvestments in law-enforcement coffers and propaganda that has affirmed the innate virtue of the police. President Joe Biden was elected on the back of an anti-police-abuse protest movement in 2020, then turned around and begged municipalities to use stimulus funds to hire more cops, all while Republicans made sure his reform push died in Congress. The result is precisely the set of conditions under which authoritarians like Trump thrive: Law-enforcement impunity is mistaken for seriousness about public safety — whether it’s the de facto immunity from prosecution local cops have enjoyed or the vows to weaponize more professionalized strata of federal police against enemies and political adversaries that Trump has been promising since his campaign. As long as so many Americans believe the job of law enforcement is to do whatever it wants to their neighbors as long as it makes them feel safer, it will continue to be a job that any beer-soaked blunderer can do.