Wag the Dog, Fetch the Jet

How Kash Patel turned a taxpayer-funded love story into a national-security press stunt—and proved Kyle Seraphin right in record time.

If you were writing this as fiction, your editor would send it back with a note: “Too on the nose. Tone it down.” But no, this is real life under the Trump restoration, where the FBI director moonlights as a tabloid protagonist and “national security” has been reimagined as a PR stunt with taxpayer-funded special effects.

It began with an airplane. A $60 million FBI Gulfstream, to be precise, a jet intended for high-stakes counterintelligence operations that somehow found itself making repeat trips to Nashville, Tennessee, home of Kash Patel’s 26-year-old country-singing girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins.

Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin noticed the pattern: Penn State, Nashville, back again. Patel’s girlfriend performing on stage; Patel’s taxpayer-funded aircraft idling on the tarmac. He posted the data publicly. And just like that, poof, the FBI’s flight tracker vanished from public access for the first time in its history.

When the flight records surfaced, the internet did what it does best: it turned federal misconduct into a meme. Analysts joked that Wilkins must be an undercover agent, because really, who else would volunteer to spend that much time with Kash Patel? If she is a spy, she deserves the Medal of Valor for deep cover endurance.

Wilkins fired back online, accusing Seraphin of “grifting” and “fake outrage.” He responded like only a man who’s paid his own rent could:

“One of us has an FBI security detail despite not being part of the government. One of us supports four kids and a wife without taxpayer jets.”

It was a crisp little morality play, until, like clockwork, CNN broke “exclusive” news of a foiled ISIS-inspired terror plot involving AK-47s, online chats, and something called Pumpkin Day. Timing so perfect you could hear the wag of the dog’s tail from orbit.

This wasn’t intelligence work; it was improv theater. According to CNN’s Ken Dilanian and the Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig, senior DOJ and FBI officials were livid that Patel had gone public with an ongoing Michigan investigation, before a criminal complaint existed and before agents even confirmed what the plot actually was.

Seraphin had actually called his shot days earlier, writing that Patel would need to ‘announce a big international arrest to distract from his optics disaster.’ He even said it would come from an investigation that pre-dated Patel’s tenure. Within hours, CNN delivered exactly that, a ready-made headline about a thwarted ISIS-inspired plot, complete with a ‘Pumpkin Day’ flourish so absurd it could’ve been storyboarded. Patel got his distraction; the Bureau lost its credibility.

The suspects? A handful of online-extremist twenty-somethings radicalized in chatrooms. The threat level? Unclear. The damage? Immediate. As former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman told MeidasTouch:

“If any rank-and-file agent did this, they’d be fired on the spot. You don’t leak before indictments, you tip off suspects and blow months of undercover work.”

In other words: Kash Patel, the man now wearing the FBI’s badge, just compromised his own agency’s case to change the conversation about his girlfriend and his jet. He didn’t just wag the dog, he threw it off a cliff and claimed it was self-defense.

Litman warns, this isn’t an isolated blunder, but a pattern. Patel and Trump’s inner circle have been systematically dismantling the FBI’s credibility, gutting career leadership, outing confidential informants, and turning federal law enforcement into a cosplay franchise.

Even Bill Barr, who spent four years defending the indefensible, reportedly said Patel’s name would go forward “over my dead body.” That’s when you know you’ve crossed the event horizon.

The real cost isn’t Patel’s jet fuel. It’s the chilling effect on the agents still trying to do their jobs. Imagine spending twenty years cultivating a source inside a cartel or terror cell, only to have your director leak the operation on live TV because his flight log went viral. Imagine explaining to a dead informant’s family that it was all for optics.

We are, again, living inside the rerun, a government of stunts, a justice system of sycophants, and a national security policy driven by impulse control issues and the algorithm.

Patel wanted to distract the press from his scandal. Instead, he spotlighted the rot: a regime so drunk on spectacle that even the FBI’s sacred silence has been auctioned off for a headline.

And perhaps that’s the most fitting metaphor for Trump’s America 2.0, a country run by men who think the world is their stage, the Constitution their prop, and the truth just something you can edit out in post.

If this is what counts as national security now, the terrorists can take a long weekend.