America’s new Deputy FBI Director once told Stephen King to ‘get a job, loser’

Washington is positively aflutter with news that Donald Trump has appointed Dan Bongino within the FBI, but his past exchange with Stephen King has also got people talking.

In case you missed it, Donald Trump recently named Bongino — a far-right podcaster who has never served in the bureau — as the next deputy director of the FBI. Bongino is a former New York police officer and Secret Service agent, and he once provided security to Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama. Beyond that, though, he is far better known as conservative political commentator who vocally supported Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

I thought Don Bongino being appointed as deputy director of the FBI was a joke. A podcaster being his only qualification. We have to laugh. pic.twitter.com/7Bx0yuCARz

— Latino Loverboy💘 (@y2kRawr) February 24, 2025

Bongino will serve as the deputy director of the law enforcement agency under newly confirmed director Kash Patel, who was already a red flag appointment given his belief in the so-called “deep state.” Of course, we know by now that those in Trump’s cabinet take the word “qualified” as more of a suggestion, since it’s composed of everyone from Fox News hosts to anti-vaxxers, television doctors and, perhaps most bizarrely, a WWE exec. 

Naturally, Trump’s eyebrow-raising choice for the FBI’s deputy director launched an almost immediate search into Bongino’s past, including a terse tit-for-tat he engaged in with King back in 2023. At that time, the author hadn’t yet departed from social media platform X (he’s back now!), and it was still his go-to site for searing takedowns of Trump and those in his orbit, which is where Bongino comes in. 

Biden is a disgrace to humankind. An embarrassment to the human race in every respect.

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) May 10, 2023

The Trump loyalist he is, Bongino wrote on X that former president Joe Biden “is a disgrace to humankind” and “an embarrassment to the human race in every respect.” Not missing a beat, King quickly swooped in to deservedly bring Bongino down a few notches, since there’s certainly no deficit of straight male podcast hosts. “But he’s got a real job,” King replied in reference to Biden, “not a podcast.” 

Going toe-to-toe with a world-renowned author is no small feat, which is probably why Bongino resorted to playground insults in his response. “Millions of listeners a day on a podcast while you’re watching porn in your momma’s basement yearning for the days that people actually gave a s*** about your dumb a***,” Bongino wrote, possessing the vocabulary level of his boss. 

Seriously, I half-expected the word “bigly” to show up somewhere in there, but Bongino instead concluded the message by telling King, who has a net worth of $500 million, to “get a job, loser.” In the wake of Bongino’s FBI appointment, King appears to have deleted his half of the X exchange, but his return to the platform earlier this month has still delivered the much-needed dose of reality we all need in these times. 

Marking his return, King fired off a searing message to Trump, describing him as “Putin-loving” and “traitorous” and adding to a long string of pointed X posts about the president and his bestie Elon Musk. Throughout the years, King has used the billionaire’s platform to call out Musk’s lies, remind us that Trump is a felon, and describe the President as a “dumpster fire.”

It clearly fell on deaf ears, since Trump’s appointment of Bongino is yet another sign that his brazenness has gone unchecked. What’s next, Kanye West for The National Endowment for the Arts? Actually, I shouldn’t have even put that into the universe.