Trump’s ‘Moby-Dick’ Is the 2020 Election

Jul 6, 2026 05:01 PM EDT, Mon

Today, I saw the corollary between Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election and Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s book, Moby Dick.

Donald Trump as Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick

🐋 The Corollary That Snapped Into Place

The MS NOW reporting on FBI agents sifting through seized Fulton County ballots produced a clean, almost involuntary recognition: Trump treats 2020 the way Ahab treats the whale in Moby-Dick. The pursuit is the point, not the catch. He does want the 2020 win, but even proving it would be the dog catching the car — the past can’t be undone, and the two‑term limit makes overturning 2020 impossible. The constitutional structure is fixed; the outcome is immovable. Yet the chase continues.

⚖️ The Grind That Consumes Institutions

That’s where the damage shows up. The FBI grind — hundreds of agents pulled off core missions to sift ballots, envelopes, and chain‑of‑custody records — isn’t investigative work in the traditional sense. It’s industrialized repetition under political heat. Pair that with the Patel‑era purges, the hollowing out of counterintelligence and national‑security units, and the hijacking of agents into politically guided tasks, and you get an institution bent away from its purpose.

🧭 The Fallout Jack Smith Warned About

Jack Smith’s warning about recent law graduates turning away from public service wasn’t abstract. It was a description of what happens when the work stops looking like service and starts looking like retaliation, grind, and instability. When agencies are purged, redirected, and politicized, the next generation sees public service not as a calling but as a liability. The pipeline collapses long before the mission does.

Melville Had the Structure Right

Melville captured the entire dynamic in one line — and the quotation marks matter because it’s the exact mechanism, not an approximation: “All my means are sane; my motive and my object mad.” The procedures are rational. The pursuit is irrational. And institutions caught in the middle are worn down by the sanity of the means and the madness of the motive.

FBI directing hundreds of analysts to dig into Georgia election probe subjects, sources say

A personnel surge supporting Kash Patel’s “priority effort” is underway, with intelligence experts tasked with running tens of thousands of records checks by mid-July.

Jul. 2, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT By Ken Dilanian

The FBI is surging resources into what it calls a “priority” investigation related to the 2020 election in Georgia, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter, in an extraordinary effort by the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency to find evidence supporting President Donald Trump’s darkest election fraud conspiracy theories.

Documents obtained by MS NOW — which the two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to share internal matters, said were related to the Georgia election investigation — show that FBI leadership is authorizing intelligence analysts to work overtime, including weekends and holidays, on the case. And they show that FBI Director Kash Patel is ordering personnel from all field offices to participate.

“In support of the Director’s Office priority effort, the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) and Criminal Division are requesting all FBI field offices to immediately surge support to an FBI Atlanta priority investigation,” said an unclassified memo issued Wednesday.

The FBI declined to comment to MS NOW.

The memo went on to detail the number of personnel each field office must contribute, depending on its size, for a total of 260 FBI intelligence officials. The guidance did not include numbers for FBI agents, dozens of whom are also working on the investigation.

Each intelligence analyst would be expected to conduct a total of 708 records checks by July 17, the memo said.

“Overtime (including weekends and holidays) has been authorized,” it added.

Asked what analysts would be looking for, one of the officials said, “Looking for derogatory information is the short answer. The idea is to build a case. Look at associations between people, look into their social media, their business activity, travel, contact with other investigative subjects.”

In January, the FBI executed a search warrant and seized more than 600 boxes of records relating to the 2020 election from storage in Fulton County, including physical ballots, ballot images, voter rolls and tabulation materials. When the basis for the search warrant was unsealed, it became clear that it relied largely on claims that had previously been debunked, including by Republican-led investigations in Georgia.

The special agent in charge in Atlanta, Paul Brown, left his job shortly before the warrant was executed.

The warrant said the investigation was based on a referral from Kurt Olsen, a White House official in charge of election integrity who backed Trump’s bogus claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

Joe Biden beat Trump in Georgia in 2020 by 11,779 votes.

In response to a lawsuit by Fulton County, a judge criticized aspects of the Justice Department’s justification as “misleading” or “troubling” but declined to order the materials returned.

Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accompanied the FBI during the search and arranged for Trump to speak by phone with some of the agents, a move Democrats say was deeply inappropriate. White House officials defended Gabbard’s presence.

Justice Department officials insist they are not pursuing criminal investigations based on the whims of the president, despite an increasing number of investigations targeting his adversaries or his political concerns.

Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MS NOW.

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