He Isn’t Who Anyone Would Have Imagined as a Credible Foe to Trump and Musk’s Assault on America. Yet Here He Is.
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Maybe because the vast majority of them have now either fallen from grace or are remembered as embarrassing signs of the times, it’s easy to forget that the first Trump administration minted a steady stream of so-called resistance celebrities, people whose very public refusal to kowtow to President Donald Trump transformed them into folk heroes among a brand of online progressives. It’s all, we know, going to look a little different this time around, but this week has given us what may be our first peek at what this sort of figure could look like the age of Trump 2.0: Everybody, say hello to Brian Driscoll.
Driscoll is the acting director of the FBI, and last week the New York Times minted him an “improbable symbol of quiet resistance” in the new Trump administration. Emphasis on the improbable—in what sounds like a particularly slapstick detail out of an old Hollywood screenplay, Driscoll is said to have landed in the top spot accidentally, after the White House listed his name in the wrong spot online and declined to correct it. What won him the admiration of the bureau’s rank-and-file has been his apparent willingness to defend them from the Justice Department, which has requested the names of all employees who investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection. Not bad for a guy who only has the job on a technicality.
Driscoll has been an FBI agent since 2007, which has earned him a long résumé of missions and a reputation as “unflappable” among his peers. Looks-wise, as the Times told it, Driscoll “does not possess the typical G-man bearing of his predecessors, with a bushy mustache and his face framed by long curls.” That’s one way of putting it. Another would be to point out that he looks impishly charming in the government portrait that accompanies the article, so much so that you could easily imagine losing a half-hour debating what actor would play him in a movie—John Bernthal, with a dash of Matthew McConaughey’s roguish energy?
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves there. First and foremost because, well, it seems like there’s still a decent chance this guy could get fired tomorrow! But in the meantime, FBI agents are reportedly trading memes that valorize Driscoll: “In one, he is depicted as a saint grasping the handbook for agents running investigations. In another, he glances upward, encircled by the words ‘What Would Drizz Do?’ ” I guess now isn’t the time to try to convince FBI agents that they should be making their own memes rather than relying on A.I., but they really should; won’t anybody think of the environment?
Beyond the bureau, it’s unclear whether Driscoll is catching on as a resistance star with a wider swath of the population. Mia Farrow posted about him on Bluesky, earning thousands of reposts and likes, though I am not sure that christens him the Matt McGorry of 2025 just yet.
Have we lost our appetite for this kind of figure? Are we all facing a collective hangover from the type of atmosphere last time around that saw us elevating people like Alyssa Milano to political heroes? Or are we all holding our breath waiting to see if he gets canned? I get that it’s embarrassing to look back on all the Avenattis and Krassensteins and God knows who else, but I don’t think we should deprive ourselves of resistance celebrities completely—we’ve got to entertain ourselves somehow. And as far FBI mustache man goes, well, there is a certain appeal right now to imagining the halls of the bureau filled with handsome cartoons like him ready to defend the republic.
