This past weekend, we saw the Trump Effect in its most negative form — that of widespread political derangement. Today, however, we’re happy to report on one of the many undeniably positive aspects of Donald Trump’s return to office: the rebirth of the FBI, in the form of a surge in new-agent applications.

As Fox News reported recently, the bureau took in a record 5,577 of these applications in March, which was, not coincidentally, the first full month at the helm for new Director Kash Patel. That number nearly doubled the bureau’s monthly average since 2016, and it reminded us of a recent surge in recruitment at another of our long-beleaguered institutions.

As for the bureau’s newfound mission and purpose, it’s been a long time coming. And it was expressed recently in a brief recruiting clip from Patel himself.

A renewed mission. A stronger future. @FBI pic.twitter.com/H7NHvPPVua

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) March 17, 2025

Those who’ve followed these pages know well that we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink on the steady but precipitous decline of the once-proud agency, whose slide into rank partisanship happened not overnight but over the course of years, from Barack Obama’s two terms onward.

The two main markers of this leftward lurch were the slow-walking of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s “private” email server and the utterly phony “Russia collusion” investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump. This investigation hinged on a piece of uncorroborated oppo-research garbage, which allowed corrupt FBI operatives to falsify a FISA application for the purpose of spying on Trump’s campaign, and, later, his administration.

The whole investigative episode, called Crossfire Hurricane, plagued Trump’s entire first term in office and will go down in history as perhaps the FBI’s darkest hour. Sadly, though, it wasn’t a one-off. Not even close. This, as we’ve noted, is the same FBI that in recent years entrapped a bunch of “pro-Trump” rabble in a phony kidnapping plot against Michigan’s Democrat governor less than a month before the 2020 election; that sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for nearly a year before the 2020 election; that colluded with Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter to censor the New York Post’s laptop bombshell two weeks before the election; that helped push the Gang of 51’s “Russian disinformation” letter even though it had already authenticated the laptop; that targeted parents who attended school board meetings because they were concerned about CRT and other hard-left ideologies being taught in their children’s schools; that targeted “radical-traditionalist Catholics” in their churches; that repeatedly targeted peaceful pro-life activists; that unlawfully seized the cellphone of a Trump-allied congressman and retired brigadier general; that gave two Republican senators a phony “defensive briefing” about Russian disinformation when they were investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine and other countries; that placed numerous agents provocateur at the January 6 protest-turned-riot and continues to stonewall Congress about it; that conducted an armed raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and rifled through the first lady’s underwear drawer because of a documents dispute with the National Archives; that intentionally screened out conservatives and Trump supporters in its hiring practices; and that cracked down on pro-Trump agents and patriotic whistleblowers within the bureau.

Indeed, the list of outrages had become too lengthy to shrug off, and it caused us to ponder — as some former agents have suggested — whether the bureau should be done away with entirely and its responsibilities scattered to other areas of government.

All along, though, we noted that this decline was driven by the bureau’s politically motivated leadership, from James Comey to Andrew McCabe to Chris Wray. It’s not the rank-and-file.

Piscis primum a capite foetet, as they used to say, or, if you’re not fluent in dead languages, A fish rots from the head.

All this is history, though, and a renewed bureau is an encouraging prospect. Patel and his deputy director, former NYPD cop and Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, have, as FBI spokesman Ben Williamson says, “put a major emphasis on restoring confidence in federal law enforcement and boosting new agent recruiting.” And the numbers don’t lie.

“The record number of FBI job applications in March,” said Patel advisor Erica Knight, “shows that people are inspired by Kash Patel’s commitment to restoring integrity and effectiveness at the bureau. Americans are putting their trust in his leadership to rebuild the FBI and keep our communities safe.”

Time will tell, of course. But the prospect of an FBI newly committed to Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity is an encouraging one.