US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House showed that the American dream was “alive and well”, Kash Patel, the nominee to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), told a sporting arena full of supporters of the President on Monday.

“We have been given a gift by God today to usher in a new dynasty, because we just inaugurated Donald J Trump as our 47th President, and we just inaugurated J.D. Vance as our Vice President of the United States,” Patel said shortly after the swearing-in at the Capitol Rotunda.

“And we did that because the American Dream is alive and well because you chose that our dream can be the dream for our children and the dream for our world.”

Patel went on to relate his life story for the audience as a manifestation of this American dream.

“My parents were born and raised in East Africa,” he said of his parents who are originally from India.

“My Father, in the 1970s, fled a genocidal dictatorship in Uganda, where he saw 300,000 of his countrymen murdered, where he saw what lawlessness would do if it was allowed to break through the system of constitutional justice, he fled, like so many others. He married my mother. They moved here. They waited in line. They stood in line because the American dream was worth standing in line for.”

“I am standing here because of the American dream,” he added.

“I am not standing here because of the colour of my skin. I’m standing here because I earned my right on this stage, and you earned your right to be here with me.”

Patel is a former public defender who has seen a meteoric rise in the power structure of Washington DC in recent years, rising up to be the Chief of Staff at the Department of Defence and Deputy Director of National Intelligence in President Trump’s first term.

Trump has now been nominated to head the FBI, an agency that investigated Trump for alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office in 2021 and for trying to overturn the 2020 election defeat to President Joe Biden.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)