News outlets previously reported that the Trump administration was considering Clarke to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Partnership and Engagement. In that role, as an assistant secretary, he would be the department’s top liaison with the more than 18,000 local law-enforcement agencies throughout the country. Fortunately for Clarke, the post wouldn’t require Senate approval, sparing him from what would likely be a contentious confirmation battle about any role he may have had in the jail-neglect case. The White House acknowledged move to HuffPost shortly after Clarke’s announcement.

Clarke built his brand not on policing, per se, but on politics. He’ll now have the chance to operate in a more political realm, and at the same time extricate himself from a growing scandal at the jail he runs. Despite that turmoil, Clarke’s ascendancy into the Trump administration isn’t necessarily a surprise. With the defeat of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in last November’s election in Arizona, Clarke is now the most prominent conservative sheriff in the country—and the most controversial.

His rigid conservative views, as well as his outspokenness in sharing them, made the Wisconsin sheriff a popular guest on conservative media outlets in recent years. Amid increased public scrutiny of law-enforcement agencies—scrutiny Trump administration officials actively oppose—a black conservative sheriff condemning the Black Lives Matter movement on Fox News was a potent image.

Clarke’s opining often went beyond policing issues: On his podcast, he referred to Planned Parenthood as “Planned Genocide” and American higher education as “a racketeering ring.” But his most frequent target is criminal-justice reform—an issue that’s increasingly popular on both the left and the right, but one that’s been dismissed by Clarke as “utterly destructive to the rule of law and public safety.” In one notable instance, his analysis repeated racist tropes about African Americans. “Let me tell you why blacks sell drugs and involve themselves in criminal behavior instead of a more socially acceptable lifestyle — because they’re uneducated, they’re lazy, and they’re morally bankrupt,” Clarke told Glenn Beck in a 2015 interview.

Left-leaning activist groups receive most of his ire, and his language toward them often veers into the eschatological. In a speech at the Republican National Convention last summer where he endorsed Trump, he compared the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements to “anarchy” and described protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore as “the collapse of the social order.” The previous year, he predicted that Black Lives Matter would “join forces with ISIS” to destroy the American government. Clarke’s antipathy toward protest movements apparently extends only to those on the left: In a tweet one month before the November election, Clarke described the federal government and media as “corrupt” and said it was “pitchforks and torches time.”