Beneath the politics of convenience is the reality that a large segment of the U.S. government really does operate without much transparency or public scrutiny, and has abused its awesome powers in myriad ways. And sometimes the government bureaucracy really does exercise power over the commander in chief: Obama felt that the military pressured him into sending more troops to Afghanistan than he had wanted, while an inexperienced George W. Bush was arguably led to war by a bipartisan cadre of national security insiders who had long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein.
Even the Trump critique about the deep state in revolt, however exaggerated, is worth consideration. Hillary Clinton voters might delight in the classified material gushing forth about the president’s men—but its release can be criminal. (In May, Brennan calledthe intelligence leaks “appalling.”)
Powerful bureaucrats with access to government secrets and trusted media friends certainly do try to influence presidents from the shadows. But in Washington, at least, their views and goals are not monolithic.
Some of the subversion and leaks Trump has faced are merely federal employees defending their turf from budget cuts and bone-headed ideas. That’s far from the way the right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich described matters in August, when he told fellow conspiracy theorist and talk-radio host Alex Jones that the deep state would turn, literally, murderous: “Trump will be killed. … They’re going to kill us, they’re going to kill him, they’re going to kill everybody.”
For Trump, a man who has always defined himself against caricatured enemies, the deep state is a useful boogeyman that allows him to merge several disparate political targets—real, exaggerated and imagined—into a single villain he can use to rally his supporters. The media’s role is particularly crucial: When Fox News host Sean Hannity tweetedon June 16 that he would open his show that night with an examination of “the deep state’s allies in the media,” the president of the United States retweeted him. It’s not easy to make conservatives distrust law enforcement and intelligence officials, but showing them to be in league with snotty liberal reporters makes that possible.
And so, after Trump’s fired FBI director, James Comey, admitted in June that he had relayed accounts of his bizarre interactions with the president to a friend, who in turn shared them with a New York Times reporter, former Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski appeared on NBC and attacked Comey as “part of the deep state.” “He’s everything that’s wrong in Washington.” It was as clever as it was insidious. Americans might be foggy about what, exactly, the deep state really is.
The media is the tool of the deep state.
) repeating the official line, and being extremely well-paid for doing so? And the emphasis is always on the latest ‘coronarvirus deaths’ hyperbole. In other words it has totally taken over 95% of the entire news schedule output, almost as if the BBC wonks are milking it for all it’s worth while it lasts.
