![]() Neither major party excites the sensibilities of its base much anymore, despite the animating outrages of Trump. For those who bother to vote, they often do so more out of a latent sense of civic guilt than any genuine feeling that one is exercising power. Beginning long before Trump took office, the trappings of democratic governance have become ritualistic, drained of meaning. Mired in a series of endless, amorphous conflicts, disfigured by inequality, and sliding toward environmental collapse, a feeling of powerlessness haunts our citizenry, a sense that we have little influence over the direction of our lives and that of our government. Trump’s invocation of the Deep State…represents another ruse to hide his own misbehavior… (It is worth noting that the origin of the term is often traced to Turkey, which has a lengthy history of military coups.) Taking the place of more anodyne terms like “the establishment”, the Deep State accurately captures the condition of our latter-day garrison state, which more resembles a militarized oligarchy than a democratic republic. But the concept, with its Cold War lineage and renewed relevance, is also terribly revealing of the world in which we live. Trump’s invocation of the Deep State, then, represents another ruse to hide his own misbehavior, a familiar scaffolding around which to wrap well-worn conspiracies. ![]() The turn toward a Deep State obsession makes sense for Trump, who prizes loyalty like a Mafia “Don” and sees conspiracies at every turn. And despite his repulsive manner, many of Trump’s policies are supported in parts of the federal government, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose officials, even as they deported record numbers of people during the Obama administration, some- times complained to reporters that they received more criticism than support. government that oppose Trump-and even actively work to undermine his policies-Trump is still the president, controlling an imperial executive office whose power has only grown in the war on terror years. Although there may be elements of the U.S. Team Trump’s Deep State fixation, however, is somewhat of a red herring. If Trump is determined to crush the Deep State, it seems he will do it with equal parts neglect and intentional malice. Those jobs that have been filled have often gone to Trump loyalists-many of them stunningly incompetent-or to graduates of the conservative think-tank pipeline. Numerous other career civil servants, particularly in the State Department, have either been forced out or consigned to grunt work, like processing Freedom of Information Act requests. Trump, whose taste for firing people is matched by his utter fecklessness, cannot find enough people he trusts. That also explains why, as of this spring, “more than half of the six hundred and fifty-six most critical positions still unfilled,” according to The New Yorker. The normal course of governance-that civil servants, in the spirit of disinterested public service, would do their jobs regardless of who is in office-makes little sense to him. The Deep State mania extends to the web, where a Google search for “deep state” on yields more than thirty-six thousand results. Mining a conspiratorial vein, Fox News-the closest thing to an official Trump mouthpiece and a profound influence on the TV watcher-in-chief-has leaned heavily into Deep State rhetoric, which is of a piece with the network’s jingoism and its tendency to periodically accuse non-white government officials, like Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin or former Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod, of subversion. From Steve Bannon-who refers to it as “the administrative state”-to Kellyanne Conway, the Deep State has become the administration’s catchall term for a nebulous collection of Obama-era appointees and civil service veterans who are working to undermine the Trump agenda. “They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!” Despite his profligate posting, Trump does not speak much of the Deep State (he has used the term in five tweets since becoming president), but it has become the favored boogeyman of those around him. ![]() “Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State,” he tweeted, going on to complain about the presence of an FBI informant in his campaign. on May 23, 2018, President Donald Trump took to his favorite medium to do one of the things he does best: complain about his many enemies in bloviating, histrionic terms. ![]()
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