“The term originated in the context of analyzing the situations in Turkey and Egypt, where I served, usually to talk about propaganda, dirty tricks, and even violence to overthrow the government,” she said. “Deep state is both inaccurate and grossly misleading,” said Nancy McEldowney, who retired in June as director of the Arlington, Va.-based Foreign Service Institute.
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At the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions in August issued a loud warning to would-be leakers, even as some career Justice staff continued spilling to the media their worries about Sessions’ policy reversals on such issues as immigration and affirmative action.Īlso enlisting in the war against the deep state are right-leaning legal activists who use the Freedom of Information Act to target disgruntled career federal workers who use encrypted software to make anonymous political commentary unflattering to Trump.īut to many with years in government, the term “deep state” is disturbing. government that has disclosed so many military plans, weapons systems and cybersecurity tactics?”Įven before he took the oath of office, Trump took to Twitter to characterize suspected leakers in the intelligence community as behaving like Nazis. “How many foreign allies are pulling back?” asked the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel in a column titled “ Washington’s Leak Mob.” “How many will work with a U.S. In July, Breitbart News-where Bannon presided before joining the Trump presidential campaign in August 2016, and to which he immediately returned after his departure from the White House a year later-publicized a report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee saying Trump faced seven times more leaks during the first 126 days of his administration than the previous two administrations. Trump is being attacked, said a memo from a National Security Council staffer published in August by Foreign Policy, because he represents “an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative.” Those threatened by Trump include “deep state actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.” On the pro-Trump Mark Levin radio show, commentator Dan Bongino decried the ongoing investigation of Trump’s ties to the Russians during the 2016 campaign, saying, "They want a scalp, and believe me when I tell you the deep state is going to get one.” More than just signifying an impersonal, inept bureaucracy, it conjures a secretive illuminati of bureaucrats determined to sabotage the Trump agenda.
But in a Manichean speech in Warsaw, Poland, in July, Trump warned of a danger “invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.”Īs the Trump era has unfolded, the term “deep state” has come to mean something sinister to some on the far right. Some interpreted Bannon’s comment as a reference to Trump’s classic Republican goals of reducing regulations, cutting taxes and shrinking government. A month after President Trump took the oath of office, his chief strategist offered a controversial description of what Americans, including the 2 million career civil servants Trump now leads in the executive branch, could expect from the new president: Every day would be a battle for “deconstruction of the administrative state,” said Stephen Bannon, the man frequently described as the mastermind behind Trump’s nationalist agenda.īannon is no longer in the White House, but his remarks at a conservative political conference in February continue to reverberate through government.
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