During the US Presidential election campaign, one of Donald Trump’s themes was the need to root out the ‘Deep State’. This was broadly with reference to his belief, shaped by his experience of his first term, that elements in the bureaucracy, particularly the intelligence services, the state department and the military, were determined to foil his agenda.
This ‘Deep State’ has been used loosely and journalistically to imply that there are secret networks in certain states which defy their official government policies. Conspiracy theorists – and the entire MAGA (make America great again) movement is full of them – believe that there is a clandestine network of officials mainly from the US Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the military, who are colluding with high finance and industrial elites to manipulate American policy.
The irony should not be lost here. For most of the world, this so-called Deep State has been the American establishment which has often been involved in an agenda to undermine foreign governments, even democracies, to preserve and protect US’s post-World War II hegemony.
There should be no doubt though, that the Trump team is determined to dismantle this establishment Deep State. No doubt a Trumpian Deep State will come up in its place and it will be coloured deeply with the paranoia and open racism that has gripped the United States and will seek out and attack those who it believes are its enemies within and without. Despite its alleged isolationist approach, this Deep State could actually foster more violence across the world because it is also dismantling the elements of soft power that the US had also created since the time of John F. Kennedy in the 1960s.
Among the first executive orders issued by Trump on January 20th, his Inaugural Day, was one that called for the “ending the weaponisation of the federal government”. Its purpose was to investigate the use of “numerous federal law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community against those perceived [as] as political opponents.” The aim was to punish the perpetrators and put an end to the process.
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What is striking in the first weeks of the Trump administration is the speed with which it is moving to dismantle this Deep State. United States Agency For International Development (USAID), an agency involved in civilian foreign and development assistance, is already dead in the water, action on other fronts is proceeding.
Remarkably, the new CIA chief John Ratcliffe has offered a buyout of all its employees. The FBI is awaiting its new chief, Kash Patel, who will arrive with his own list to conduct a deep purge of America’s premier domestic intelligence and security agency. As for the military, the administration will not carry out a personnel purge, but with Pete Hegseth around, it is committed to “cleaning up” the Pentagon and is likely to end up sidelining a whole generation of senior officers.
Trump has wasted no time in acting against the so-called Deep State. Indeed, he seems bent on throwing out the baby with the bathwater. On January 28, he offered buyouts to the entire federal bureaucracy numbering 3 million if they opted to leave their jobs in one week. Tens of thousands accepted the offer while some have now been offered a deferred resignation programme.
As for the business and industrial elite, they displayed their fealty to Trump in the run up to the inaugural. The new high-technology elite – Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Vivek Ramaswamy got the pride of place in the ceremony in addition to the scattering of the other business leaders. There are other leaders like Peter Thiel, Jamie Dimon as well as those like Paul Mellon, Bill Ackman and John Paulson who have been with Trump for sometime now.
The notion of the Deep State foiling MAGA plans received maximum traction in the early days of the first Trump administration. The biggest believer in the Deep State was Trump’s then chief strategist Steve Bannon. He may have fallen out with Trump subsequently, but his pursuit of “deconstructing the administrative state” has been seen as an important goal of the White House.
In a poll done by the news channel ABC in April 2017, it was revealed that nearly 50% of Americans believed that there was a Deep State operating within the federal government. Belief in the Deep State was evenly divided between the two parties, and 60% of those under 30 years of age who were polled said that they believed in the Deep State as against only 37% of the older folk.
There was a time when the Deep State was spoken of in reference to foreign countries like Russia, Turkey or Pakistan. But today, it is the President of the United States who believes that there is a sinister Deep State within his own government and is bent on dismantling it.
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It is not just the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon which are being targeted. Tulsi Gabbard who is likely to receive confirmation as the Director of National Intelligence has been tasked by the ‘weaponisation’ executive order cited above to review the activities of the entire intelligence community during the Biden Administration. This is a list of 17 agencies which comprise the “intelligence community” and includes the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, the Defence Intelligence Agency, intelligence agencies of the Department of Treasury, Drug Enforcement Administration, the Homeland Security, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps intelligence and so on.
The US State Department has not gone unscathed. Even as Trump took office, the Trump administration demanded the resignations of senior career diplomats who served as politically appointed ambassadors as well as lower level positions. While this is par for the course for senior level positions appointed by the president, the Trump team has sought the ousters of lower level personnel as well.
Such a massive purge of the US intelligence agencies would be akin to the much deadlier and lethal purge of the Soviet military on the eve of the German attack on the country. The country paid a heavy price for it as could the US now.
There can be little doubt that the adversaries of the US – China or Russia – will be celebrating this dismantling of the so-called Deep State. Having the US president disembowel the country’s defence and security system is something beyond their wildest dreams. A new American Establishment aka Deep State will no doubt emerge from the embers of the old. But it could take a decade or more to build.
Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.
