Kash Patel’s Deep State: How Trump Trained the GOP to Hate Rule of Law 2
I realized after I wrote my first post on how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law that I didn’t lay out what I meant by that. After all, that first post showed that for decades before Trump ran for President, Republicans were already willing to gin up criminal investigations against people named Clinton for political gain.
If that’s the baseline, what did Trump change? And to what degree was that change driven by Russian interference, which I argued did little more than drop a match on an already raging bonfire in 2016?
So I want to show the trajectory, using this Politico piece about the concerns a bunch of spooks have about Trump’s plans to remake the Deep State in his image. The story is not all that new — there have been a bunch of stories that included Trump’s goal to remake the Deep State in his image, both during his Administration and in more recent descriptions of Trump’s plans for a second term. But it does certain things that make it helpful to explain what I mean.
The spooks described three concerns with Trump in a second term. He would:
- Selectively ignore intelligence on certain issues [cough, Russia], blinding the Intelligence Community and weakening our collective alliances
- Leak [more of] America’s secrets
- Staff the agencies with loyalists
POLITICO talked to 18 former officials and analysts who worked in the Trump administration, including political appointees from both parties and career intelligence officers, some who still speak to the former president and his aides and had insight into conversations about his potential second term. A number of them were granted anonymity to avoid provoking backlash and to speak freely about their experience working with him. Others are now vocal Trump critics and spoke publicly.
“He wants to weaponize the intelligence community. And the fact is you need to look with a 360 degree perspective. He can’t just cherry pick what he wants to hear when there are so many U.S. adversaries and countries that don’t wish the U.S. well,” said Fiona Hill, a top Russia adviser on the National Security Council in Trump’s administration who has regularly criticized his policies. “If he guts the intel on one thing, he’ll be partially blinding us.”
Many of the former officials said they opted to speak to POLITICO because they believe the extent to which Trump could remake the intelligence community remains — despite the copious media coverage — underestimated.
Trump’s demands for “loyalty” — often read as a demand to skew findings to fit his political agenda — have not been limited to his spy agencies, but in the intelligence world, those demands carry particularly dire risks, they said.
If Trump is cavalier with his treatment of classified information or material — as alleged in a June 2023 indictment of the former president — it could endanger those who supply much-needed intelligence, said Dan Coats, who served as director of national intelligence early in Trump’s tenure.
Kash Patel gets special mention as someone who would both burn intelligence and spin fantasies by Politico.
Kash Patel, former top adviser to Devin Nunes, a former representative from California, and director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, served as an informal adviser to Grenell but was also considered for a top post at the CIA. He later became chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense in Trump’s final months. Patel also helped advise on an initiative to declassify material related to the origins of the Russia investigation.
Patel is likely to return to serve under Trump if he is elected, raising worries among current and former intelligence officials about the preservation of sources and methods of U.S. intelligence.
“There were often a lot of appointments that seemed designed to make sure that the intelligence assessments could be shaped to paint certain pictures that simply didn’t match up with what the intelligence community had come up with,” said one former Trump administration intelligence official.
The guy who rose to prominence by turning an investigation into a Russian attack on democracy into a counterattack on the FBI, the guy who spends his time writing children’s books in which he, Kash, protects his liege from imaginary threats from the Deep State, is presumed to be the future steward of Trump’s efforts to politicize the intelligence community.
You could argue that the replacement of civil servants with Trump partisans in the IC is little different than what Trump plans everywhere else in government, if he’s elected. That’s true with regards to the means — gutting civil service protections and replacing them with loyalty oaths to a person rather than the Constitution. But not the effect.
One reason Trump floated putting Kash in charge of the FBI, after all, was because efforts to punish Trump’s enemies weren’t producing the results he desired. The Durham investigation didn’t exact revenge on FBI figures like Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok; when it finished, Kash complained that it “failed” precisely because people who tried to protect the country from Russia weren’t prosecuted for doing so. Five years of investigating the Clinton Foundation failed to find a chargeable crime. After he left government, a Kash Patel charity started funding right wing FBI agents accused of the same thing McCabe and Comey were — improper disclosures — but did so to discredit investigations into the right wing.
An IC led by Kash Patel would not just be a politicized intelligence community, intentionally blinded to the threat from countries like Russia, and by degrading intelligence on certain adversaries corroding the alliances built on that shared intelligence.
But it would be an instrument for exacting loyalty.
That instrument can and would be targeted at disloyal Trump party members. Look at efforts by the GOP House to investigate Cassidy Hutchinson, for example.
It’s not just Jack Smith or Nancy Pelosi’s spouses who get targeted with threats for challenging Trump, but also Don Bacon’s.
This, then, is the trajectory along which Trump has coaxed Republicans. At first, a goodly many Republicans defended the integrity of the Mueller investigation, until they didn’t anymore. With the first impeachment, virtually all Republicans excused Trump’s defiance of their own appropriations choices. With the second, reportedly fearful Republicans made excuses for an attack that threatened their own lives rather than fulfill their constitutional duty to check Trump. Since then, Trump has used his legal woes not only as an electoral plank, but also as leverage to demand that the party continue to pay his bills, diverting funds that otherwise might help to reelect down-ticket candidates.
What used to be the Grand Old Party has become, literally, a criminal protection racket serving one man.
The fate of the party depends on that man defying the law.
In a post examining why Elise Stefanik might have parroted Trump’s assertion that January 6 felons were, instead, hostages, I laid out a taxonomy of potential motives that would convince Republicans to follow Trump down this path. Aside from ideological true believers, I think Republicans are motivated because they’ve fallen for Trump’s grift, they’re afraid, or they calculate they can stay on Trump’s good side long enough to advance their career.
One way or another, a series of individual choices brought Trump’s party to this point.
Moments ago, Mitch McConnell endorsed a man who launched a terrorist attack targeting, among others, McConnell himself.
A series of individual choices have brought the party that used to be Mitch McConnell’s to this point.
Update Mike “Moses” Johnson is bragging about defunding the FBI and DOJ.
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Thank you.
It’s not like McConnell has scruples, but perhaps is hoping for a quieter retirement. Good luck with that.
We’ll see how the SOTU goes since that is the usual kickoff for the campaign. I expect the Ds will point out that Defendant-1 comes with minions which will make America into Vlad’s Russia. Whether the NYT actually reports this truthfully is the big question.
WAPO headline has “trump” and “unity” in the same sentence. have to scroll down quite a bit to find the article about young progressives not wanting to talk about Biden (for whatever reasons, presumably the age thing).
Seeing pictures of Biden on a bike. Can’t imagine Trump being able to ride a bike.
Biden is in much better physical and mental shape than the former guy, who I’m sure never has ridden a bike. (He might be able to manage a trike…if you can find one that can handle his weight.)
I’ve never seen Trump on anything less than a self propelled (motorized) four wheels.
FWIW, there are adaptive trikes that can carry up to 500 lbs. They are called Bariatric tricycles. https://www.worksmancycles.com/cargo-bike-adult-tricycles-weight-limits.html
Man, did he demonstrate that last night. I had never before seen a State of the Union address I would describe as riveting; this one kept me up until midnight, when the emotive stylings of Senator Katie forced me to turn off the TV (I’d had to pause several times earlier to address cat needs).
Hands down the best from a TV perspective I have ever seen. Mike Johnson proved a disastrous Speaker choice: he has the opposite of a poker face, and by the end of Biden’s speech I halfway expected Johnson to stand up and announce he had switched parties. Massively entertaining just to watch him back there–in Luciferian position–ruing the day he acceded to his colleagues’ request.
Speaking of McConnell scruples, did McConnell ever fight back about Trump hitting at his wife and family?
no
McConnell and. Scruples should not appear in the same sentence.
“Mitch McConnell has no scruples whatsoever.” Works well enough for me.
We can’t underestimate the fear of physical harm from Trump supporters. I think that worry about what could happen to his family has something to do with Mitch’s capitulation. His wife’s sister just died under circumstances that are under investigation. Even if it has nothing to do with Trump or his supporters, it could be another wake up call to Mitch who has endured his share of threats from both Trump and his supporters.
Mitch M endorsing him is disgusting. He knows who he is, threats and all. The threats are not just to him and his family; they exist for all of us. I was not under any delusion that MM would endorse Biden or no labels or something, but I thought he might at least wait until mid-summer or later to see how the indictments and trials play out.
Gooper lemmings endorsing Trump are a riff on capitalism’s, doesn’t matter what you pay for it, so long as you sell it to someone else for more. That is, it doesn’t matter how vindictive and destructive Trump will be, so long as you direct his ire onto someone else.
In real estate, that’s call the Bigger Fool Theory, i.e., find a bigger fool to buy your property. Trump has tried to play that game in the commercial real estate business for decades. He, however, is not very good at it as he’s had to file bankruptcy multiple times before he could find a Bigger Fool. Over the past fifteen to twenty years, he’s found it easier to launder Russia Organized Crime Mafia dirty money.
Owning three casinos within a few miles of each other is like owning three gas stations on three out of the four corners of the same intersection.
In his SPAC S-4 (https://fintel.io/doc/sec-digital-world-acquisition-corp-1849635-s4a-2024-february-14-19767-511) under his business history on pages in the 130s it describes each of his business ventures and their failures and it states after each failure that “there can be no guarantee that TMTG’s performance will exceed the performance of these entities.”
It’s been clear to me that physical threats have been at the core of the collapse of the GOP. It’s what Trump learned from Roy Cohn and all the Italian Mafia gangsters he did business with, and as the power of La Cosa Nostra receded in NYC he learned even more from the far more violent Russian/Ukrainian gangsters who moved into Brighton Beach, which led him, naively, into Russia’s deadly embrace.
The Skripal poisoning was in March 2018, preceding the July 4 senatorial trip and the July 18 Helsinki summit by only a few months.
As they left their Helsinki meeting Trump looks like Putin just told him “I am the one who knocks.”
Agreed!
The news that former WH physician, Rep. Ronny Jackson, was running a candy dispensary and that the WH mental health counselors were grilled about what patients said to them all supports longstanding rumors that Trump constantly gathers dirt on everyone so he can use it to ensure loyalty. Cassidy Hutchinson’s original lawyer, Stefan Passantino, was improperly sharing info about her and her case with Trump’s team and even Maggie Haberman. It’s another classic Roy Cohn tactic.
He’s an idiot, but I bet Madison Cawthorn was not lying when he talked about the constant GOP’s drug-fueled sex parties.
Yeah, that does shine a light on what Madison Cawthorne meant when he was talking out of school about drug-fueled orgies.
Just out today, Jackson was demoted to captain (in 2022) for misconduct.
He’s claiming political persecution – of course.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/us/politics/ronny-jackson-demoted-navy.html
This is how terrorism works. We are far too conditioned to perceive it as a foreign threat, or more recently as perpetrated by unhinged hermits whose manifestos alone survive to tell us how different they were from us.
Terrorism as a political strategy wears a bespoke navy suit and overlong red tie. It speaks in a moronic (to us), easily deciphered (to its operatives) code that everyone understands but seemingly no one can legally charge.
The bottom line is fear. Fear and the intense human desire to stay inside the tent, because outside lies…”vermin,” “crime,” a mythological hellscape where no one knows your name. Terrorists might feel their way but they always know what they’re doing.
Republicans pick and choose the history they want to focus on, but more than a few of them would do well to brush up on their knowledge of Ernst Rohm and the Night of the Long Knives.
Zirc
Yes, the assistants to the coup are always among the first to go.
They know too much, or they’re a bit too popular.
Poor Brown Shirts…..a lesson there…Proud Boys?
Implication being that the Russians know how to do this, have done this before, and may again even on USA soil. I agree.
When you put it that way the situation seems really awful. I don’t think you have to be a disaster monger or conspiracy theorist to understand the situation is even worse. Factor in that we are in a pseudo-War with Russia, and MAGA is their ally and social engineering project. I think Ukraine is set up to become the world’s first Orwellian War as an endless propaganda that locks its participants into fascism. Maybe they haven’t thought of it, so let someone from the Gulf Kingdoms engineer another crisis. I think all of the powerful, reactionary autocracies believe it would be in their long term strategic interest if the United States were an autocracy too.
My big fear is a group of nations around the world seem to believe American soft power is the real challenge their regimes face. Russia seems to believe this in influential circles, such as in the philosophy of Alexandr Dugin, and likely China believes this too. They can measure up or measure us down. I think we have a strong normalcy bias, anyway, not only about intelligence agencies but both that the idea of America and American military might will always give us have the advantage to choose our own history. I think a primary goal of the next Trump Administration will be to make the United States turnkey fascist. The Heritage Foundation is open about it. I think if we lose the election a crisis will come to bring the Democrats around and it won’t seem like propaganda at the time. It’s the tyrant’s playbook. For my part, I’m trying not to think about it too much. It makes my thoughts too dark. What you think may happen doesn’t have to be what happens. Just seems we are entering a treacherous phase.
For not wanting to think about it too much, you’re obviously not reaching your goal [grin]. Good opinion, nonetheless.
That Project 2025 and the like are set forth in public is part of the ‘softening up’ phase once its promoters go all-in on saying the quiet parts out loud. This has to beg questions about what remains secret and closely guarded.
What is the plan for the mid-term election in 2026 should Trump be swept in on a MAGA wave? It is of course possible that Trump squeaks in and has to face blue majorities in Congress, or a Democratic House and a Republican Senate. What then?
(Meta;) How much autocracy is the Constitution configured to flex to and possibly even favor?
(It seems one silent part could be focused plans to implement a post-Constitutional order.)
To your point: Viktor Orban is scheduled to visit with Trump at Mar-a-lago tomorrow. Clearly, Trump is welcoming him, and not just for a social visit. I wonder what they’ll talk about?
We know they have a shared objective — undermining NATO. So probably that, for starters.
And as nycsouthpaw says:
https://bsky.app/profile/nycsouthpaw.bsky.social
Mar 7, 2024 at 10:18 AM
And now any attack on Sweden triggers NATO Article V. Swede!
McConnell is loyal to a Republican Party that no longer exists. If I didn’t hate him, I’d say he was pathetic.
He’s watched Trump stomp in, take over his party, make it over in his own name.
Is it possible that he’s impressed?
(I’ll grant that the hypocrisy is way beyond any reasonable understanding but that’s how the GOP seems to roll now.)
Like all of Trump’s minions, Kash Patel is dangerous.
And McConnell has always believed in the Confederacy as a way to keep the Union Northerners in check. He was raised that way.
The Deep State myth helped to feed Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, the Bundy sieges, Jade Helm, the Comet Ping Pong Pizza attack, and assorted QAnon violence including Q-Nut Queen – Ashli Babbitt. It has been the basis of much domestic terrorism.
And it’s gone international:
I have a friend from Chile and two of his wife’s younger sisters are full-on Q-Anoners, the whole recycled shebang that Trump will expose the pedophile dems who kill children and harvest their adrenochrome and march them off to prison. All radicalized online through a Telegram channel, which must have been in Spanish because these 2 ladies don’t speak English very well.
Also have a Canadian expat friend in Belize who has a Canadian expat poker buddy down there who thinks Trump is a “patriot”. His source of news in Belize: Fox News.
There is a Chilean telenovela from 2019-2021 called “La Jauría” (“The Pack”) that presses all the right buttons of sex trafficking, exploited minor girls, abusive teenage boys and men, corrupt priests and high government officials, and a mysterious deep international web of perpetrators who remain untouched by the law. I watched it earlier this year. It’s the kind of dramatic show that can convince impressionable viewers of unproven things to be scared of.
With McConnell’s endorsement of Trump today, we’ve reached the “YET” part of his speech after he refused to convict Trump for inciting insurrection.
“He hasn’t gotten away with it… Yet.”
“An IC led by Kash Patel would not just be a politicized intelligence community, intentionally blinded to the threat from countries like Russia, and by degrading intelligence on certain adversaries corroding the alliances built on that shared intelligence. But it would be an instrument for exacting loyalty. That instrument can and would be targeted at disloyal Trump party members. Look at efforts by the GOP House to investigate Cassidy Hutchinson, for example.”
One of the tooth-grinding signs of stupidity in the press right now is how much, especially at the top, they don’t believe that someone like Patel might also turn that machinery on them. Idiots like AG Sulzberger can’t imagine that a Trump team would not only target whistleblowers, it will file charges against his reporters and his paper. They will use friendly courts to gain incredibly broad injunctions against publishing, and abuse contempt penalties as well. And no amount of past back scratching the press did will matter. Purges don’t care about that kind of thing.
In its beat sweetener approach, Politico overstates Patel’s resume. He held the posts it mentions, but most of them for a short time and without the experience or talent to understand, perform or grow into them. But that wasn’t his or his patrons’ goal. He used them, instead, to extract information and to do WTF his patrons wanted done.
That’s what makes him a model for the thousands of bureaucrats Trump would need to launch his Fascist revolution. Instead of adopting Shakespeare’s “kill all the lawyers” – a prerequisite to dissolving the bonds of government in order to reshape it in the image of the revolution – KashPatelcrats would be the revolution.
Exactly! Well said!
The stupid thing about so many beat sweeteners, including this one, is that the subjects are never going to be useful sources.
You could possibly justify a beat sweetener when there is a hope for a quid pro quo. But Patel only feeds unreliable garbage to reporters. The kid glove treatment only reinforces his judgment that the press will eat up more of it.
Left out was the attempt to put him into NSA, and the stalwart resistance of General Nakasone that kept him out, although at the price of losing some (apparently) really competent people. (I find it hard to write about competent people in the IC, which I detest.)
Nakasone retired a few days ago. I have not heard anything about what his successor is like. When Nakasone took over, the first thing he did was tell the staff that they were going to abide by the law. I do not for one single, solitary moment believe the staff took him seriously or did abide by the law, but it was a nice touch.
Absolutely, earl. And then he left with the magically declassified documents, and proceeded to achieve exactly nothing.
I think Politico underplays the danger here. At the very end, they have a couple of paragraphs about our “allies and credibility.” What they say — that people won’t trust us if Trump is reelected, and won’t share their intelligence if that happens — it true, but incomplete.
I’m certain that our intelligence partners are *already* asking themselves “should we share X with the US?” right now. They aren’t going to wait for the election to be asking that question. They know that in 10 months, a possible Trump administration might see it and do something to expose their sources and methods.
I suspect that some are already editing back what they might have more freely shared in the past. As the calendar approaches November, they will be doing more editing — even if Biden is ahead in the polls.
More worrisome is that these allied intelligence services may be having some extremely delicate conversations with lower- and mid-level American spooks about their future under a Trump administration. Picture a US spook and his foreign colleague, who have been working together for years, and the colleague says something like this: “You’re going to be in a world of hurt if Trump wins. We wouldn’t dream of asking you to do something against the US, but if you decide you’d like to help us bolster the informal IC beyond the US in some way, give us a call. Because we’re going to need all the help we can get if the US tries to cut ties with the rest of the West on this.”
The world of spooks has gotten very very weird over the last 8 years, and that weirdness will only ramp up exponentially over the next 9 months as the election approaches. Where it goes after that depends a great deal on the results of the November elections.
I think this is exactly right, but I also think it will happen sooner that that because as TFG will now be the Republican nominee, I guess formally at the convention, I think he starts getting intelligence briefs sooner rather than later and our current allies maybe rethinking a few things…
I don’t disagree with the central point about concerns over abuse of intelligence by MAGA in general and Trump in particular.
But, isn’t there a real question mark over whether Trump as the acknowledged candidate of the GOP in the upcoming election will in fact be the recipient of intelligence briefings? I understand that historically such briefings have occurred as a courtesy. And the courtesy is extended for the purposes of effecting a seemless transition of power should the candidate be ultimately successful.
There appear to me to be numerous national security reasons for not observing the courtesy in this instance.
Just as Trump has been denied security clearance post-Presidency, as opposed to all of his recent peers…well, fellow ex-Presidents.
Presidents do not have security clearances. Current presidents have access to most govt information. Past presidents traditionally retain considerable access. But past presidents, barring Trump, and their retainers respected the rules. Trump lost access because he abuses them.
According to Popok of MeidasTouch, only one before the election with the presumptive candidate.
But it’s up to the current administration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGZqM5cUtmI
I agree. I think the MeidasTouch network is worthy of one’s time. This one caught my attention even though it has old(er) news. None the less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeXWYCSzwLk
AFAIK there is no requirement to share security information with any nominee until they assume office. It has been done in the past as a way to insure some continuity and only 45 has violated the trust many times.
I think it *already* is happening, just on the chance that Trump wins the election. Our allies have seen Trump at work in his first term — and been burned by it. Sure, cutting back on cooperation may not be necessary if Biden wins, but the word “if” is the kicker. Better to cut back now, and then resume fuller cooperation later if Biden wins.
This isn’t about Trump getting any briefings as a candidate, but him getting access to whatever secrets the foreign partners have given over the last several years, once he becomes president again. *That* is the driving concern.
Politico’s piece assumes that institutions of American government will survive intact, if a little bruised, whatever Trump throws at them. That happy assumption may be necessary to avoid an obvious hair-on-fire moment, and to maintain a mandatory above-the-fray attitude. But the assumption ignores what those institutions will face: a squall comprised of Trump’s vindictiveness, his patrons’ plans for a revolution in American governance, uniform support from the GOP, and many in the press and on the bench, and the efforts of thousands of KashPatels.
Is there anything that will make MSNBC stop throwing Chuck Todd on the television screen? Anything? Bueller….
How about Kornaki, Welker any Symone Sanders? Can they be gone too?
yeah, agree
((sigh)) sure do miss Chuck Rosenberg.
Tune into KO on You Tube after the State of the Union Address
Should be a dandy.
How have I managed to avoid seeing Chucky so far? My condolences. Agree w/bmaz about Symone as well…Kornacki may be Mr. Horse Race, but somehow I don’t mind him.
The plans for 2025 may be following a Russian model for adopting mob tactics in government.
From a review of a 2018 book by Mark Galeotti:
“The vory and their values have moved to the heart of the state in the culmination of a process begun in the first half of the twentieth century. . . . Galeotti suggests, via Russian examples, that only a triad of uncorrupted policing, defense of the rule of law, and a persistent and courageous civil society can provide any hope of countering the thugs.”
(also available here).
A later paper by the reviewer:
Thugocracy: bandit regimes and state capture
Nancy Ries
Published online: 29 Oct 2020
(also available here)
“In this paper I analyze the Trump, Putin, and Zuma regimes as ‘thugocracies’: projects of sophisticated state capture, through organized crime networks at every level of scale, and utilizing complex arrays of mafia tactics, personnel, and practices.”
My first knowledge of Kash Patel was when he was working for the DOJ, and showed up for a hearing in federal court before Judge Lynn Hughes, who promptly berated him for not wearing a suit & tie; for adding nothing of value to the case; and summarily excused him. Judge Hughes subsequently entered an “Order on Ineptitude” regarding the DOJ’s multiple failed attempts to obtain a transcript of the hearing from which Patel was ejected.
I’ll note that I appeared before this particular judge many, many times in my career, starting as a 1st-year associate. I always knew to dress appropriately, arrive early, and most importantly, to be extremely prepared.
Free WaPo link:
https://wapo.st/49YX523
that was a delicious read. Thank you for posting this. LOL
“So, what is the utility to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense, eat at their expense and stay at their expense when there are plenty of capable people over there, in this room plus over there?” Hughes said “You’re just one more nonessential employee from Washington. . . . You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” Judge Hughes to Patel.
Yep, I remember discussing that here at length when it happened.
No, he didn’t add value. He was there to fly the flag and phone home. Same with his attempt to interview Christopher Steele, by showing up in London, unannounced, with no notice to the UK Justice Ministry, Foreign Office, or intel services. Steele told him to pound salt. What a putz.
If there truly was a deep state, we would not be discussing Donald Trump. Well, perhaps only in NYC as a short fingered vulgarian developer who doesn’t pay his bills or taxes.
Oh, there’s a deep state, it’s just not what and who Trump thinks it is. Like everything else, Trump views it through a personal lens.
Trump uses deep state as a punchline and an epithet. He thinks it includes the people who refused to let him join their clubs, and the bureaucrats who tried to hold him to account or restrained his profit taking: the ordinarily wealthy, judges, mid- and lower level bureaucrats. As president, he added policy-level appointees, such as generals and senior politicians, who remained loyal to the Constitution rather than to Trump personally.
The deep state traditionally refers to extremely powerful figures, who retain influence over national policies and priorities, regardless of the government of the day. Once, those included the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Harrimans. Now they include politically active oligarchs, such as those created by big tech and the financialization of the economy. They are not a monolith; they do not share the same priorities all the time. They are more like a revolving set of personalities, whose interests often coalesce.
They exert influence through the businesses they control and their cultural platforms, such as elite banks, universities, think tanks, the press and largest foundations, the Trilateral Commission and CEO-only Business Roundtable, and the FedSoc. They affect, for example, the size of the Overton Window, and the scope of the most well-funded research and who does it.
They filter, foster, and fund candidates for senior roles, who, in turn, become elite university and foundation presidents, senior judges and lawyers, pubic figures, and the most influential among the many who pass through the revolving door. Former members included Dean Rusk and John J. McCloy; now they include Scalia fils. Clarence Thomas hopes to add Crystal Clanton to the nomenklatura; if Donald Trump has his way, he will add Kash Patel.
As with analyses of imperial power, American academics typically identified deep state influence in other countries, but not in the pristine USA, a narrow focus welcomed by such titans as the Dulles brothers. Sociologist G. William Domhoff and historian Alfred McCoy are among the exceptions.
This was true even while Samuel Huntington – a Harvard academic and adviser to the Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission – and Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell campaigned against what Huntington called a Nixon-era “excess of democracy,” and advised wealth on how to control it.
Much criticism of the deep state is as deep as a car park puddle, and uses, as does Trump, caricatured versions of it to ridicule the idea. It does not reflect the power and continuity of immense wealth, and the businesses and institutions through which it exercises that power.
I agree with your technical definition, but the popular interpretation of “Deep State” seems to refer to the career employees of the federal government. They are the ones who go to work every day, making careers of it, and creating those tiresome regulations that get in the way of Trump and his friends.
Trump wants to undo civil service protections and bring back the old spoils system. Ironically, cutting out the bureaucracy that he vilifies as the Deep State benefits the plutocrats you describe as Deep State.
I agree.
Trump uses mythology to build windmills others are too cowardly to attack and defeat, unlike the Man from Mar-a-Lago.
He uses propaganda to lie about his real aims, such as gutting the civil service that makes govt run, because it’s the only institution powerful enough to oppose immense wealth, if only at the margins.
He uses it to give false meaning to things he can’t control. Here, he attributes power to the serfs rather than to the castle, in whose shadow they work.
The deep state must be delighted that he gives them cover to hide behind, even if it’s only a shrubbery by the drawbridge. Where are the Knights Who Say “Ni!” when needed?
The real deep state is chortling over their success at using Trump to install three new “conservative” (that is, reactionary activist) justices on SCOTUS to do away with regulations and keep their wealth safe.
They’ve seen the GOP use culture war issues, clumsily, to hang on to enough power to keep their own coffers stuffed, which is the only thing they care about. Not abortion, not gay rights, not Israel or Ukraine. They’re still happy with the party they placed their bets on forty years ago. As long as the Electoral College remains, it’s a safe bet.
I wish the media would do a better job of explaining how the current state of Israel/Gaza and Ukraine/Russia stem from many of the actions that Trump took, from blackmailing Zelenski to withdrawing from the Iran Nuclear Agreement to moving the embassy to Jerusalem. That blaming Biden is not accurate (though Biden certainly owns the response to Israel’s attack on Gaza).
Putin didn’t invade Ukraine and Hamas didn’t attack Israel on a whim. Iran was willing to flex it’s muscles (to the extent it controls Hamas) because they are that much further along towards nuclear capability. Putin was encouraged by the disarray Trump caused in NATO.
How to get that information into the Right Wing Bubble is beyond me.
Not to contradict but another view is that in fact these politics; authoritarian, embracing violence and know nothingism, are broadly based. I don’t think tens of millions were taught anything per say. I think politicians, not the media mind you but politicians, are just responding to the market. Politicians are following the votes, as politicians always do. Not leaders, just participants.
Fascism has always, since it coalesced into an ism in the 1920’s 100 years ago, has always been nascent in the US. It went politely unnamed after the outbreak of WWII until, well, we’re waiting.
Which came first, the sugar-laced cereal sales or the marketing?
Intel agencies eye brief for Trump, amid fears he could spill secrets It’s standard practice to share classified information with presidential nominees, but the decision to brief Trump if he becomes the GOP nominee this year is loaded with political and potentially legal risks. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/07/biden-intel-briefings-trump-00145651
SAKELLARIADIS / BANCO 03/07/2024 01:12 PM EST
Among the legal issues, there’s how Trump would use the briefings to dismiss the Florida documents case.
The basis would be that the briefings constitute the govt’s admission that a) he can be trusted with the most sensitive govt. secrets, b) it waives prosecution of him for any past conduct, and c) any continued prosecution of him would amount to discrimination and political payback.
If the govt prudently attempted to bind Trump contractually to obey applicable law regarding the care and use of govt information – before and with each briefing, as the Brits reportedly do regarding official secrets – he will cry foul, scream that it’s unprecedented, and could only be regarded as an attempt to interfere in his electoral prospects.