Trump and the “deep state”

ABSTRACT

Donald Trump and his loyalists invoked the concept of the deep state when confronted with resistance to the president’s agenda. The hazy concept of the deep state was tied to the long-standing conservative critique of the administrative state and the growth of the federal bureaucracy. Together, they conveyed reproach that Trump was subverted by a shadowy network of unelected bureaucrats that illegitimately holds the levers of real power in the United States. But there is no deep state. The conflict between the bureaucracy and Trump underscores a conflict between liberal and populist conceptions of democracy; between, utilizing Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of conviction. The bureaucracy’s commitment to liberalism and instrumental rationality butts up against the Caesarist authority claimed by a leader on the basis of his presumed plebiscitary electoral mandate. Trump’s rhetorical accusation of a deep state undermined confidence in government and the legitimacy of the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Trump and Trumpism
• Deep state
• Administrative state
• Federal bureaucracy
• Caesarism
• Imperial presidency
• Max Weber Politics as a Vocation

Notes

1 The aim was not just Trump’s, of course. The theory of augmented executive power, or, perhaps better put in the context of this paper, Caesarism redux or imperial presidency 2.0, in recent years has come under the moniker of the “unitary executive.” It was a primary feature of conservative constitutional theorists of the George W. Bush era (Yoo 2005) and lived on in the pronouncements of Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr. Irony abounds here. Like many instances in American history, the valence of political critique can switch over time. In the late 1940s Republicans championed the Bricker Amendment, a bill that aimed to restore checks and balances on the president’s power. Then, liberals laughed. In the immediate post 9/11 Bush years, conservatives championed the unvarnished power of the president, resulting in the use of executive order and “signing statements” that recorded President Bush’s intimation that he might not abide by the legislation he was signing. Liberals howled. But when Republicans achieved congressional majorities in the 2010 midterm election and President Obama found himself hamstrung, he used the executive order style of rule just as Bush had.

2 Trump’s deep state accusation also encompassed the whistleblower revelation of his effort to coerce the president of Ukraine to initiate a corruption investigation of the then not-yet determined, but likely Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden.

3 In the aftermath of Trump’s firing of Comey and the Oval Office celebration of his sacking with Russian officials, the FBI commenced a counterintelligence investigation whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security (Goldman, Schmidt, and Fandos 2019b). This inquiry, of course, added grist to the deep state mill.

4 Conspiracy theories abounded among some unknown, but substantial set of Trump supporters. One was QAnon, a deep state theory embraced by some Trump supporters that made its appearance on the Internet in 2018 and went public at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida in August of that year. Among the QAnon claims was that Trump feigned collusion with the Russians to create a pretense for the hiring of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was actually working to expose Democrats engaged in planning a political coup. QAnon also participated in the spreading of stories that Democrats and Hollywood celebrities engage in the sex trafficking of children, a claim that inspired a gunman to storm a Washington pizza restaurant in December 2016 in the effort to free such children (Coaston 2018). QAnon conspiracy theories were embraced by headliners at the inaugural American Priority Conference in December 2018 (Schrenckinger 2018). Trump himself often retweeted conspiracy claims (Roose and Winston 2018).

5 See the whistleblower complaint regarding President Trump's communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (Washington Post 2019). Here, the relationship between Trump and his loyalists in the media, especially Fox News commentators, served to create an echo chamber effect for a president who, according to all reports, didn’t read, didn’t trust his expert bureaucracy, and was keen to share conspiracy notions with his followers.

6 The idea that “cultural Marxism” infects western contemporary thought has coursed through right-wing circles since the 1990s. The gist is that virtually all the ills of current American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation, gay rights, and environmentalism to the decay of traditional education, are ultimately attributable to the insidious influence of the (mostly Jewish) members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (including Theodore W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, among others), who fled Nazi Germany for the United States in the 1930s and influenced generations of American scholars and students thereafter. The far-right commentator Lyndon LaRouche coined the cultural Marxism term in the 1990s. As in all things LaRouche, as crackpot a conspiracy theorist as one can find, his use of the label reeked of anti-Semitism. Cultural Marxism was picked up by new right organizers Paul Weyrich and Paul Lind, founders of the Free Congress Foundation. Weyrich was perhaps the key conservative political entrepreneur of the late 1970s, a right-wing Catholic who succeeded in pulling hitherto reticent evangelical Protestants into organized conservative political action in part to counter the power of cultural Marxism. The cultural Marxism critique, if not the exact term, was enlisted by the paleoconservative author and presidential contender, Patrick Buchanan (2002). Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous conservative news website closest to the Alt-Right, declared that the critique of cultural Marxism was central to his political awakening. Edward A. Glinka’s (2018) deep state book devotes a full chapter to the nefarious legacy of the Frankfurt School. Cultural Marxism is now a central nemesis in Alt-Right thinking (Jay 2011; Bolton 2017).

7 Authorship of “Potus & Political Warfare” was attributed to NSC strategic planning office staffer Rich Higgins. Higgins, who came to the NSC with Trump’s (short-lived) National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and was aligned with Breitbart publisher and White House strategist Stephen Bannon, was forced out in 2017 by H.R. McMaster, Flynn’s replacement as National Security Adviser (Gray 2017). Breitbart itself was an early source of deep state writing. Barely a month after the 2016 election, “Virgil” (2016) posted a long article on Breitbart warning of the deep state “complex of bureaucrats, technocrats, and plutocrats that likes things just the way they are and wants to keep them like that—elections be damned.” Buttressed by their mainstream media allies, Virgil warned ominously, the deep state would act to overturn Trump’s election.

8 In A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935), the Supreme Court struck down certain provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act because the legislation had not set explicit guidelines to guide the President’s actions. But the Court rejected challenges to the creation and growth of New Deal agencies thereafter. And in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), the Court ruled that the Constitution had never given “illimitable power of removal” to the President vis-a-vis congressionally created independent regulatory agencies (thereby casting grave doubt on any theory of the unitary executive, mentioned in footnote 1).

9 Many of the Trump administration’s strenuous efforts to reverse Obama era legislation, agency rule-making, and Executive Orders were denied or slowed by the courts largely because of the administration’s violations of the Administrative Procedure Act. The decision in the DACA controversy, Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, 591 U.S. __ (2020), is a case in point. The Court majority found the DHS’s reasons for rescinding the benefits and forbearance of the DACA program to be so inadequate on their face, and had not addressed reliance interests secondarily, that they were arbitrary and capricious. Adhering to proper procedures, the Court maintained, “serves important administrative law values by promoting agency accountability to the public, instilling confidence that the reasons given are not simply convenient litigating positions, and facilitating orderly review.”

10 Former Pennsylvania Senator and 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s (2011) evaluation of climate change is typical. The claim of “man-made climate change,” Santorum declared on the Rush Limbaugh radio show, is “patently absurd … junk science … a beautifully concocted scheme … by the left … just an excuse for more government control of your life.”

11 See also Stephen Bannon’s comments at the 2017 CPAC conference, in which he spoke of Trump’s agenda as the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (Rucker and Costa 2017). The intellectual source of this strain of critique is surely Friedrich Hayek (1944), The Road to Serfdom.

12 Ironically, this has been essentially the crude Marxist critique of American politics for decades: rich, powerful capitalists and large corporations are the hidden (and not so hidden) puppet-masters of politics. Politics is an epiphenomenon of economic power. Trumpists transform the puppeteer from the plutocrats to the liberal federal bureaucracy – which makes the views of Trump and his loyalists (pictured by many as distinct from the “establishment” GOP) not much different from the Republican new class political playbook of the last 40 years, after all. Notwithstanding some policy differences (on trade for example), Trumpism is not a break from the Republican Party; Trumpism is the party’s quintessence.

13 Weber’s flirtation with Caesarism (criticized by Gerhard Casper [2007] as Romantic elitism, and by others as a disturbing Nietzschean trend) was expanded, in spades, by the Nazi political/legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s elevation of the sovereign and assertion of the sovereign’s power to suspend the law was in part rooted, like Weber, in dreams of German national power and his understanding of the ineffectual Weimar Reichstag.