Trump’s ‘Deep State’ bogeyman

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/07/2018 (2655 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a long time, Joseph Stalin, the ruthless Soviet dictator, was portrayed in the west as paranoid and delusional, a person who believed there were conspiracies against him. Now, archival documents suggest Stalin’s desperate pursuit to maintain absolute power was more manipulative and calculating. Crises were manufactured and facts distorted; anyone remotely suspected of questioning his iron-fisted rule was arrested, given a “show” trial, and dealt with harshly.

The United States is by no means the Soviet Union, and U.S. President Donald Trump is not Stalin. But Trump is seemingly as devious as the Soviet autocrat in his daily assaults on the truth. When he is not fear-mongering about immigration, he is conjuring the ominous image of the “Deep State,” a secret cabal of justice and military officials and influential members of the civil service who are allegedly plotting to destroy his presidency.

He has repeatedly depicted special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, over whether Trump and the members of his campaign team colluded with Russians during the 2016 presidential election, as a conspiracy against him. And last January, the president’s son, Eric Trump, went so far as to suggest talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres, no fan of the Trumps, was a Deep State operative. DeGeneres thought the accusation was nuts. “I don’t have that kind of time,” she said with a smile.

While this all sounds like a bad X-Files episode or the storyline of a Robert Ludlum thriller, it indeed would be absurd if it were not such an effective tactic. Trump has used the spectre of the Deep State to deflect criticism of his policies and behaviour, which his paper-thin skin cannot tolerate. He did this again recently by advancing a dishonest interpretation of the report into the 2016 presidential election by Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the U.S. Justice Department.

One silly text message included by Horowitz in his 500-page report, between two FBI agents who were romantically linked and shared the thought that they wanted “to stop Trump” from winning the election, was all the president needed to declare the Deep State attack as a legitimate threat. That the agents had absolutely no influence over the election was ignored, as was the fact that if anyone benefited from former FBI director James Comey’s intrusion in the campaign, it was Trump, rather than his opponent Hillary Clinton.

More disconcerting is that according to an opinion poll conducted in March by Monmouth University in New Jersey, 74 per cent of Americans — Republicans as well as Democrats — “feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a ‘Deep State’ of unelected government officials.”

That Trump should continually allude to the Deep State is not surprising. Conspiracies have been a part of his arsenal for many years. He was at the forefront of the “birther” movement which declared former U.S. president Barack Obama’s birth certificate a fake, insinuating Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii.

He has given credence to the contentious theory that autism in children is caused by vaccinations, and he suggested the far-fetched notion that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the alleged plot to assassinate former U.S. president John F. Kennedy. And those are only a few examples of his warped imagination.

Trump, however, is not the first president to put his faith in conspiracies. Monarchical and Masonic conspiracy theories have been around since the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson believed, as his biographer Jon Meecham points out, that “America’s enemies were everywhere.”

In more modern times, two of Trump’s Republican predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, postulated about the “Deep State,” yet they didn’t call it that. In one of the last speeches Eisenhower delivered as president in 1961, he warned his fellow Americans “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.” He didn’t originate the concept, which dated back to at least the 1930s, but his remarks have been remembered ever since by Deep State adherents.

Nixon was even more paranoid than Trump seems to be, though he was more circumspect in public. The release of the Pentagon Papers by the report’s author, Daniel Ellsberg, to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1971 drove Nixon to distraction (the “papers” documented the extent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967).

‘‘We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy,’’ he said in a taped, recorded conversation on July 1, 1971, with national security adviser Henry Kissinger and chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. ‘‘They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?’’ The White House then approved a covert operation to break into the office of the California psychiatrist who had treated Ellsberg. The more infamous break-in at the Democrats’ headquarters at the Watergate Hotel soon followed.

What truly goes on inside Trump’s brain is anyone’s guess.

But this much is certain: should Mueller’s investigation turn up some truly damaging evidence, or should the Republicans lose control of Congress in the November midterm elections, you can be assured Trump will not blame himself, his inadequacies or objectionable policies for these challenges to his power, but the lurking Deep State which is out to get him. It’s his go-to bogeyman.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.