Listen Up America: There is No "Deep State." Get Over It
Rather than some secret anti-Trump fifth column inside the career bureaucracy, public servants function as part of the constitutional autoimmune system at work.
Following the FBI’s search and seizure of 27 boxes (11 classified) of official government documents at Donald Trump’s vacation home August 8, Newt Gingrich wrote in Fox News: “If we do not act, the forces that are threatening us will establish government of the deep state, by the deep state, and for the deep state.” Fox’s Larry Kudlow chimed in, “There is a deep state bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., that is subverting our cherished institutions in favor of their radical leftist views.” Then come hollow allegations of the FBI “planting evidence.”
“Since 2014, the Ukrainian government in Kiev has been totally controlled by the US State Dept, the CIA, the Pentagon, & groups of heavily-armed Ukrainian Nazis,” tweeted a Democrat, of all things, running for a House seat in Kentucky. One tweeter retorted, “If true — bravo folks for the excellent interagency coordination!”
What the tweeter was getting across in his snarky comeback, of course, is that the government bureaucracy couldn’t accomplish such a sprawling conspiracy if it tried. And I can attest to that. I had much to admire about public service in my 25 years inside the belly of the beast. But robust competence wasn’t one of them. “God save us always,” Graham Greene wrote, “from the innocent and the good.”
So, my fellow Americans, I hate to break it to you, but there is no “Deep State.” Yep. All those allegations the GOP and Donald Trump have been feeding you about a vast cabal of malevolent bureaucrats frenetically plotting to stymie the majestic agenda of TFG to take us all back to 1853 is horse feathers. It has the same validity as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of political fiction that blamed the world’s problems on the Jewish people, leading to the murder of six million of them.
Donald Trump’s corruption and transactional patriotism are finally catching up with him. But what Trump seems incapable of comprehending is that the public servants he has savaged over the years are, unlike him, not driven by revenge. They are there out of a devotion to American principles and the U.S. Constitution. As such, they provide an added check and balance on executive power. Rather than some secret anti-Trump fifth column inside the career bureaucracy, they function as part of the constitutional autoimmune system at work. As with the military, they will not follow illegal orders. Only an amoral egocentric bombast like Trump who wallows in a fantasy world of conspiracy theories would fail to grasp that.
Not to be morbid, but the only members of the “Deep State” are six feet deep — i.e., deceased. Here are three, all killed in the line of duty:
Arnold Raphel, U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, was killed when the military plane he was on with President Zia-ul-Haq went down over Punjab province in 1988. A career Foreign Service officer, Arnie warned the State Department and the CIA that the Iranian source used by Lt. Col. Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scheme, was unreliable. His warning ignored by senior officials, events proved Arnie right. He hand-picked me to be detailed to the White House to help investigate the scandal (nixed by ass-covering White House officials the day before I was to report for duty), and later to be Senior Country Officer for Afghanistan. Arnie was given a full-honors funeral at Arlington Cemetery. He was a true patriot who gave his full measure to his country.
Elizabeth C. Hanson was so deeply affected by 9/11 that not long after graduating from college, she joined the CIA as an analyst. On December 30, 2009, Hanson waited with her intelligence team at Forward Operating Base Chapman, a major U.S. counterterrorism site in Afghanistan to meet a trusted Jordanian asset who claimed to have penetrated al-Qaeda, with information on locating Osama bin-Laden. Hanson’s role was to help debrief the Jordanian. The White House was on standby for a phone call immediately afterward. The Jordanian, however, was a double agent and detonated a powerful suicide bomb that instantly killed seven CIA personnel, including Hanson, aged 30. “She was at the tip of the spear in the fight on terrorism,” noted a former CIA covert officer.
Edwin R. Woodriffe was a trailblazer in the FBI as one of a handful of African-American special agents in the mid-1960s. The son of immigrants, he worked his way through Fordham and realized his dream of serving in law enforcement, as a police cadet, a Treasury agent and, finally with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1969, at age 28, he and another special agent were fatally shot by a bank robber, the first Black special agent to be killed in the line of duty. He left behind his wife and two young children. Woodriffe is honored to this day for his sacrifice and for helping to open the way for more African-Americans to serve in the Bureau.
I knew many, many more such selfless, dedicated and patriotic public servants, some having been held captive, tortured, shot at and targeted with directed pulsed energy that damaged their brains — all in service to the United States. During my 23 years with the State Department, 78 of my diplomatic colleagues were killed in the line of duty.
I ask those of you who believe in the existence of a so-called Deep State to look closely at the beaming faces of Arnold Raphel, Elizabeth Hanson and Edwin Woodriffe, search your hearts, and ask yourselves if you truly believe that folks like these great Americans who took the oath put their lives on the line every day in the service of a nefarious and shadowy cabal of ruthless government workers, collectively conniving to take down your hero, a congenital liar and conman, soon to have his comeuppance in the courts.
If you cannot shake your misguided belief, then I feel sorry for you and call to your attention Tom Paine’s admonition, “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead.”
Listen Up America: There is No "Deep State." Get Over It
Mr .Bruno, whether you intend to be or not, you are one of the most eloquent gaslighters I've encountered in a long while.
WHERE IN THE CONSTITUTION does it say the unelected bureaucracy is to "provide an added check and balance on executive power?"
"Rather than some secret anti-Trump fifth column inside the career bureaucracy, they function as part of the constitutional autoimmune system at work." Did you skip the definition of "irony" in school?
The "Deep State" need NOT mean a grand cabal, in fact it is insane to believe such stupidity outside of a movie theatre.
The term can mean "the emergent property of a self-interested, unaccountable administrative state, acting in concert - NOT coordination - to stymie the will of the people in their electoral choices." Alignment of interests is all that is required for each individual to take or NOT take action that observed on a macro level would indicate the existence of this Deep State. Against a man who promised to fire 50% of 2,100,000 lavishly paid public sector union members, it is not hard to discern how those interests are aligned.
Incompetence, bureaucratic inertia and a range of tactics like slow-rolling requests, accidentally shredding, say, FOIA requests and the like can all undermine a President's agenda. Which you seem to applaud by saying the bureaucracy is a "check" on the Executive Branch.
You create false strawmen when you say "If you believe in a metastasizing bureaucracy, then you ALSO MUST call fine patriots part of a vast conspiracy." I, too, have worked with many excellent patriots in various governmental departments. Their hard work and self-sacrifice does not change the fact that a vast administrative state is smothering the nation in a nanny state whose actions are killing us by a thousand paper cuts. The two phenomena can exist together, and demonstrably do.
I understand where you are coming from, but all of us face challenges when trying to see a problem from myriad angles. Given your experience and dedication, you are rightly outraged and appalled when you hear about "conspiracy theories" which bear no resemblance to the on the ground reality of the hardworking (mostly), dedicated (mostly) professionals who work in the government. What you are NOT hearing is what we in the private sector know which is this massive, bloated bureaucracy is too big to be effective, has proven to be more expensive than we can afford and will fight like any organism for its survival. Parasites kill their hosts all the time.
So, while you are right about the "Deep State" as a figment of the QAnon tinfoil hat brigade, you are wrong to believe that the same effects cannot be achieved in a distributed organic manner as the bureaucracy's immune system reacts to attempts to trim it down to size.
And you are 100% wrong about an unelected cadre of people - no matter how well-intentioned - who exist to be a further check on the Executive Branch. Completely and utterly wrong.