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.

(The following article is updated from that published a couple of years ago)

“I will shatter the Deep State, and restore government that is controlled by the People.” — Donald Trump.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.” — Russ Vought, OMB director-designate.

In his book, Government Gangsters, Trump’s choice to become FBI director Kash Patel has a “nonexhaustive” enemies list of 60 names titled, “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.”

Following the FBI’s search and seizure of 27 boxes (11 classified) of official government documents at Donald Trump’s vacation home in 2022, 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 came hollow allegations of the FBI “planting evidence.”

As a former deep stater with a high level security clearance, I’ll let you in on a secret: the government bureaucracy couldn’t accomplish such a sprawling conspiracy if it tried. 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 Donald Trump to take us all the way 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.

What Trump and his merry band of fellow nihilists seem incapable of comprehending is that the public servants they savage are, unlike them, not driven by revenge or greed. They are there out of a devotion to American principles and the U.S. Constitution. As such, they deliver essential services for the public good, defend us all from enemies foreign and domestic, and, yes, provide an added check and balance on executive power because, as with the military, they will not follow illegal orders. And it’s this that drives the megalomaniacal MAGA mob into a frenzy. Rather than some secret anti-Trump fifth column inside the career bureaucracy, government employees function, at times, as part of the constitutional autoimmune system at work. Only an amoral power-hungry bombast like Trump and his slavish minions who wallow in a dark fantasy world of conspiracy theories 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. None of them were “suckers” or “losers” or “deep state” operatives. They were heroes.

As the Biden administration is compelled to consider granting pre-emptive blanket pardons to multitudes of selfless patriotic public servants as the barbarians gallop closer to the gates of power, we who have served our country worry about their fates.

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 and put their lives on the line every day for you, connive in the service of a nefarious and shadowy mass of ruthless government workers, collectively plotting to take down your idol, a convicted felon and conman, soon to wreak his promised “retribution.”

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.”