In choosing Tulsi Gabbard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, President-elect Donald Trump seems to have prioritized his election promise of “demolishing” what he calls the “Deep State,” a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy in general and in particular for the military and spy agencies, who allegedly leak information against the government or compel the elected leaders to do what they advise or dictate.
Gabbard, a Democrat-turned-Trump supporter, has been consistent in her anti-surveillance views, even when she was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives.
Her animus towards what she has described as the “national security state and its warmongering friends” has been such that in December 2020, shortly before she left Congress, she introduced legislation that would repeal the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, two of the most significant surveillance instruments passed by Congress after September 11, 2001. That success eluded her is a different point altogether.
Gabbard has reportedly argued that the “Democrat elite and neocons” have formed a “cabal of warmongers in permanent Washington.” And accordingly, she, like Trump, has questioned American support for Ukraine.
Incidentally, she greatly supported Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who were behind two of the biggest US national security leaks of the 21st Century.
Trump’s nomination of Gabbard needs to be seen in the context of his own grudge against the “deep state” for its alleged hostility towards and defiance of him as President between 2016 and 2020. So much so that when, in March 2023, he kicked off his third Presidential run in Waco, Texas, Trump had framed the 2024 race as “the final battle.”
In this battle, he said, “Either the Deep State destroys America, or we destroy the Deep State.” Lest anyone doubt his role, he announced: “I am your warrior, I am your justice. … For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”
It seems Trump had many reasons to be bitter about some of the officials during his first term as the President. In fact, in July 2017, the Republican-led Senate Homeland Security Committee released a report that found the Trump administration was hit by national security leaks “on a nearly daily basis” and at a far higher rate than its predecessors encountered.
Pointing out that the protection of secrets is essential to protecting America’s intelligence activities and to enable the President to achieve foreign policy objectives effectively, the report said how “since President Trump assumed office, our nation has faced an unprecedented wave of potentially damaging leaks of information…. leaks are flowing at the rate of one a day…. Articles published by a range of national news organizations between January 20 and May 25, 2017, included at least 125 stories with leaked information potentially damaging to national security… All such revelations are potential violations of federal law, punishable by jail time.”
Incidentally, after Trump fired him, FBI Director James Comey admitted that he had “relayed accounts of his bizarre interactions with the President to a friend, who in turn shared them with a New York Times reporter.” Predictably, former Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski attacked Comey as “part of the Deep State.”
Similarly, in his book “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” former US National Security Advisor (NSA) Lt. General (retd) HR McMaster has written how “It was difficult to get State and Defence even to comply with Trump’s directive to stop certain activities. I discovered that contrary to the South Asia strategy, which called for the suspension of all aid to Pakistan with a few exceptions, when Defence Secretary Jim Mattis visited Islamabad in the coming weeks, the Pentagon was going to deliver a military aid package that included more than $150 million worth of armored vehicles.”
McMaster was said to have been shocked at the Defence Secretary’s defiance of stated US policy. As he wrote, “President (Trump) had been very clear on multiple occasions to suspend aid to the Pakistanis until they halted support for terrorist organizations that were killing Afghans, Americans, and coalition members in Afghanistan…We had all heard Trump say, ‘I do not want any money going to Pakistan’.”
It may also be noted that soon after Trump assumed office in 2017, John Brennan, CIA director under President Barack Obama, had argued that executive branch officials have an “obligation … to refuse to carry out” outrageous or anti-democratic orders from President Donald Trump. This was predictably interpreted by Trump’s followers as “ a call for a coup” by “embeds in the deep state at the Pentagon, State Department, and various intelligence agencies.”
Incidentally, “Deep State,” as a term, came into the political vocabulary in Turkey during the 1950s, implying a network of individuals in multiple branches of government with ties to ex-generals, officials, and organized crime who were committed “to preserve secularism and destroy communism.” The term has also been used in places like Egypt, pre-war Syria, and Pakistan, where militaries maintained close control of bureaucratic and political systems even when civilians were nominally in charge.
In essence, the Deep State is supposed to be composed of the entrenched officers in powerful ministries and state-run utilities who either clash routinely with elected leaders, denying them the ability to govern democratically or insulate them from legal or political reckonings.
Tufts University international law professor Michael J. Glennon’s 2014 book, “National Security and Double Government,” also deals with the same phenomenon. He has revealed how even Obama, who had campaigned against Bush-era surveillance and security policies in 2008, acquiesced to many of them as President—suggesting a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it.
However, in America, the term Deep State was popularised by Mike Lofgren, an author and a former Republican U.S. Congressional aide. In his book “The Party Is Over,“ he talked of a web of entrenched interests in the US government and beyond (most notably business leaders in Wall Street and tech czars in Silicon Valley) that dictate America’s defense decisions, trade policies, and priorities with little regard for the actual interests or desires of the American people.
“It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance,” he wrote, adding that Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks of the NSA’s surveillance programs exposed pieces of the apparatus.
Another famous book, “The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy,” by Canadian academic and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott, also discusses how a hidden “Deep State” influences and often opposes official U.S. policies “in the name of freedom and democracy.”
In his book, Scott has provided compelling evidence to argue that the Deep State is now institutionalized in non-accountable intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA as well as in private corporations of Wall Street bankers, lawyers, and international oil companies beyond the reach of domestic law.
Such views have been further strengthened by Big Tech Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission that officials in the Biden Administration had “pressured” him to “censor” content during the Covid pandemic. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg said.
This admission gave a lot of credence to the claims of the Republicans and many conservative analysts that the Deep State is suppressing free speech and censoring opponents’ views. They were referring to how the mainstream media, as well as the social media, ran a tirade against Trump (who, incidentally, was blocked by Twitter before Elon Musk’s takeover). Their contention is that Big Tech was not just a bystander but an active participant in a censorship scandal orchestrated by the Deep State of the United States.
There have been many foreign policy analysts who believe that the Deep State in America today is essentially dominated by left-liberal thoughts, and its primary objectives happen to be weakening Russia, challenging China, and restraining Israel and India.
Many Indian observers point out how social media, all controlled by American companies, have been used against the Modi government’s policies, be it its Citizenship Amendment, the Farm Laws, or its record on human rights and secularism.
There is a growing perception that the American Deep State, particularly intelligence agencies and the Justice Department, are playing a dirty role in promoting the Khalistani activists in the U.S. and Canada and selectively targeting Indian business leaders having a global presence like Gautam Adani to the extent of investigating his so-called misdeeds in India (not in the U.S.) and indicting him in blatant violation of Indian sovereignty. The point that is made is that these anti-India activities are being pursued without the approval and support of the White House.
Will President Trump be able to chain the Deep State after assuming office for the second time on January 20, 2025? As John J. DiIulio, Jr., Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society argues, his task may not be that easy and simple, as the number of people who get paid from the U.S. Treasury but work for private businesses and nonprofits is now more than three times as large as the entire on-payroll federal civilian workforce.
He has a point when he says that “while there is a Deep State, it does not emanate from within the federal bureaucracy. Rather, the real Deep State is the contractor state.
It consists of four intersecting networks: financially well-heeled and politically well-protected mega-corporations led by big defense contractors; state and local government leaders in both parties that bark and bloviate about federal bureaucracy and overspending but fight for their constituents’ shares of federal dollars; taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit organizations with multi-million-dollar annual budgets; and, last and most lethal to reform efforts, career congresspersons in both parties”.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
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