Trump versus the ‘deep state’: Hostile takeover of permanent government
THE apartment building in Washington, DC, in which I reside, a few blocks from the White House and the federal government offices, is home to many Washington types: lawyers and lobbyists, government workers and congressional aides, Pentagon and State Department staffers, and even a few guys who are (I think) spying for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
To say that many of my neighbours were depressed on Nov 6 would be an understatement. But it would be a mistake to assume that they were devastated by the election results because they were proponents of a left-leaning Democratic agenda.
In fact, it is difficult to describe Pentagon and State Department officials advocating military assistance to Ukraine in its war with the Russian aggressor as “lefties”.
Instead, it is more accurate to refer to the antagonism between president-elect Donald Trump and the entire Trump world (on the one side) and the “permanent government” as institutional.
It is a clash between a revolutionary force that aims at more than just disrupting the working of the US government. The Trumpists’ goal is to challenge the managers of the so-called “deep state”, to collapse the entire status quo.
And to be fair to the president-elect, that is exactly what he had vowed to do during the election campaign – to get back at those at the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies whom, he contended, have been after him for the last 10 years or so.
Whether those who would now be placed in charge would be competent and qualified for their jobs is a secondary issue from Trump’s perspective. Their main qualification is that they are ardent Trumpists.
Whether those were the efforts to impeach him in response to, among other things, his egregious conduct leading to the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol; the numerous legal cases against him commenced by the Justice Department; and the criticisms of Trump during his first term by high-ranking military officials who had worked closely with him, it is no surprise that the president-elect wants this time to ensure that his (real or imaginary) enemies will not go after him during his second term in office.
“You tried to destroy Trump, you tried to imprison Trump, you tried to break Trump,” said Steve Bannon, a close political ally of the president-elect. “He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him. And now he has turned on you.”
During his first term in office, Trump surrounded himself with members of the Washington establishment, including Vice-President Mike Pence, who served as guard rails, the so-called “adults in the room”, who at the very least helped ensure that the president would not be allowed to fulfil his more radical “America First” ideas.
That is not going to happen in the second term starting with Vice-President JD Vance, an America First ideologue who is ready to help his boss transform the political universe, by, among other things, deporting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants; imposing punishing tariffs on US trade partners and rivals; consummating the bromance with Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin; and going after what Trump has referred to during his election campaign as the “enemies within”.
And with the Republican Party now in control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, and with a US Supreme Court dominated by conservative justices, Trump is now in a position to realise his plans.
His decision to appoint former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, a fierce critic of the Justice Department, as attorney-general, to head the department that investigated him for sex trafficking, clearly amounted to sticking the middle finger in front of the members of the Washington, DC, community.
Gaetz is unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate to his position, but the other revolutionary types whom the president-elect appointed, shocking Washington in the process, including Pete Hegseth as Pentagon chief and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, would probably get the green light from the Republican majority in the Senate.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host who served in the Army National Guard in Iran and Iraq but has no experience leading any large organisation, has been a long-time critic of the military leadership. He was also a subject of a sexual assault complaint in 2017.
Gabbard, a former Democrat who served in the military, not only has no experience in the intelligence agencies she will oversee, she has often repeated Russia’s positions on Ukraine and Nato, and met in the past Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad, whom she insisted was not an enemy of the US. Like Hegseth, she would ensure that the defence establishment would be loyal to Trump.
And then then there is former presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy who made a name leading an anti-vaccine movement, who will be appointed as secretary of health and human services, and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose claim to fame was admitting to having cold-bloodedly killed her dog, to be tapped as secretary of homeland security.
And the centre of this Trump world would be billionaire Elon Musk, who played a major role in candidate Trump’s election campaign, and later as head of his transition team and in the selection of individuals to Cabinet posts.
Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will spearhead a new Department of Government Efficiency, whose goal would be to streamline the federal government and get rid of thousands of employees (including my neighbours), including the elimination of the Department of Education and shifting its responsibilities to the states.
