He will destroy the “deep state” or the “deep state” will destroy America, says Donald Trump. What sounds good and dramatic, especially in an election campaign, is doubted by political scientists like Francis Fukuyama. The “deep state” does not exist. Not yet.
A secret service agent in front of the White House in Washington.
Anna Moneymaker / Getty
“A trained CIA assassin just tried to kill Trump in Florida.” The “Deep State” was undoubtedly behind it, wrote Alex Jones after the foiled attack a few days ago in West Palm Beach. After the first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July, Jones also posted on X: “The ‘Deep State’ tried to kill Trump.”
Alex Jones may be a notorious conspiracy theorist and criminal. He was sentenced to pay $1.5 billion in damages for spreading his infamous lie that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012 was pure theater. Nevertheless, the man with the radio show and website of the same name, “Infowars,” is followed by millions of Americans. And he is one of Trump’s most important supporters.
Breaking: Trumps attempted assassin in Florida is a US fighter who served in the Ukrainian foreign Legion. The CIA runs and controls the US foreign Legion in Ukraine. Translation: a trained CIA killer just tried to kill Trump in Florida. This is all about preparing the ground for… https://t.co/vFX1gsiwaI
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) September 15, 2024
Trump appeared on Jones’s “Infowars” show as a presidential candidate in 2016 and made the show famous. Alex Jones owes his rise to power to him, and Trump in turn became a hero to conspiracy theorists. The closeness between the two continues to this day. After the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, Jones wrote to his more than two million followers on X that he had “told Trump several times that he needs to say openly what everyone else already knows. It’s obvious that they tried to kill him.”
🚨BREAKING: Trump Blames Biden Harris Administration For Assassination Attempt pic.twitter.com/lsmUPqKqRA
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) August 29, 2024
Conspiracy theories have become important pillars of the Republican Party under Trump’s aegis. Trump is the main character, the great victim of a dark conspiracy. Since his defeat, the former president has claimed that he was the true winner of the 2020 election, and he is being inundated with lawsuits – innocent of course – and now there are even attempts to kill him.
“Deep State” – Jones understands this to mean hidden forces in the government apparatus that oppose America’s interests and now want to bring down Donald Trump. Trump likes to see himself as a fighter against dark forces, as a chosen patriot, even as the one sent by God, whom this “Deep State” wants to stop with all its might.
Americans distrust the state
Over 40 percent of Americans believe according to surveys in the existence of a “deep state”. Among Republican voters, the proportion is as high as 60 percent.
Such figures come as no surprise to Francis Fukuyama, the renowned political scientist at Stanford University. One of the most important aspects of American political culture is the distrust of the state, which has far too much influence on the lives of every single US citizen. “Americans see themselves in a system with a constitution that protects them from the state. In Europe, on the other hand, most citizens believe that this state protects them from external enemies, from corporations, from market forces and so on.”
For someone like Donald Trump, says Fukuyama, it is easy to criticize the existing federal bureaucracy as a “deep state” with all its negative connotations.
It was therefore not surprising that Trump made the fight against the “deep state” a theme in the election campaign. “Here is my plan to dismantle the deep state,” he recently explained in a video, presenting a ten-point plan that primarily involves cleaning up the administration. He wants to get rid of “corrupt actors” in the national security and intelligence apparatus, he says, and close departments and federal agencies that he doesn’t like, including the Environmental Protection Agency.
But what is really behind this “deep state”? Is there really a danger in the USA from coordinated forces in the government apparatus that want to harm Donald Trump?
The term was introduced into historical scholarship in the early 1990s to describe countries such as Turkey and Egypt, which already had a security apparatus and a military in the 1920s that pulled the political strings in the background. Without them, nothing could be achieved in the state.
Although the term “deep state” is now widely used, political scientist Fukuyama does not believe that one can speak of such a state within a state in the USA. Of course, there are questionable practices by the domestic secret service FBI, secret activities by the CIA abroad, including numerous successful coups and assassinations of governments and presidents who opposed the interests of the USA.
The massive surveillance of American citizens by the foreign intelligence service NSA was also an unacceptable outgrowth of the state apparatus. Nevertheless, “when these abuses were uncovered at the time, hearings were held and laws were changed so that something like this could not happen again. Officials who had abused their power were charged. And that is exactly what constitutes a properly constituted, constitutional government.”
The American system has a lot of control processes, “checks and balances,” says Fukuyama, including the congressional investigative committees. As early as the mid-1970s, during the Watergate investigations, the activities of the secret services were more closely monitored and the president’s scope for action was curtailed. In the decades that followed, US presidents, attorneys general and the heads of the secret services accepted this legal framework, these restrictions on the possibilities of the FBI, CIA and NSA.
The new power of a president
And yet, as early as the 1980s, there were forces that saw things very differently. For example, Bill Barr, who later became Attorney General under George HW Bush and was given the position again under Donald Trump. For Bill Barr, the Watergate reforms went too far. In his opinion, special investigators are too powerful. He believes that a president should be able to do what he wants. If the voters don’t like that, they can vote him out – after four years.
This attitude of many conservatives has now been confirmed by the recent decision of the Supreme Court in the USA, which granted Donald Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. The Supreme Court’s decision states that no conversations of the president may be used as part of a criminal investigation.
The author and Pulitzer Prize winner David S. Rohdewho has written two books on the “Deep State,” said in an interview with the “NZZ am Sonntag”: “From now on, the president could call the attorney general and talk to him about breaking into the Democrats’ national headquarters, as in the Watergate case. And this conversation is no longer available to investigators. So it is a far-reaching judgment and means a big change for the country.”
Legal freedom for a president who can do whatever he wants without running the risk of being prosecuted. According to the two analysts, Fukuyama and Rohde, Trump will now try to fight a supposed “deep state” with a real “deep state”.
David Rohde ended his 2021 book “In Deep” about Trump and his time in the White House with the following ominous lines: “He tried to create a government made up only of loyalists, without transparency, democratic norms or public processes – a ‘deep state’ of his own.”
He didn’t succeed back then. Trump didn’t even manage to do what he repeatedly chanted during his 2016 election campaign: “to drain the swamp,” to drain the bureaucracy in Washington. In fact, it continued to grow during his term in office. Trump also filled many positions with lobbyists.
But the former president is also taking advantage of Americans’ skepticism about the distant center of power in Washington in this election campaign. He describes his MAGA movement as resistance against this “deep state” that interferes too much in the affairs of citizens. He therefore warns in an almost apocalyptic way: “Either the ‘deep state’ destroys America, or we destroy the ‘deep state’.”
In 2016, this strategy worked.
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