Donald J. Trump and the Deep State, Part 1

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When the uninitiated think of the “Deep State,” they tend to imagine a group of men getting together in a room, smoking cigars and plotting world domination. But the Deep State is not one coordinated network of people controlling the government from the shadows.

Instead, it refers to individuals and groups that have the resources to shape the direction of the world to their benefit and don’t hesitate to make use of them. At times, the interests of different factions of the Deep State collide. That often happens when the direction of the world is rapidly changing, as is the case now after the election of Donald Trump.

Nobody knows this better than Peter Dale Scott, the foremost expert on the US Deep State. Below, you will find a new introduction to the paperback version of The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy, Updated Edition (copyright 2017), (with permission of the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved). This is Part 1 of a two-part series.

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Berkeley, poet, and 2002 recipient of the Lannan Poetry Award.

His political books include Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan  (2010), The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (2014) and  Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House (2015). A complete bibliography can be found on his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net.

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On February 3, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported President Trump’s plans to pave the way for a broad rollback of the recent financial reforms of Wall Street.[1] Although no surprise, the news was in ironic contrast to the rhetoric of his campaign, when he spent months denouncing both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for their links to Goldman Sachs, even when his campaign’s Financial Chairman was a former Goldman Sachs banker, Steve Mnuchin (now Trump’s Treasury Secretary).

Trump was hardly the first candidate to run against the banking establishment while surreptitiously taking money from big bankers. So did Hitler in 1933; so did Obama in 2008. (In Obama’s final campaign speech of 2008, he attacked “the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street.”[2] But it was revealed later that Wall Street bankers and financial insiders, chiefly from Goldman Sachs, had raised $42.2 million for Obama’s 2008 campaign, more than for any previous candidate in history.)[3]

However, Trump’s connections to big money, both new (often self-made) and old (mostly institutional) were not only more blatant than usual; some were also possibly more sinister. Trump’s campaign was probably the first ever to be (as we shall see) scrutinized by the FBI for “financial connections with Russian financial figures,” and even with a Russian bank whose Washington influence was attacked years ago, after it was allegedly investigated in Russia for possible mafia connections.[4]

Trump’s appointment of the third former Goldman executive to lead Treasury in the last four administrations, after Robert Rubin (under Clinton) and Hank Paulson (under Bush), has reinforced recent speculation about Trump’s relationship to what is increasingly referred to as the deep state. That is the topic of this essay.

But we must first see what is really meant by ‘the deep state”.

What Is Meant by the Deep State?

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Since 2007, when I first referred to a “deep state” in America, the term has become a meme, and even the topic of a cautious essay in The New York Times.[5] Recently it has been enhanced by a new meme, “the ’deep state’ versus Trump,” a theme that promoted Donald Trump as a genuine outsider, and entered the electoral campaign as early as August 2016.[6]

Trump reinforced this notion when he expressed opposition to America’s international defense alliances and trade deals that both traditional parties had long supported, as well as by his promise to “drain the Washington swamp.” It was encouraged again post-election by Trump’s longtime political advisor Roger Stone, formerly of the Washington lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, once a major feature of that swamp.[7]

But those who saw the election as a contest between outsider Trump and a “deep state” tended to give two different meanings to this new term. On the one hand were those who saw the deep state as “a conglomerate of insiders” incorporating all those, outside and inside the traditional state, who “run the country no matter who is in the White House…and without the consent of voters.”[8] On the other were those who, like Chris Hedges, limited the “deep state” to those perverting constitutional American politics from the margin of the Washington Beltway — “the security and surveillance apparatus, the war machine.”[9]

But both of these simplistic definitions, suitable for campaign rhetoric, omit the commanding role played by big money — what used to be referred to as Wall Street, but now includes an increasingly powerful number of maverick non-financial billionaires like the Koch brothers. All serious studies of the deep state, including Mike Lofgren’s The Deep State and Philip Giraldi’s Deep State America as well as this book, acknowledge the importance of big money.[10]

It is important to recognize moreover, that the current division between “red” and “blue” America is overshadowed by a corresponding division at the level of big money, one that contributed greatly to the ugliness of the 2016 campaign. In The American Deep State (p. 30), I mention, albeit very briefly, the opposition of right-wing oilmen and the John Birch Society “to the relative internationalism of Wall Street.” 

References

[1] Michael C. Bender and Damian Paletta, “Donald Trump Plans to Undo Dodd-Frank Law, Fiduciary Rule,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-moves-to-undo-dodd-frank-law-1486101602. Cf.

[2] R.G. Ratcliffe, “Obama’s final campaign speech of 2008,” Houston Chronicle, October 27, 2008, http://blog.chron.com/texaspolitics/2008/10/obamas-final-campaign-speech-of-2008/.

[3] Eugene Kiely, “Obama, “White House ‘Full of Wall Street Executives’?” Factcheck.org, March 1, 2012.

[4] Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” New York Times, October 31, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html (FBI); “Cheney Firm Won $3.8bn Contracts from Government,” Observer, July 21, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/21/globalisation.georgebush. See below.

[5] Anand Giridharadas, “Examining Who Runs the United States,” New York Times, September 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/us/examining-who-runs-the-united-states.html?_r=0. I believe the first to apply the Turkish term “deep state” (derin deret) to U.S. politics was the Swedish writer Ola Tunander (Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], x, 244, 270, 384).

[6] Michael Covel, “The Deep State V. Trump,” Daily Reckoning, August 25, 2016, https://dailyreckoning.com/deep-state-v-trump/: “Donald Trump has the establishment scared out of their establishment minds.”

[7] Ryan Lizza, “Roger Stone Versus the ‘Deep State’”, New Yorker, January 20, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/roger-stone-versus-the-deep-state. Stone has been described as a “political provocateur” who “helped choreograph the… riot which shut down the Bush v. Gore recount in Miami-Dade County” (Jeffrey Toobin, “Bad Old Days,” New Yorker, May 2. 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-political-provocateur-roger-stone-talks-trump. During the campaign, Stone and fellow provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart together promoted the divisive notion  “how the general election will almost certainly be hijacked by acts of voter fraud” — by Democrats (Ken Meyer, :Roger Stone Says There Will Be a ‘Bloodbath’ if Election is Stolen From Trump,” Medaite.com, August 2, 2016, http://www.mediaite.com/online/roger-stone-says-there-will-be-a-bloodbath-if-election-is-stolen-from-trump/. Their politics of division is shared by Steve Bannon, who “is so dominated by a desire to wage war and vanquish his enemy that he cannot think clearly about damage wrought by his destructive, polarizing approach” (Conor Friedersdorf, “The Radical Anti-Conservatism of Stephen Bannon,” Atlantic, August 25, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/the-radical-anti-conservatism-of-stephen-bannon/496796/).

[8] Covel, “The Deep State V. Trump.” Cf. John W. Whitehead, “The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay,” Rutherford Institute, November 10, 2015, https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_deep_state_the_unelected_shadow_government_is_here_to_stay: “The Deep State…is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.”

[9] “Chris Hedges on How the ‘Deep State’ Will Influence the Trump Presidency,” Truthdig, Jan 17, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_the_deep_state_will_influence_the_trump_presidency_20170117. In this camp are Glenn Greenwald, who equates the “deep state” with “the intelligence community,” and Eric Margolis, who equates it with “the massed national security apparatus” (Glenn Greenwald, “The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer,” The Intercept, January 11, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/11/the-deep-state-goes-to-war-with-president-elect-using-unverified-claims-as-dems-cheer/; Eric Margolis, “Trump Versus the Deep State,” The Unz Review, January 13, 2017, http://www.unz.com/emargolis/trump-versus-the-deep-state/.

[10] Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); Philip Giraldi, “Deep State America,” The American Conservative, July 30, 2015, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/deep-state-america/.

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