Trump vs. ‘Deep State?’ That’s How Light Gets in

March 6, 2017
Submitted by: Love Knowledge
Category: Politics

The post Trump vs. ‘Deep State?’ That’s How Light Gets in appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

The resignation of President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on February 13 was accompanied by a flood of speculation about a war between the Trump administration and the “Deep State,” meaning the intelligence agencies. In the midst of the furor, three remarkably similarly slanted stories about it appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, all under headlines about an American “Deep State,” and all with references to perceived similarities to Turkey and Egypt.

According to a front-page story in The New York Times:

A wave of leaks from government officials has hobbled the Trump administration, leading some to draw comparisons to countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where shadowy networks within government bureaucracies, often referred to as “deep states,” undermine and coerce elected governments.

So is the United States seeing the rise of its own deep state?

Not quite, experts say, but the echoes are real — and disturbing.

Though leaks can be a normal and healthy check on a president’s power, what’s happening now extends much further…[1]

Edward Curtin sounded a more alarming note, accusing the Deep State of a “Reality-TV Coup d’etat in Prime Time”:

The day after his surprise election, the interlocking circles of power that run the show in sun and shadows — what C. Wright Mills long ago termed the Power Elite — met to overthrow him, or at least to render him more controllable. These efforts, run out of interconnected power centers, including the liberal corporate legal boardrooms that were the backers of Obama and Hillary Clinton, had no compunction in planning the overthrow of a legally elected president.[2]

But there is no meeting-place that could ever accommodate the amorphous “circles” of US power (more conflicted than interlocked), and no concerted policy that could ever issue from such an imaginary meeting.

References

1. Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, “As Leaks Multiply, Fears of a ‘Deep State’ in America Increase,” New York Times, February 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/world/americas/deep-state-leaks-trump.html. Cf. Doyle McManus, “Is the ‘deep state’ out to get Trump? We’re not there yet,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcmanus-deep-state-20170219-story.html; Ishaan Tharoor, “Is Trump fighting the ‘deep state’ or creating his own?” Washington Post, February 1, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/01/is-trump-fighting-the-deep-state-or-creating-his-own/?utm_term=.0b698a2c4ba3.

2. Edward Curtin, “The Deep State Goes Shallow: A Reality-TV Coup d’etat in Prime Time,” OpEdNews 2/24/2017 at 14:03:50