He seems to suggest, though he never outright claims, that the reforms muzzled what at least used to be a deep state. Rohde appraises subsequent presidents, after Richard Nixon, by how faithfully they held to these Church-era reforms. Its hearings and subsequent report unveiled a long and gruesome string of assassinations, wiretaps and assorted skulduggery - after which Congress passed laws restricting these practices. and the F.B.I., beginning, in 1975, with the committee chaired by Senator Frank Church. Much of the book charts the history of congressional oversight over the C.I.A. So, is there a deep state, though one with a more neutral name and less cabalistic motives than the conspiracy theorists portray? and senior intelligence officials proved to be the most formidable resistance” the administration would encounter from within the federal government, initiating a “struggle for power that would define Trump’s presidency.” Notice: Rohde isn’t paraphrasing Trump’s point of view here he’s describing what he sees as an objective situation. But Rohde also writes that, especially during Robert Mueller’s probe of his ties with Russia, Trump came to believe that “a cabal of Democrats and ‘deep state’ members were trying to force him from power.”Īt times, Rohde suggests there is a deep state, though he calls it “institutional government,” a term he chose “for its relative neutrality.” Its denizens don’t form “an organized plot,” but they do exhibit “bias, caution and turf consciousness.” And, he writes, “the Justice Department and the F.B.I. He notes in passing (more detail would have been welcome) that Bannon fed the idea to Trump as a way of getting him to “distrust the advice of career government officials who opposed Bannon’s policy goals.” Meanwhile, Trump soon realized its power as a narrative device, invoking it last year at least 23 times. He was retweeting a post by Sean Hannity, his favorite Fox News host, who had hawked a segment on his show that night on the ties between the “deep state” and the news media.ĭid Trump and Bannon - does anyone in power - believe this conspiracy theory? Rohde goes back and forth on the question. Trump himself first invoked the term, Rohde reports, on June 16, 2017. Virgil broadened the term to encompass “the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats and plutocrats that likes things just the way they are” - including the “highly politicized” intelligence agencies and the “liberal apparatchiks” installed by President Barack Obama - who were now all engaged in “a great power struggle” with the newly elected president. Steve Bannon had been the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and became Trump’s chief strategist. Donald Trump,” a 4,000-word article in Breitbart News. The former Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott first applied it to American military and intelligence elites, in a book entitled “The Road to 9/11.” The alt-right adopted it in December 2016, after an anonymous author, using the pen name Virgil, wrote “The Deep State vs. He begins with a brisk history of the phrase, which is rooted in Egypt and Turkey, where the military ran everything and nipped the slightest buds of democratic reform. Early on in his book “In Deep,” David Rohde, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, asks “whether a ‘deep state’ exists in America.” At the start of his final chapter, he concludes, “There is no ‘deep state.’” But in the intervening pages, he raises more questions than he answers. The specter of a “deep state” has served as a useful scapegoat in Donald Trump’s presidency, the alleged locus of resistance to his reign. IN DEEP The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America’s “Deep State” By David Rohde
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