The Deep State Theory Cuts Both Ways
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Four weeks into the Trump Administration, the intense polarization of the election has migrated to the federal bureaucracy. There have been scenes of visible dissent from federal workers alarmed by the new President’s intentions: E.P.A. officials lobbying their senators to oppose Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to run the agency; a thousand State Department diplomats signing a formal document objecting to Trump’s broad travel ban. More opaquely, current and former government officials have leaked details of intercepted communications between Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., forcing Trump to drop Flynn, his longtime ally and national-security adviser, just twenty-four days after the Inauguration. This pattern of dissent, and its early successes, has brought about a vogue for the theory of the deep state, usually used in analyzing authoritarian regimes, in which networks of people within the bureaucracy are said to be able to exercise a hidden will of their own. In pop culture, the clearest expression of the deep state is Dar Adal, the ruthless spymaster played by F. Murray Abraham on “Homeland,” a character so unfamiliar to American audiences that the producers gave him a Middle Eastern-sounding name.
The federal government employs two million people; its sympathies move in more than one direction. While many federal employees may want to oppose the White House, others (especially border-patrol and immigration agents, whose support Trump often cited on the campaign trail) have already been taking some alarming liberties to advance the President’s politics. During the weekend when Trump’s travel ban was in effect, Customs and Border Patrol agents at airports across the country denied families and lawyers, and even members of Congress, access to people who were being detained under the order’s authority. They also exercised broad discretion in whom they detained. At the Vermont border, a Canadian citizen was turned around from a shopping trip after an agent confiscated her phone and found Arabic prayers on it. She was among many would-be border crossers who have been asked about their personal feelings toward Donald Trump.
These incidents have continued even after federal judges blocked the government from implementing the travel ban. In Atlanta, an immigration lawyer reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were going door to door in Hispanic neighborhoods, asking for documentation. In Los Angeles, agents were said to be at immigration court, asking the relatives of petitioners about their own status. In Alexandria, Virginia, agents showed up early Wednesday morning at a church’s hypothermia shelter, lined Hispanic men up against a brick wall, and scanned their fingerprints to find out if they had criminal backgrounds. In El Paso, agents detained a domestic-violence victim in a courthouse, where she had gone to seek a protective order. In Seattle, attorneys for a legal immigrant who’d been detained have claimed that I.C.E. agents used white-out to alter a form on which their client had denied being a gang member, to make it seem that he’d instead confessed to membership. If Trump’s opponents in the bureaucracy have been weaponized, then so have his supporters.
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