A partisan assault

Democrats’ ‘deep state’ is real. The ‘alt right’ is fake

Here’s a fact for the media to chew on: The “deep state” is here. As outlined in Foreign Policy, the concept of the deep state is nothing new. But the Trump presidency may serve as the galvanizing force that links some of the formal established Democratic opposition forces, including MoveOn.org, government unions and Black Lives Matter, with the informal deep-state cadre of disgruntled liberal bureaucrats, the hostile mainstream media and the usual suspects on the left. It’s a troubling phenomenon, with anti-Trump organizations and Democratic-aligned civil servants conspiring to actively work against the incumbent government.

There might not be any central command guiding the deep-state actions, but it’s not hard for card-carrying Democratic Party members, the mainstream media, liberal think tanks, government unions and other anti-Republican liberals of various stripes to naturally form into a collective grain that runs contrary to whatever elected Republicans in Congress and now in the White House want to accomplish. It’s just like when a school of fish move in unison, choreographed not because of some planned effort, but because it is in their nature. The bias against President Donald Trump has become frantic, and the Democrats and their allies in the media overreach almost daily in attacking the president and Republicans in general.

“Deep state” is a sexy new label being used in Washington to describe embedded anonymous bureaucratic bias against Mr. Trump and Republican rule.

Specifically, the deep state is leaking documents, making confidential conversations public, pushing rogue social media accounts and otherwise acting in an underhanded manner to discredit the president, his Cabinet and the policy objectives of the Republicans. The use of encrypted chat programs to communicate and the continued leaks to various media outlets are just the start. Their tactics are beginning to spread to other Democratic sympathizers and form a continuous partisan assault both from within the government and from outside groups.

At some level, this shouldn’t be surprising. The 2016 election was so vitriolic, and the Democrats’ belief that Hillary Clinton would be the next president was so strong, that their defeat carried extra weight. Members of the Democratic coalition are already firmly entrenched within the federal government and among the surrounding intelligentsia. They have the ability to feed their supporters information, giving the activists more reason to protest, which in turn conflates the liberal hype around the actions of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress. It’s a vicious cycle.

At the same time all this is going on, the left has taken to painting Republicans with a broad brush as the “alt-right.” Well, as best I can tell, the alt-right is just a new way for the left to call Republicans racists and Nazis without actually having to say those terms out loud. To me, the deep state is real. The alt-right is not.

The deep state may not be fully developed quite yet, but as the Democrats regain their footing and begin to coordinate and try to further and further damage the president’s credibility, it will have a detrimental impact on how our democracy functions and will further erode the public’s trust in government.

Ed Rogers, a political consultant, wrote this for The Washington Post.