Trump, Nixon and the Deep State
The ongoing controversy regarding U.S. President Donald Trump and his relationship with Russia is the gift that keeps on giving – for the “deep state.” This has hobbled his presidency from the word go, and he may yet face a “Nixonian” removal from office at some point in his term. The FBI is investigating whether any of Trump’s advisers colluded with Russia in its efforts to disrupt the 2016 election. Trump’s opponents would love to impeach him or, failing that, use the 25th amendment to the U.S. constitution to replace him with Vice President Mike Pence.
My guess is that the Watergate scandal itself will be increasingly seen as the removal from power in 1973-1974 of an increasingly inebriated, irrational, and paranoid president, Richard Nixon by a “deep state,” and not just because of the break-in at the Democratic Party’s National Committee offices at that office complex.
Rather, it was because those in the commanding heights of the American political system, including the powers-that-be in the Republican Party itself, saw him as an existential danger to the republic, if not the world. Members of Nixon’s own party feared for his stability, as John Farrell’s new book, Richard Nixon: The Life, makes clear. Volatile, he would fly into rages and threaten to unleash nuclear war.
Nixon had considered using nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War, and also at the time of the conflict between India and Pakistan during the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, when he implicitly threatened India, then a Soviet ally, by ordering a nuclear aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal.
Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and General Alexander Haig, the White House Chief of Staff, spent much of their time restraining him. Haig was essentially seen as the acting president during Nixon’s last few months in office.
While decades of literature on the subject has focused on those two intrepid Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in bringing Nixon down, it was of course “Deep Throat,” the FBI agent Mark Felt, who sought them out and used them in order to send Nixon packing.
Felt, the Bureau’s Associate Director, provided the information that eventually led to the resignation. The intelligence services put an end to Nixon’s presidency, for the good of the country.
This, even though he had been re-elected to a second term in 1972 in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history, winning 49 of the 50 states.
Is history repeating itself? Trump, considered a loose cannon, has been subjected to a flood of “leaks” designed to embarrass, if not derail, his administration.
Trump fired Michael Flynn as national security advisor in February over revelations Flynn misled senior officials over his communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Trump sent out a now-infamous March 4 tweet claiming then-President Barack Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower during the 2016 election. It has been widely mocked. But is it all fantasy or “fake news?” Devin Nunes, the Republican chair of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, was recently provided with reports indicating that Trump or members of his transition team may have been “incidentally” caught up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.
An intelligence official who “unmasked” the names of multiple private citizens affiliated with the Trump team is someone “very senior in the intelligence world,” a source told Fox News on March 31. “Opposition by some in the intelligence agencies who were very connected to the Obama and Clinton teams was strong,” this source added. “After Trump was elected, they decided they were going to ruin his presidency by picking them off one by one.” Comments from former Obama administration official Evelyn Farkas on MSNBC suggested her former colleagues tried to gather material on Trump team contacts with Russia.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer suggested this raises “serious” concerns about whether there was an “organized and widespread effort by the Obama administration to use and leak highly sensitive intelligence information for political purposes.”
As for the term “deep state,” there’s nothing sinister or conspiratorial about it; all it refers to is a multitude of people and organizations, most not in the “official” government. Among them are high-level politicians, academics at elite Ivy League universities, prominent media and newspaper owners, fellows at think tanks, billionaires, and so forth. As Trump is also learning, judges, in particular, guard it.
So yes, Virginia, America does have a “deep state,” hiding in plain sight, if you know where to look.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.