Is ‘deep state’ undermining Trump?
Why leaks designed to hurt elected government spell danger for citizens in U.S.
WASHINGTON— A wave of leaks from government officials has hobbled the Trump administration, leading some to draw comparisons to countries such as 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.
Although leaks can be a normal and healthy check on a president’s power, what’s happening now extends much further. The United States, those experts warn, risks developing an entrenched culture of conflict between the president and his own bureaucracy.
Issandr El Amrani, an analyst who has written on Egypt’s deep state, said he was concerned by the parallels, although the United States had not reached authoritarian extremes.
“As an American citizen I find it really quite disheartening to see all these similarities to Egypt,” El Amrani said.
What makes a deep state?
Although the deep state is sometimes discussed as a shadowy conspiracy, it helps to think of it instead as a political conflict between a nation’s leader and its governing institutions.
That can be deeply destabilizing, leading both sides to wield state powers, such as the security services or courts, against one another, corrupting those institutions in the process.
In Egypt, for instance, the military and security services actively undermined Mohammed Morsi, the country’s democratically elected Islamist president, contributing to the upheaval that culminated in his ouster in a 2013 coup.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has battled the deep state by consolidating power for himself and, after a failed coup attempt last year, conducting vast purges.
Although U.S. democracy is resilient enough to resist such clashes, early hints of a conflict can be tricky to spot because some push and pull between a president and his or her agencies is normal.
Culture of conflict
Officials, deprived of the usual levers for shaping policies that are supposed to be their purview, are left with little option other than leaking.
They have leaked draft executive orders, inciting backlashes that led the orders to be shelved. And they have revealed administration efforts to circumvent usual policy-making channels, undermining Trump’s ability to enact his agenda.
Trump’s moves to consolidate power under his own authority also has them struggling to keep what they see as their crucial role in governance.
Tit for tat
Trump’s tendency to treat each leak as an attack rather than an attempt to influence policy has created an atmosphere in Washington of open institutional conflict.
Trump, in rejecting intelligence assessments that Russia intervened in the election to help him win, has risked implying that he will only accept intelligence bent to his political interests, while he plans to review the intelligence agencies.
“It looks, sounds and feels like a political witch hunt,” Amy Zegart, the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, said. “It’s like pouring gasoline on the fire.”
Crossing the line
Officials are stuck in a difficult position: even if each individual leak is justifiable, as insubordination becomes more sustained and overt it inches deeper into the grey zone of counter-democratic activities.
The distinction between deep-state meddling and acceptable protest is difficult to draw in the U.S., Zegart said, because this degree of opposition is so unusual.
Bad for everyone
A lesson of deep states: even minor decisions become the subject of political infighting, making basic governance difficult.
“We saw in Egypt in 2013 that the result is complete decision-making paralysis,” El Amrani said.
That is one of the milder outcomes. But when institutions with vast power see themselves as locked in a zerosum struggle for survival, it is often basic civil liberties and democratic rights that end up in the crossfire.