Trump is his own deep state — sabotaging the sly policies he had ordered in writing
David Frum’s new book, “Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy,” analyzes how the U.S. president has undermined the country’s democratic traditions, and how they can be salvaged. This section looks at the “deep state” cited by Donald Trump and his allies as a supposed obstacle.
It seems ungrateful for Trump to hate the FBI so much, considering all the FBI did to make him president. Through the 2016 campaign, the FBI’s New York office leaked antiClinton tidbits to former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. FBI director James Comey’s formal notice to Congress on Oct. 28, 2016, that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails “in connection with an unrelated case” apparently validated Trump’s campaign claims that some huge scandal was secreted within the Clinton email server. Hillary Clinton credited that notice as a crucial factor in her narrow defeat 11 days later. Trump assumed law enforcement agencies and the military would support his reactionary, chauvinist politics. It must have jolted him to discover post-election that his campaign, too, had come under investigation on counterintelligence grounds.
Pre-presidential Trump had a long, complex, and mysterious relationship with the FBI and law enforcement agencies. Trump acted as an FBI informant in the 1980s, as the Washington Post reported during the campaign. His usefulness to other FBI investigations may explain how a New York real estate figure who shared a lawyer with John Gotti and Tony Salerno escaped investigation himself.
From his earlier experiences with the FBI, Trump seems to have absorbed a transactional approach to law enforcement — the approach he deployed on James Comey at their famous dinner in January 2017. You do me a favour, I do you a favour. Only this time, the exchange of favours did not happen.
Trump fired Comey. Jared Kushner reportedly assured Trump that Democrats would welcome the firing, ending Trump’s Russia exposure once and for
all. As so often happened, Kushner’s advice proved less than astute. Trump for the first time in his long life of corrupt dealings found himself face to face with a criminal investigation he could not transact his way out of.
Trump would gradually attach the term deep state to every element of government that resisted his whim of the moment.
According to Bob Woodward’s reporting, President Trump ordered Secretary James Mattis to plan an operation intended to assassinate Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — an unlawful order, since assassination is prohibited by U.S. law. Mattis reportedly listened politely, then told his staff, “We’re not going to do any of that.”
When Central American asylum seekers sought to rush the U.S. border, Trump reportedly demanded they shoot the migrants in the legs. That unlawful command was likewise ignored. Trump sought to blackmail Ukraine into fabricating dirt against likely presidential rival Joe Biden. His National Security staff mutinied and thwarted him.
But it all started with Comey and the FBI, and that first encounter with cops he could not buy.
The phrase deep state originates in the byzantine world of Turkish politics. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, bequeathed a military and security establishment committed to secularism. For decades, Turkish politicians who wished to push their country in more Islamic directions would be balked — or even sometimes overthrown — by Kemal’s heirs in the armed forces.
Western political scientists adopted the term deep state to describe the power of the Kemalists after Kemal. Over time, the term was extended to describe other Third World societies with overmighty military and intelligence establishments, especially Pakistan. Steve Bannon absorbed the term somewhere and introduced it to Trump. Trump then diffused it through the conservative media, and especially to his pal Sean Hannity at Fox News.
In Turkey and Pakistan, the term deep state described how those with secret power used clandestine means to thwart the regular government. Bannon, Trump and Hannity used the term to mean the direct opposite: how the regular government used lawful means to thwart Trump officials who abused their power.
Consider the actions at issue in Trump’s impeachment trial. Congress voted military aid to Ukraine. Trump could have vetoed that aid. He could have withdrawn U.S. recognition of the Zelenskiy government as the lawful government of Ukraine. He could have nominated Gordon Sondland as ambassador to Ukraine and instructed him to support the business schemes of Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas as in the national interest of the United States.
He could even (probably) have directed his attorney general to open a criminal investigation of the Burisma gas company and any U.S. person involved with it, including Hunter Biden.
These actions might have exacted a political cost, but they were all within Trump’s legal authority. Trump did not do any of them. Instead, Trump used all the immense legal powers of his office to advance one policy in Ukraine. He then deployed secret nonlegal methods to advance a contradictory policy.
Or consider Trump’s Russia policy. Trump could have pivoted U.S. foreign policy to Russia. He could have appointed a secretary of state, secretary of defence, and national security advisers who shared his pro-Putin views.
He could have waived U.S. sanctions on Russia and accredited a U.S. ambassador to Bashar al- Assad. He could have ended U.S. naval operations in the Black Sea and withdrawn U.S. forces from Poland and Romania. He could have invited Vladimir Putin to Camp David for talks, given a speech to Congress or to the country arguing for an alliance with Russia.
Again, Trump did not do any of that. He signed all the instruments and findings to continue pre-existing Russia policy. Then he sabotaged his own policy in private, working around his own administration — treating even his note-takers and translators as spies and enemies.
Presidents hold enormous power over foreign policy. Trump did not use those powers. Trump was conspicuously uninterested in all those regular operations of the executive branch. He talked on unsecured phones, relied on Fox News rather than intelligence briefings, and disparaged his own officials as “Never Trumpers.”
Those disparaged officials did not defy Trump’s policy. They complied with Trump’s policy, as that policy was codified in formal orders. What they defied was the policy that Trump whispered to his cronies, the policy that Trump and his spokespeople indignantly denied they were following.
Trump disliked all formally constituted government. As Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified, Trump talks in code. He wanted underlings who would spare him the distasteful necessity to articulate his intentions out loud. He expected them to anticipate his wishes, while preserving his deniability.
Government works by paper. Presidents issue orders by signed decision memo, creating a record of clarity and accountability. Trump hated paperwork. He erupted in rage when his first White House counsel, Don McGahn, took notes at meetings.
He used insecure devices, risking surveillance by enemy spy services, rather than use methods where his own government could record him.
Trump was not a victim of the deep state: a rogue government-within-agovernment that sabotaged lawful authority. It was Trump who was his own deep state, sabotaging on the sly the policy that he himself had ordered in writing.
Trump instinctively mistrusted all the law enforcement functions of government. He assumed, however, that the military would salute and obey any order, no matter how illegal. It must have stunned him to discover that the armed forces declined to act as his toy army.
Senior military leadership resisted
Trump’s wish for a big parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. Donald Trump had returned enthralled from a 2017 Bastille Day visit to Paris. He had stood in a place of honour in a reviewing stand as troops, weapons and military bands passed before him. He was seen to mouth “So good” to his wife, Melania. Trump returned home from Paris determined that he must have a parade in Washington for Veterans’ Day 2017.
The Pentagon found reasons why it could not be done. Heavy military vehicles would chew up the streets of Washington, D.C. The symbolism was inappropriate while U.S. troops were still engaged in combat against ISIS and the Taliban.
Anyway, it would all cost too much. Defence planners estimated that the parade Trump wanted would cost the federal government and the District of Columbia a total of $92 million, rather than the White House figure of $12 million — an estimate the Pentagon leaked to journalists, just in case.
The more fundamental cause of reluctance was not financial or symbolic, but human: the military has a lot of real work to do, and it did not want to impose useless extra tasks on its personnel for no better reason than to amuse an infantile president.
Yet Trump kept ordering the parade. A compromise was reached in time for the Fourth of July 2019. Trump got a flypast by each of the armed services, including the Coast Guard, but no marching troops, no rolling vehicles.
We were promised an armoured division motoring along Constitution Avenue. We got Trump standing behind two parked tanks.
From the book “Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy” by David Frum. Copyright © 2020 by HarperCollins Publishers. To be published Saturday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.