Since one of those people, according to the president, is me, I would like to take the opportunity to clear the air and respond with a better-substantiated allegation: Trump is out of his mind. I’ve worked closely with civil servants for many years, whether inside or outside of government. Generally they are good, patriotic Americans who want to serve their country. While some have strong political views like any citizen, the vast majority don’t let it affect their work, and regardless of who is leading the White House, they do their jobs. They don’t conspire to secretly reverse the policies of the administration in power.
Do you think your mail carrier is having secret meetings to destroy Donald Trump? Do you think federal law enforcement agents, whose culture leans conservative, sit around trying to find ways to get Democrats elected? Is the Pentagon’s librarian a mole for Bernie Sanders? The president’s claim of a Deep State sounds preposterous because it is. The person intent on destroying democratic foundations is Donald Trump, not the honorable public servants who go to work every day to make sure our government runs—to get Social Security checks out on time, to protect communities from criminals, to keep food and prescription drugs safe from contamination, to uphold our Constitution.
Don’t believe it? Consider this: The administration can’t even consistently define who exactly is part of the “Deep State,” and it changes depending on the day. Who exactly is part of “the Deep State” in Trump’s world depends on the day. The term is used to dismiss any agency, report, finding, anonymous quote, news story, or other mode of disagreement with the president. Someone in the government differs with President Trump on global warming? That’s the Deep State. A report comes out that says Trump officials have violated ethics laws? That’s someone from the Deep State. Lawyers tell the president he can’t do something? The Deep Staters are at it again!
Sean Hannity once devoted part of his cable news program to what he called “The Mueller Crime Family,” including supposedly nefarious individuals who were part of the Deep-State plot to investigate Donald Trump. One of them was his own deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein has since won praise from President Trump for his public service, even though the president once retweeted a meme showing Rod behind bars for treason. Which means that members of the “Deep State” really are just people whom Trump doesn’t like. Once he likes them, they aren’t in it anymore.
The concept has fueled a paranoid and secretive atmosphere across our administration. The White House constantly shuts out and shuts up the public servants of the executive branch, often with the president’s blessing, because of suspicion they are disloyal. Meetings are often held for “politicals only,” a term used to describe settings where only presidential appointees are welcomed. Sometimes such meetings are held inside the secure White House Situation Room when they have nothing to do with classified information because aides don’t want to risk the possibility that a non-political employee might overhear the development of a controversial policy.
The president is alert to this as well, as he is wary when he sees faces he doesn’t recognize. If ever experts from within the administration’s bureaucracy are brought into sensitive White House discussions, they must be the “trusted” ones. Skepticism about career staff is so intense that sometimes Trump aides deliberately disclose false information in meetings to see if it ends up in the press so they can root out suspected traitors. (The people who do this are the ones you’d expect, and I’ve seen them hypocritically leak to the press to promote themselves, despite running their own anti-leak operations.) What this means is that Trump is limiting information he hears from within his own government to more inexperienced political types who tend to agree with him in the first place and who he perceives are personally loyal.
The worst part is that America’s public servants, whose jobs we are paying for with our tax dollars, are not trusted to do their jobs. We have a government filled with experts on every topic imaginable, from award-winning medical professionals to world-class economists. They’re not useful if they’re ignored, yet the White House has given implicit sanction to departments and agencies to relocate or otherwise dismiss these voices when they cause problems for the administration’s agenda. At a bare minimum, the work of such government employees is frequently left on the cutting room floor.
A common silencing tactic is to tell an office it’s “under policy review.” That means politicals are trying to decide if the office will be elevated, moved, disbanded, or otherwise reorganized. With their futures hanging in the balance, those employees try not to cause problems while they are stuck in a holding pattern. As a result, many having been standing down on their work for the entirety of the administration, such as scientists focused on climate change or health experts wary of environmental deregulation. If some Trump politicals are hoping these functions will wither in the meantime or people will leave in frustration, they are getting their wish. We are losing talented professionals every single day because of the president.
The result is that our sprawling government is often run by a skeleton crew of partisans. Important issues get neglected with regularity. In fact, a good chunk of the crises we deal with at the highest levels of government emerge, in part, because no one has an eye on the ball. Some of the stupidest actions you’ve seen our administration take were the result of a plan hatched by a group so tiny that it couldn’t see the mountain of secondary consequences right in front of them. Good advice is getting ignored because it isn’t being sought in the first place. Even the policies the president wants to champion—such as education reform—are getting dropped because there are not enough trusted people around him to pay attention (a reality that led Education secretary Betsy DeVos to admit that “education clearly has not been at the top of [the president’s] list of priorities”). Ultimately, with the civil service boxed out of running our government, the American people are getting less than what they pay for, and much less than what they deserve.
The most illustrative example of Trump-maligned government employees is the US intelligence community. These agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, have some of the most important jobs in America. I wish more Americans could meet these patriots in person to fully grasp their devotion to duty and country. On a day-to-day basis, they are responsible for keeping us safe, going to work in places they cannot discuss to solve problems they must not reveal. Their most stinging defeats are put on public display, while their greatest victories in protecting the American people are celebrated in silence. Many risk their lives—and some give them—without their hard work ever being known. Think about that. It’s one thing to lose your life, but to willingly give up your legacy on top of it is an act of eternal sacrifice. This is the ethos that defines the intelligence community.
Donald Trump’s attacks on America’s covert workforce began before he was elected. He resented the intelligence community’s conclusions that the Russians were interfering in the 2016 election to his benefit. Advisors urged Trump during the campaign to call out the Russians publicly and to disavow their meddling. He had to take a stand, they said, but Trump was unmoved. During one debate-prep session, a member of the team spoke up. He said the candidate needed to acknowledge the intelligence and use the debate stage as a platform to denounce Moscow. If he was going to show solidarity with Secretary Clinton on anything, this was it.