US President Donald Trump is convinced that the “deep state” thwarted his first term, robbing him of the 2020 election. Expunging it seems to have become his main priority of this second term. But, is there such a thing as a deep state? There certainly is. It would be enough to read the memoirs of former US presidents or secretaries to discover their frustration in face of the bureaucratic resistance confronted while in office. In this regard, those of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, written a few decades ago, were particularly enlightening.

The following excerpts from his Memoirs speak volumes. They referred to the interaction between the White House and the Pentagon: “Orders were given in that respect, but our military bureaucracy resists intromissions in strategic doctrine even if they come from the White House (…) When I assumed my functions, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told me that he too had tried to give more options to the President in strategic matters, but he finally desisted given the bureaucratic resistance (…) A 1969 presidential request demanding a reasoned explanation on the naval programs was never satisfactorily answered during the eight years that I served in Washington. The responses given were always close to insubordination and far from being useful.”

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had also much to tell in this regard. One of the main reasons that led Nikita Khruschev, the Secretary General of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, to install missiles in Cuba was the presence of American missiles in Turkey, bordering the Soviet Union. US President John F. Kennedy understood the risks involved therein. Several months before the crisis, he had ordered that the US’s missiles be removed, as they represented an unnecessary provocation. However, bureaucratic resistance both within the State Department and the Department of Defense thwarted the implementation of such orders, which were never carried out.

Moreover, during the infamous 13 days of the crisis, the US Navy was reluctant to obey the president’s orders with regard to the Cuban naval blockade. While Kennedy wanted to give Khruschev time to see, think and blink, bureaucracy within the Navy did all it could to circumvent those orders and put in place its own book of procedures. Additionally, when tensions between both countries peaked, and war could have ensued at any moment, an American spy plane crashed in Siberia. The Air Force bureaucracy had kept its regular procedures in place, notwithstanding Kennedy’s insistence on acting with the utmost prudence.

The deep state, indeed, exists. It represents the natural impulse of the federal bureaucracy to act in accordance with its own institutional aims, set of rules and particular subculture. Seeing presidents and secretaries as simple snowbirds, bureaucratic loyalties are entrenched within their own institutions. For someone like Trump who, more than requiring loyalty for his agenda demands fealty to his person, this represents the worst of sins. Indeed, “he demands personal loyalty—or what John Bolton, Trump’s longest-serving national security adviser in his first term, has called ‘fealty, a medieval concept implying not mere loyalty but submission.’” The interaction of complete opposites such as these can only lead to a trainwreck.

Trump’s pincers: destabilizing federal departments from both sides

In his second term, Trump aims to bend the federal bureaucracy into submission through a pincer strategy. One jaw pursues its destabilization from the inside by putting federal departments and offices under the control of well-known disrupters. The other jaw harasses and destabilizes these organizations from the outside.

The avowed intention of this dual process is taming bureaucrats by making them feel vulnerable and insecure, by demolishing their sense of entitlement and career safety. In the words of Russell Vought, the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

The first jaw, thus, is entrusted to people that have “sworn” personal allegiance to Trump. Experience or knowledge regarding their assigned area is not an employment requisite, though. An important historical precedent in this regard dates back to 12th-century England. Faced with the Church’s resistance to his rule, Henry II of Plantagenet decided to appoint his closest friend, the conspicuous dissolute Thomas Becket, as Archbishop of Canterbury.

The problem ended up being that Becket realized that his true base of power resided in the Church that he was supposed to “rule,” and not in the king that had put him in charge. As the king’s man, he was fated to be institutionally resisted, thus becoming feeble and ineffectual. Contrariwise, by submitting to the Church’s interests and organizational subculture, he could personify the political might of that institution. Hence, he sided with the Church.

This phenomenon is well known in contemporary US politics. For a political appointee, siding with the bureaucratic organization is known as “going native.” When a secretary becomes a “native” of the Department that they were chosen to lead, they acquire real power. Otherwise, the risk of remaining as an inefficacious figurehead is always present.

Conscious of that reality, US presidents tend to choose figures with knowledge of the subjects involved, but at the same time with sufficient personal standing and integrity. The former is to avoid manipulation from the inside of the organization. The latter is for them to promote workable compromises between bureaucratic and political objectives. Although an imperfect solution, it is a pragmatic one.

Trump, however, searches for absolutes. He not only wants personal allegiance from his barons but for them to forcefully control their fiefs. This is why he places so much importance in choosing disruptive figures, people susceptible of exacting obedience under the continuous threat of chaos. This translates into management by fear.

However, installing fear from the inside may not be enough. That is why the second jaw of the pincer searches to project it from the outside as well. It does so through a blistering shake-up of federal bureaucracy: shutting down or dismantling agencies, ousting federal appointees before their term has ended, planning large-scale layoffs, reviewing the elimination or combination of bureaucratic divisions or entire agencies, transforming civil servants’ failure to implement the president’s will into cause for disciplining and separation. All this and more.

Much of the above is being done in overt violation of the US Constitution’s separation of power. Since the inception of the Republic, indeed, it has always been the legislative branch that decides how to structure the executive branch, creating departments, giving them functions and providing their funds. Not anymore. So far, though, judicial authority in this field has been respected. However, a furious rhetoric on challenging the judiciary builds up in the president’s camp. All of this, of course, must be sending shock waves of fright upon federal bureaucrats, who feel that they may no longer be protected by the rule of law.

Trump’s strategy may damage the US

No doubt about it, this pincer strategy could be utterly effective in domesticating the deep state, rendering it docile. The problem is that it can disassemble the State itself in the process. It can, indeed, make a big mess of federal institutions, procedures and civil service, degrading the capacity for policy implementation and distorting institutional memory and governance know-how. Additionally, it can dangerously meddle with the Constitutional separation of power. Hammering the foundations upon which the federal government and the branches of government depend for their functioning, is indeed a risky business — one that could turn a global superpower upside down and set in motion a spiral of decline.

Frankly speaking, though, a good dose of pure deep state doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, when faced with proposals such as turning Gaza into an American Riviera while permanently expelling the Palestinian population, retaking the Panama Canal or absorbing Greenland. And what about Trump’s repeated questioning of Canada’s viability as a nation and his threats to annex it through economic force? Indeed, the US might need its deep state.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.