Jay Sekulow, a member of Trump’s personal legal team, used the words “shadow government” outright in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox. “You’ve got a shadow government that is leaking … information” about Trump, he said, and it includes “people that were in step with the previous administration.” Sekulow also speculated about whether Clinton was “leading the shadow government while Obama’s giving $400,000 speeches,” or if Obama was leading it directly.
“If there was ever confirmation that the Deep State is real, illegal & endangers national security, it’s this,” Donald Trump, Jr., tweeted about yet another White House leak. “Their interests above all else.” Western Pennsylvania congressman Mike Kelly claimed that Obama continued living in Washington, DC, with his family for “one purpose and one purpose only.” He planned “to run a shadow government that is going to totally upset the new agenda.” In a later qualification, Kelly’s spokesperson walked back the comment, saying that Kelly “was sharing the frustration of everyone in the room over how they believe certain Obama administration holdovers within the federal bureaucracy are attempting to upset President Trump’s agenda.”
“Holdovers” is in itself a revealing term, used by people who don’t want to say “shadow government” outright. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski added the word in a tweet in which he proclaimed “The deep state is real.” All “Obama hold overs in the Gov’t need to go to allow @realDonaldTrump to Make America Great Again!” The holdovers were frequently blamed for leaking or fabricating anything unflattering about the Trump administration. (Sometimes—for example, in the president’s volleys of outraged early morning tweets—a piece of news is denounced as both leaked and fabricated, which is a neat semiotic trick.)
In one thing, however, the people fretting about leaks were correct. There were an unprecedented number of them in the first years of the Trump administration, particularly in the West Wing, where it sometimes seemed as though everyone was secretly recording each other. They were astounding in their breadth (fired White House aide Omarosa Manigault released numerous recordings she’d made, including one of Chief of Staff John Kelly firing her) and their pettiness. When First Lady Melania Trump had kidney surgery, her staff didn’t inform West Wing personnel about when she’d return to work, for fear that would leak, too. In the West Wing, the leaks were part of constant backstabbing and palace intrigue, which seemed endemic to working for the Trump administration. But elsewhere, at the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, they seemed to occur out of a sense of defiance: when EPA staffers were ordered in the fall of 2017 to take a mandatory course on preventing leaks, news of that leaked, as well.
Actual opposition forces within the government allowed the Deep State conspiracy theory to flourish, buoyed by inarguably real events. Similarly, a raft of Twitter accounts dispensing “rogue” tweets spurred paranoia over leakage as evidence of malicious moles inside the government. The tweets were presented as uncensored reports from staffers within various federal agencies, including the EPA and the National Park Service. It is possible that some of the accounts, at least in the administration’s early days, really were manned by dissatisfied employees at agencies that would likely undergo profound changes under the new regime. But soon enough, some of the accounts looked more like liberal fan fiction. One appeared calling itself “Rogue POTUS Staffer.”
“The unofficial resistance team inside the White House,” the account’s bio read at one point. “We pull back the curtain to expose the real workings inside this disastrous, frightening Administration.” Rogue POTUS Staffer managed to garner thousands of credulous retweets by writing, essentially, what liberals wished to hear. Most of the dispatches featured Trump panicking or melting down in absurd ways.
“POTUS suddenly angry watching Ryan press conference,” one tweet read. “Apparently shouted ‘—off’ and threw book at a TV which may be broken now.” In another, “Reportedly, POTUS just became so angry he tried to tip over his desk. Tried three times before giving up. Now, angry and embarrassed.”
Tellingly, this insider account never managed to predict any of the numerous administration departures or produce any information that convincingly showed the missives were coming from inside the White House. Still, the tweets generated a satisfying, narcotizing stream of likes and retweets by delivering constant, impassioned indictments against the administration and dark warnings about where it was headed.
Small enough to fit in a soda can or large enough to encompass a violent plot against America, in the hands of Trump partisans, the Deep State functioned like Silly Putty, stretching in all directions to cover anything that might need explaining away. It might be the Russian collusion investigation or Hillary Clinton not being jailed over her private email servers. (“Why aren’t our deep state authorities looking at this?” Trump groused on Twitter in November 2017, referring to Clinton’s emails, more than a year after the FBI elected to not charge her. “Rigged & corrupt?”)
At the farcical end of the spectrum, Deep Statism was deployed as exculpation in the legal scrapes of a bunch of low-level political actors. In Montana, for example, a Republican candidate for Senate named Troy Downing blasted the Deep State for its “witch hunt” against him—specifically the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which looked into suspected violations of his hunting license. Then there was Trump advisor Roger Stone, who told Alex Jones in an interview that the Deep State had sent some villains to T-bone his car in a hit-and-run. “They have poisoned me, they have smeared me, and someone in a car tried to kill me,” Stone said, appearing via satellite unharmed and quite chipper after the alleged incident. (According to the Washington Post, Stone claimed to have been a passenger in the car, but he left the scene by the time the police arrived to take a report.) Stone had previously complained in late 2016 that someone had poisoned him with polonium, the deadly radioactive material that was used to kill a Russian spy a decade earlier. Then, too, he appeared to recover in miraculous fashion.
In its more serious guise, Deep Statism represented an alarming new development: a ruling party and a presidential administration that claimed to be under attack even as they held the bulk of power in the United States, that used the language of victimhood even as they were the victors, the history-makers. That is a worrisome phenomenon: claiming that an external enemy threatens the sovereignty of the state—an enemy to be repelled by any means necessary—is historically a hallmark of authoritarian leaders.
Demonstrating the extent to which besieged thinking seeped into the Trump administration was a memo sent out by a staffer at the National Security Council, Rich Higgins, which was so alarming that it became minor national news. Working in the NSC’s strategic planning office, Higgins was one of a group hired by quickly ousted and criminally charged National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. (Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian government officials before Trump had been inaugurated.) Higgins’s memo, titled “POTUS & Political Warfare,” contained a long list of the president’s supposed enemies, among them “deep state actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.” It went on to present a Trumpian view of how the administration should respond to its foes.
“The administration has been maneuvered into a constant back-pedal by relentless political warfare attacks structured to force him to assume a reactive posture that assures inadequate responses,” part of it reads. “The president can either drive or be driven by events; it’s time for him to drive them.”
Higgins was fired by Flynn’s saner replacement H. R. McMaster, but one administration official went on the record agreeing with him. A government source told Foreign Policy magazine, which published the memo, that its purpose was to warn Trump. “The memo maybe reads a little crazy, sure, but it’s not wrong and Rich isn’t crazy,” the official said.
At its extreme edge, Deep Statism looks a lot like the New World Order suspicions that came before it: a fear of total domination, subjugation, literal slavery. “The goals of the deep state are simple,” wrote the conspiracy-addled finance site Zero Hedge. “The complete enslavement of mankind by political elites.” The site is run by a former hedge fund analyst named Daniel Ivandjiiski, who was barred from Wall Street for insider trading in 2008 and, like a lot of people who are out of better ideas, started blogging. Ivandjiiski and other contributors to the site wrote under the pseudonym “Tyler Durden.” He, or they, fretted with increasing zeal about Trump being impeached by the Deep State, a pit stop on the journey to global enslavement.
“It has been apparent to those not blinded by partisan politics that something is going on in the government right now,” offered one post. “Yet most simply call it a ‘witch hunt,’ simply for lack of wanting to admit the deep state exists. It certainly looks like a battle between democracy and the deep state. And we aren’t sure we’d put money on democracy at this point in history.”
Along these lines, Stone, in an interview with the Harvard Political Review, blamed the Deep State for a looming coup attempt (and for the president’s ignorance about world events). “I have come to this conclusion that we are witnessing a slow-motion coup by the deep state, the very people that opposed the presidential election,” Stone told the journal. “They have used illegal and unconstitutional leaks to destabilize his presidency. The generals have pretty much taken control of the White House and are seeking to isolate the president and limit his access to information. I am surprised how much he does not know.”
Right-wing gasbag Rush Limbaugh echoed Stone. “There is already a silent coup,” he told his audience, perhaps misunderstanding what a coup is, “and it’s been under way for quite a while to get rid of Donald Trump.” And Mike Cernovich predicted that the Deep State would eventually turn deadly. “Trump will be killed,” he told Jones. “They’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill him, they’re going to kill everybody.”
That kind of language—setting up an immediate, apocalyptic battle between the meager forces of good and the pervasive foot soldiers of evil—is a hallmark of conspiracism (and again, has often served as a justification for authoritarianism). The ultraconservative legal activist group Judicial Watch released a report awash with such language, claiming that the Deep State comprised the EPA, the IRS, law enforcement agencies, and, of course, career civil servants throughout the government. “No matter who’s in power, they exert control,” Judicial Watch wrote. The organization also called the Deep State “dangerously malignant,” suggesting a cancer needing to be cut out by any means necessary—an immediate kill-or-be-killed scenario for Trump.
“Sometimes, as it has with the Trump presidency, the Deep State rises to the surface in rebellion,” the report stated, “taking aggressive, seditious measures against a president whose election it opposed and who it perceives to be a threat to its own agenda and, perhaps, its very survival. As already is clear with the Trump presidency, the Deep State can turn on any president that threatens its interests and survival. And left unchecked, it may illegally destroy him.”
As those on the far right fulminated about imminent global takeovers, they were matched on the left by its own paranoia. The left’s fears of conspiracies and collusion made for some very strange bedfellows. Elements of the anti-Trump resistance saw the Kremlin’s agents everywhere and so found themselves cheering on the intelligence institutions doing battle in Russiagate—the same institutions historically distrusted by the left, and with good reason. People like James Comey, the FBI director fired by Trump, became a hero to liberals, although they reviled him during the elections for his role in the scandal over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state.
The Russia frenzy produced rhetoric that replicated that on the conspiratorial far right, along with conspiracy stars to espouse it. Eric Garland, a small-time economic consultant and self-described “futurist” (how he actually earned a living was opaque), became well known overnight for a one-hundred-twenty-seven-tweet thread. His exhausting missive began with the words “Time for some game theory” and culminated in a sweeping, not-altogether-coherent account of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The tweetstorm garnered sincere praise from legitimate reporters; Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffrey called it the “single greatest thread I have ever read on Twitter. And in its way a Federalist Paper for 2016.”
Praise from such credible journalists encouraged Garland to spend the next year identifying various people he thought were in league with the Russians, which came to encompass a long list. At one point, Garland condemned Bernie Sanders as a Russian simp in terms that seemed borderline anti-Semitic. “Sanders is not a son of Vermont—he is not an inheritor of our values of inviolable liberty, sovereignty, justice, and law,” Garland declared of the state’s senator. “If Sanders will not stand with America—much less Vermont, my ancestral home—against Russia, he has betrayed both Republic and Country.”
Garland reached extremes that put him in the front ranks of the conspiracy-minded. “Let’s talk about this weeks sic events that already show that we’re in hyperdrive to expose a global criminal conspiracy,” he tweeted. He also sounded alarmingly unhinged, vowing, with a signature mix of all-caps and exaggeration, “I WON’T BE THE FIRST GARLAND OF MY LINE TO SPILL BLOOD FOR AMERICA AND THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY AND NEVER THE LAST, YOU FUCKERS.” Seth Abramson, an English professor and former lawyer who identified himself on social media as a political expert, wrote in November 2017, also on Twitter, “While the final pieces of proof must still be put into place, every indication we have *so far* is that the President has been and continues to be a Russian asset.”
In line with the conspiracist playbook, Russiagate even yielded false flag accusations. In an account called “A Hamilton Spirit,” a person claiming to be a psychiatrist garnered close to sixty thousand followers with rants connecting every event in the visible universe to Trump’s Russian ties. He implied that a mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival might have been staged—by whom, it wasn’t clear—in order to distract Democrats and somehow prevent them from filing articles of impeachment against Trump. A Hamilton Spirit seemed proud of the fact that he made logical connections no one else had. “I’ve always been really good at puzzles,” he explained.
Deep Staters and Russiagaters revealed an entire country in the grips of conspiracy thinking. Both sides considered themselves eminently reasonable, though, following the habits of the conspiracy-verse: they insisted they had done their research and arrived at the only sensible conclusion, and that their enemies were bought and paid for, and probably actors, plants, or spies. Left-wing comedian Jen Kirkman called Bernie Sanders a “Russian chaos agent,” while right-winger Steven Seagal, the partially fossilized action hero, wrote an entire novel based on his purported encounters with the Deep State, titled The Way of the Shadow Wolves. Referring to himself and coauthor Joe Morrissey, part of the novel’s introduction reads, “Shadow Wolves is a book of fiction based on reality. Both authors have worked with, confronted, and seen the power of the Deep State and the manner in which many federal government agencies willfully violate the Constitution and the laws of the land in service to special interests.”
The two camps operate with a specific kind of linguistic grandiosity, an overheated rhetorical style where every event, no matter how mundane, is part of a showdown between good and evil. The speaker/writer/tweeter is always standing alone at the gate, bravely pushing back the demonic hordes. And even thoughtful believers on the left also express their fear in terms of a coup.
The essay “Trial Balloon for a Coup,” published in Medium by a writer named Yonatan Zunger, went viral with claims that the Trump administration, in passing bans on immigration, was testing the resolve of the American populace to pave the way for a military coup. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal is to create ‘resistance fatigue,’” the author wrote, “to get Americans to the point where they’re more likely to say ‘Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys ever stop?’ relatively quickly.” Another essay in Medium also declared the immigration ban a “headfake,” designed to test whether the Trump administration could attempt a full-scale government takeover. It didn’t use the word “coup,” but came very close. “The administration,” the author, a San Francisco entrepreneur named Jake Fuentes, wrote, “is deliberately testing the limits of governmental checks and balances to set up a self-serving, dangerous consolidation of power.”
The Russiagate coup theory was stated explicitly on Patriobotics, a site that traffics in heated Trump–Putin conspiracizing. The site was set up by Louise Mensch, a former Conservative politician in Britain turned romance novelist who moved to New York in 2012 and became a journalist of sorts. Mensch was frequently joined by former NSA staffer John Schindler, as well as Claude Taylor, a freelance photographer who describes himself as a “former staffer” in the Clinton White House. (He worked in the volunteer office in 1993.) All three have generated devoted, almost fanatical followings, alongside a larger number of people calling them cranks and liars.
Among other things, Mensch suggested that Trump had been secretly indicted and handed a copy of that indictment on an airplane runway by the “Marshal of the Supreme Court,” which is not how indictments work. At one point she said that teams backed by Trump advisor Steve Bannon were behind a series of bomb threats phoned into Jewish community centers. (The threats were traced to a disgraced journalist trying to terrorize his ex and a disturbed Jewish teenager in Israel.)
In other Mensch assertions, Bannon was in for a pretty dark fate: “My sources say the death penalty, for espionage, being considered for @StevenKBannon,” she tweeted. “I am pro-life and take no pleasure in reporting this.” Additionally, Black Lives Matter was a Russian operation, for instance, directly funding protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Taylor reported on a criminal probe into Trump Models Management by the New York Attorney General based on a tip from an insider at the AG’s office. Separately, Mensch claimed that according to her sources, Trump “is linked to a Russian-based human trafficking enterprise, where girls and women were kidnapped into sexual slavery. This includes underage girls and minors.” Except there was no probe or source at the Attorney General’s office; Taylor was fed information by a hoaxer who told the Guardian she’d acted out of frustration at the “fake news” disseminated by Taylor and Mensch.
Despite the bizarre nature of her reports, Mensch had a sizable Twitter following, and people outside journalism were not always aware that she was not a credible political journalist. This in turn helped generate more uncertainty about what is real, who can be trusted, and who is a real journalist. And, to complicate matters further, Mensch did once get her hands on a genuine, newsworthy piece of information. In February 2017, she learned that the FISA court had granted a warrant to surveil two Trump aides who were suspected of having communications with banks linked to the Russian government. The reporting was confirmed by other outlets, which allowed Mensch and her followers to declare her legitimacy.
In a delicious irony, conspiracy theories emerged about Mensch herself: she was a Trump-backed plant, paid to make the Trump resistance look stupid. She was a Russian plant, paid to make the anti-Russia resistance look stupid. Meanwhile, Mensch argued that the resistance movement against Trump itself is a Russian plot.
If Russiagate is an example of citizens’ deep suspicion toward their government, it also prompted concern that it could lead to the reverse: the government’s suspicion of its citizens, which has resulted in some of the darkest periods in American history. A mania for ferreting out secret domestic enemies brought us McCarthysim and the life-ruining inquisitions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and thousands of Japanese Americans being imprisoned in internment camps during the latter days of the Second World War.
Masha Gessen, for one, feared that anti-Russia paranoia could lead to a climate of McCarthy-esque persecution, suspicion, and witch hunts. Gessen warned that Russiagate was “promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.” Press freedom organizations also worried that Russia-collusion panic could have a chilling effect on free speech. In September 2017, the FBI investigated whether Sputnik and RT were illegally spreading Russian propaganda without having registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In November, RT did register as a foreign agent but planned to challenge the Justice Department’s order to do so in court.
Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote that government control over news organizations is a bad idea. “No matter one’s feelings on Russia or Sputnik,” he wrote, “I think it’s concerning anytime the FBI gets involved in defining who is and isn’t a journalist.”
In any case, Sputnik and RT’s activities post-2016 were not new. They have long focused on true but unflattering aspects of American government to shape a narrative. They had plenty of material to work from: police violence, gun violence, government repression, enthusiastic drone use. With the exception of reporting by Sean Stone—director Oliver Stone’s adult son and an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist—a lot of their coverage looked like typical journalism. And the government’s response to Sputnik and RT gave both organizations grist for their mills. One Sputnik columnist condemned the suspicion against his outlet as part of the mainstream media plot against Trump. “Anyone, anywhere, who might be linked to Russia in any whichever way no matter how direct or indirect is suspected of being a ‘Kremlin agent,’” he wrote. “And that their interactions with American political campaigns constitute, at the very least, some form or another of ‘meddling.’”
In fairness, Russia did not by any means corner the market on state-sponsored propaganda pushing its message overseas. The Voice of America, a government-funded station that broadcasts around the globe—in more than one hundred countries and sixty-one languages—has done so since the Cold War. The United States always insisted that VOA was created to counter Soviet propaganda, not create our own, but that distinction has seemed awfully fuzzy.
The Deep State and Russiagate shared one other important characteristic. They both speedily took on the nature of something of great benefit to conspiracy sellers: formless, vast, amorphous modes of suspicion. They cast shadows that could grow to encompass any event, any discovery, or shrink to reveal a sunny, bright nothing. Conspiracist politicians and pundits only profit from an environment in which nothing is certain, everything is clouded by suspicion, and no source of information can be trusted.
If that sounds too, well, conspiratorial, consider one of Trump’s early and few press conferences, held in the first year of his presidency. He called the Russia collusion story “fake news put out by the media” and said that the reporters gathered were part of a press corps that was “out of control.” But, he suggested, soon it wouldn’t much matter. “The press, the public doesn’t believe you people anymore,” Trump told the room, beaming contentedly. “Now maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you.”