MAKICHUK: Has Trump turned the 'Deep State' on its head?
Mythical dragon or not, the majority of Americans believe it exists
You may not like him.
You may think his policies are wacko and lacking in context.
He’s unpredictable, sometimes irrational.
But one thing you can’t deny, he has been effective in turning Washington D.C., and the so-called Deep State, on its head.
Case in point.
The CIA is being run by a loyal sycophant.
John Ratcliffe.
The DIA, is also being run by a Trump loyalist and possible Russian asset.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Neither of these people should have been put in place.
Politicizing America’s intelligence agencies, goes against all the rules.
Loyalists tell the president what he wants to hear, to back his beliefs, instead of telling him the cold hard facts.
Be that, as it is, the CIA and all these other agencies, are under the gun.
All trying to survive the maelstrom that is Donald Trump.
If there is a Deep State, it sure as hell has been body slammed to the mat. Extinguished and marginalized, possibly forced to go deeper, and become more dangerous.
I used to think that the Deep State was just more conspiracy nonsense. You know, your basic tinfoil hat crowd.
A way of blaming government for anything and everything.
An imaginary dragon, to be slayed.
Now, I am not so sure.
It may not be a sprawling all-encompassing conspiracy, but it may exist in a different form. Perhaps in ways more subtle.
Some are even saying Trump has created his own Deep State.
My brother Jim used to joke, that the world is run by four guys on a golf course, somewhere in Arizona.
A funny joke, but it may not be far from the truth. Power exists in strange places.
“Deep State” comes from the Turkish derin devlet, a clandestine network, including military and intelligence officers, along with civilian allies, whose mission was to protect the secular order established, in 1923, by the father figure of post-Ottoman Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
It was behind at least four coups, and it surveilled and murdered reporters, dissidents, Communists, Kurds, and Islamists.
In the U.S., the idea of a Deep State cabal of unelected officials secretively pulling the strings of American government, is widely believed.
One 2018 poll even claimed that a majority of American voters place credence in the theory. This is no fringe phenomenon.
America’s democratic political institutions and public opinion are riven by anxieties that have been given voice in the pronouncements of Donald Trump: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” he told a rally in Waco, Texas, in March 2023.
It is a matter of history, documented history, that the Joint Chiefs sat down with Jack Kennedy, and pushed the idea of a covert attack on civilian and military targets in the US, to make it look like it was Castro’s Cubans.
Operation North Woods was presented as a false flag operation, which could justify war with Cuba.
Kennedy was horrified and shut it down immediately.
The possibility that pockets of power exist, secret pockets of power, is highly possible.
For instance, we do know that MJ-12, the mysterious “Majestic 12,” did exist at one point.
There is speculation it has been disbanded or replaced.
MJ-12 was believed responsible for keeping the lid on UFOs and any contact with alien races. As well as the back-engineering of alien technology — still the worst kept secret in America.
There is even speculation they had a hand in JFK’s assassination, or possibly covering it up. Then again, who hasn’t been implicated in Jack’s death.
For reasons which are still unknown, Edward Lansdale, a significant figure in the CIA and involved in various covert operations in Vietnam, was identified as being in Dallas by a reputable witness.
And we all know that the CIA threw dirt, covering up their tracks from the events at Dealey Plaza, on Nov. 22, 1963. Only now, 60 years later, are they admitting they knew more about Lee Harvey Oswald.
There is even evidence to suggest, that the order came from the very top — from LBJ and the two Texas oilmen who backed him, Clint Murchison and Harold L. Hunt — a conclusion determined by the KGB investigation and reported to the Kremlin.
Former CIA director Allen Dulles, whom JFK fired after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, may have even backstopped the whole operation from Langley. Using wire services to implicate Oswald in press releases sent round the world.
No wonder the majority of Americans believe in a conspiracy to kill JFK.
Interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN, Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett, discussing D.C.’s penchant for covering things up, jokingly said, “Does anyone believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK from behind and in front?”
He even speculated that the JFK files had been tampered with, and we may never know the truth.
If there’s no Deep State, who tampered with those files?
And how many were killed, to cover up JFK’s assassination? Was there a rogue unit, within the CIA?
“You know this town buries secrets,” Burchett told Tapper. He added, “This town does not give up its secrets easy.”
According to a report in Scientific American, one of the most influential books to raise this question was The Invisible Government, written in 1964 by journalists David Wise and Thomas Ross.
They opened their account with a stark declaration: “There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible.”
They then set out their thesis that the CIA had occasionally acted outside the authority of elected officials, and that such covert operations were not merely an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, but had actively shaped it.
In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg provided the press with a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, which revealed that four successive administrations had deceived the American people about the U.S. role in that conflict and the likelihood of victory.
It is no surprise then, that Hollywood has jumped on the Deep State bandwagon, with several films, including Executive Action, All The President’s Men, and Warren Beatty’s classic political thriller, The Parallax View.
In the latter film, political reporter Joe Frady, played by Beatty, uncovers a massive conspiracy in a plot that plays out in an explosive game of cat and mouse.
The film highlights themes of paranoia and the dangers of unchecked power. And anyone seeing it, will never look at political assassination the same way again.
Which brings us right back to today’s Trumpian milieu.
Did he upend the Deep State, or create his own Deep State?
Deep waters, for sure.