War has come to the deep state, or so it seems. During Donald Trump’s first weeks in office, he summarily fired a dozen top FBI officials and a similar number of US attorneys deemed hostile to the White House, and nominated deep-state critics including Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for cabinet posts, while issuing executive orders to declassify all documents related to the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency dismantled the CIA’s favorite cutout, USAID.
“The deep state is a cancer that undermines popular sovereignty.”
Given the centrality of the “deep state” to the MAGA worldview, merely uttering the phrase will immediately code you as a Trump partisan. But until quite recently, the concept was the province of the political left. Understanding its origins and evolution makes clear that the stakes are far greater than the political fate of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. The deep state is a cancer that undermines popular sovereignty. Those who wish to restore democratic rule, regardless of political orientation, must therefore take it seriously.
The “deep state” first entered the English lexicon in the 1990s, when it was very occasionally used by scholars who borrowed it from Turkish. But it was Peter Dale Scott, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who popularized the term among critical left-leaning scholars of covert action when he first used it in his 2007 book The Road to 9/11.
In Turkish, derin devlet (“deep state”) referred to clandestine networks within the armed forces that saw themselves as having a transcendent legitimacy and authority rooted in the founding of the republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This authority, they believed, allowed them to use extra-legal means to protect the state from both external and internal threats, especially those emanating from the secular Marxist left and the Islamist religious right. Both threats, it was feared, might use Turkish democracy to change the direction of the country’s political development. Emboldened with these ideas, elements in the Turkish military have engaged in various types of political interference, maintained corrupt connections with heroin gangs, and launched coups both successful and failed.
As it spread beyond Turkey, the term “deep state” was adapted to describe similar networks in other countries. Always, the term implies that unelected officials and bureaucrats can undermine elected leaders and shape policy undemocratically and without public scrutiny. In Scott’s usage, it refers to “power not derived from the constitution but outside and above it, more powerful than the public state.” Long before importing the Turkish phrase into English, Scott was writing about “deep politics”: clandestine networks of government and business potentates that exercise power against the will of the citizenry and its elected representatives.
In Scott’s account, the deep state is a loose formation combining elements of the security state and the permanent bureaucracy with networks of ultra-wealthy private-sector financiers. It is fundamentally a form of “top-down or closed power, as opposed to the open power of the public state or res publica that represents the people as a whole.” It is, one might say, the ultimate veto power. Central to the notion of the deep state is that networks of elites, feeling constrained by democracy, will use illegal methods to circumvent it. Indeed, almost every writer who deploys the term is describing not a single entity, but networks encompassing an array of individuals and institutions—or “networks of networks,” as Trump’s new FBI director Kash Patel has put it.
In his 2022 book American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, Aaron Good develops Scott’s ideas into a tripartite theory of the state. Good’s model of the state consists of the “public state,” embodied by elected federal, state, and local governments and their civil-service bureaucracies; the “security state,” made up of the government’s international and domestic intelligence and security apparatus; and finally, the unaccountable, secret, informal “deep state,” consisting of networks within the other two layers of state power that extend outward into private-sector economic power, including both “the overworld of private wealth” and the “underworld of organized crime.” These networks exercise secret and illegal forms of undemocratic control including political blackmail, election interference, off-the-books funding schemes, assassinations, constitutional states of emergency, and de facto coups.
The historical record overflows with examples of the type of sub rosa power networks described by Scott and Good. The CIA’s interference in the Italian elections of 1948; the same agency’s involvement in the Corsican mafia’s heroin trafficking, which eventually evolved into a funding system for its covert war in Laos; the FBI’s violent and often illegal repression of the left as part of its COINTELPRO or counter-intelligence program during the 1960s; the Iran-Contra scandal, in which deep-state networks illegally sold weapons to Iran to fund the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras in defiance of the law; and the wholesale importation of cocaine to the United States on CIA-charted aircraft—as was documented by the US Senate in live broadcast hearings during the summer of 1987.
The deep state’s ability to work around and undermine democratic rule returns us to the fundamental question of political sovereignty: What is it, and who possesses it? In recent decades, the definition offered by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt has proven to have troubling relevance. In Schmitt’s view, ultimate sovereignty within a constitutional democracy resides with that power that can legally suspend the constitution in part or in whole. Or as Schmitt famously put it: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.”
Most liberal constitutions do indeed contain clauses that allow for their own suspension under a “state of emergency” or “state of exception.” Depending on your view, these clauses are necessary features of democratic politics in a dangerous world, or they are a democratic polity’s suicide pact with itself. In his book State of Exception, published in the early days of the Global War on Terror, the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben explored the dangers posed by this legal loophole; the Nazi dictatorship, as he noted, was a technically legal hiatus from democracy allowed for by the Weimar Constitution’s Article 48.
The literature on the deep state underlines the importance of political emergencies. Even short of total formal suspension of constitutional authority, political emergencies create space for secrecy-seeking political actors to override voters, circumvent legal accountability, and rule by fiat. Historians of the deep state see it as having grown steadily during America’s postwar project of global hegemony. Cold-War foreign policy and anti-communist hysteria at home gave free rein to ever more illegal operations by the US security state, which in turn allowed for deep state networks both abroad and at home to metastasize into what Good calls “covert top-down rule.”
The entire deep-state literature—which included output by academic historians, journalists, documentarians, and political theorists in the United States and abroad—was for most of its existence almost exclusively a province of the radical left. With the political rise of Donald Trump, that began to change. It was only in the election year of 2016 that the conceptual apparatus of deep-state studies started circulating among conservatives. In September 2016, former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren published The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. Lofgren, Steve Bannon, and others on the right most likely picked up the deep-state framework from Alex Jones, who—though he is now anathema to the left (and cozy with Donald Trump)—was once a left-adjacent, anti-imperialist, anti-war, populist libertarian back in his days on Austin public-access TV.
“The deep state depends on secrecy, which is why it compulsively promulgates it.”
In light of various efforts to keep Trump out of office and oust him from the White House, MAGA stalwarts found themselves reaching for the idea of the deep state because it offered a way to make sense of the connections between the Clinton campaign, former British spies, the FBI, and the mainstream media. Later, the Covid pandemic reinforced the need to think about loose unofficial networks of power and states of emergency. Across the United States, Covid led to governor-declared “states of emergency” that brought lockdowns, vaccine passports, and mass firings of public workers. Meanwhile federal officials led efforts to stifle discussion of the virus’s origins and censor open debate about links between intelligence agencies, the scientific establishment, NGOs, and the political class. All of this spurred a pandemic-focused subgenre of deep-state theorizing. Aaron Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, for example, though not a left-wing book, engages directly with the left-wing critiques of the deep state.
Because the historiography of political assassinations has played a prominent role in the evolution of deep-state theory, the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump brought yet more attention to deep-state studies. Again and again, the history of political assassinations reveals secret networks within the state security apparatus and civil bureaucracy that link up with networks in the overworld of the ultra-wealthy and the underworld of organized crime. It is no coincidence that in the wake of events at Butler, Pa., the Trump family grew close with RFK Jr.; nor is it any coincidence that the Trump administration has committed to declassifying all the documents relating to the assassination of RFK’s father and uncle, as well as Martin Luther King.
If the administration follows through on these promises, the decline of legacy media—in part due to its increasingly blatant biases and links to covert operations of power—leaves us in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, it is good that public opinion and critique have been partially liberated from the stranglehold of the stuffy editorial pages of the old flagship metro dailies and their amplification system, the network nightly news. But on the other hand, the institutional capacity for investigative journalism on a mass scale has been radically reduced. If there are waves of declassification, the blogosphere, the podcasts, and all the new alternative media will have to work hard to digest these primary documents, and will need resources to do so.
The deep state depends on secrecy, which is why it compulsively promulgates it. A new transparency based on the massive declassification of security state documents is essential to creating a national discussion that can help excise the deep-state cancer. Trump and key agency heads like Gabbard, Kennedy, and Patel must take the lead in exposing previously hidden history. But it will be incumbent on all who wish to see democracy thrive to pitch in and help make sense of what we learn.
A robust national debate is also essential if we are to prevent the deep state’s relaunch from within the “reformed” remnants of old agencies. In short, this surgery cannot be left to the experts: It requires the disinfecting sunlight of declassification and public discussion. If the vaults of files are not disgorged, then it will be clear that Trumpian efforts against the deep state are nothing but limited insider-vs-insider score settling. Popular pressure must be exerted now to help us avoid that fate.