DEEP AND WIDE:

"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. [...]

One day earlier this month in Palm Beach, just after 6 a.m., the President went on a vengeful Twitter binge. Trump reads little but has declared himself "the Ernest Hemingway of a hundred and forty characters," and that morning he levelled what the Times rightly called "one of the most consequential accusations made by one president against another in American history." With no evidence, save the ravings of the talk-radio host Mark Levin and an account, in Breitbart News, of Levin's charges of a "silent coup," Trump accused President Obama of tapping his "wires" at Trump Tower. He compared the unsubstantiated offense to "McCarthyism" and "Nixon/Watergate."

By now, Trump's tactics are familiar. Schooled by Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy's protégé, in the dark arts of rage, deflection, insult, and conspiracy-mongering, Trump ignited his political career with "birtherism," and he has kept close by his side Steve Bannon, formerly of Breitbart, who traffics in tinfoil-hat theories of race, immigration, and foreign affairs. Together, they have artfully hijacked the notion of "fake news," turning it around as a weapon of insult, diversion, division, and attack.

One does not have to be ignorant of the C.I.A.'s abuses--or of history, in general--to reject the idea of an American Deep State. Previous Presidents have felt resistance, or worse, from elements in the federal bureaucracies: Eisenhower warned of the "military-industrial complex"; L.B.J. felt pressure from the Pentagon; Obama's Syria policy was rebuked by the State Department through its "dissent channel." But to use the term as it is used in Turkey, Pakistan, or Egypt is to assume that all these institutions constitute part of a subterranean web of common and nefarious purpose. The reason that Trump is so eager to take a conspiratorial view of everything from the C.I.A. to CNN is that an astonishing array of individuals have spoken out or acted against him. Above all, he is infuriated that intelligence and investigative services have been looking into possible Russian connections to him, his advisers, his campaign, and his financial interests.

Tweet   @brothersjudd