That ‘Deep State’ You Keep Hearing About? It Doesn’t Exist

Michael Hayden really, really doesn’t like it when people talk about the Deep State.

Well, of course! is what you’re probably thinking. Hayden is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a former director of the National Security Agency, and a former deputy director of national intelligence. If anybody embodies what President Trump, numerous right-wing Trump acolytes, and all too many progressives refer to as the Deep State, it would be Hayden. But in his just-released book, The Assault on Intelligence, Hayden patiently—and, at times, not so patiently—makes the case for why the Deep State, well, doesn’t exist.

Why is the “deep state” on the tip of so many tongues these days?

The politics of the American deep state have grown more explicit in the six months of the Trump presidency.

Rosie Gray of TheAtlantic.com reports that Rich Higgins, an NSC staff director and former Pentagon official, was recently fired for circulating a memo arguing that a “deep state” of leftists, globalists and Islamic sympathizers poses a threat to the Trump administration and to U.S. national security.

    His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking.

Who’s right?

If You Think Trump’s at War With the Deep State, Take Another Look at His Policies

The prospect of four years of Donald J. Trump’s nonstop rants about imaginary conspiracies against his daughter, wholesale slander against the judicial branch and attacks on the press as enemies of the people has caused some Americans to slip into a comforting form of denial. He will be a blip in our history, they say, because our formal institutions, and the American people, will ultimately prevail against a rogue disruptor.

Others, more hard-boiled, appeal to the powers-that-be that they believe actually run the country regardless of electoral results: the Wise Men, the Power Elite or what I have called the Deep State. These informal power groupings, according to speculation, will attempt to gently but firmly pry Trump’s tiny fingers from the wheel before he sails the ship of state into an iceberg.