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Source: ScheerPost
Patrick Lawrence: What Odds, as Trump Takes on the Deep State?
By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost
This is the second of two essays considering President Trump’s unfolding offensive against the institutions and agencies comprising the deep state — the permanent state or the invisible government, as it is also commonly known. The first in this series is here.
Trump’s telephone conversation with the Russian president, which he disclosed at noon Wednesday, Feb. 12, lasted 90 minutes. Trump was quick to note that the exchange marked the start of negotiations to bring the Biden regime’s proxy war in Ukraine, three years running as of Feb. 24, to an end. But there was much more to the conversation, as Trump and the Kremlin described it. Here is how Trump cast the call on his Truth Social platform:
I just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, Energy, Artificial Intelligence, the power of the Dollar, and various other subjects. We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people, and we, likewise, lost so many! We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together. But first, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine. President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, “COMMON SENSE….”
Since the telephone call, of course, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump officials have met in Riyadh with Russian counterparts, effectively serving as sherpas in advance of a Trump–Putin summit at some point this spring, if all goes to plan. I read this as a preliminary but important consolidation of Trump’s demarche: The more progress, the better the president is protected from deep state subversions. Trump’s swiftly advancing demarche in relations with Russia, we ought to note, requires that we cast his campaign against the deep state in a broader context. Sunday’s elections in Germany are the most immediate case in point. Exit polls available at writing indicate that, as long and widely expected, the Christian Democratic Union under the leadership of Friedrich Merz, a committed Europeanist, will form the next government.
But Merz will not form it alone. The CDU and the Christian Social Union, its conservative cousin with its strongest base in Bavaria, appear to have commanded a combined 29% of the vote. To understand this likely result, we have to put it against the 19% to 20% — again, according to the polls — that goes to Alternativ für Deutschland, the party of conservative populists that stands against precisely the neoliberal ideology Trump and his people are attacking at home. The CDU, like the Social Democrats (who lost big Sunday) and other mainstream parties, has vowed never to invite AfD — now Germany’s No. 2 party — into a coalition government. This means the CDU will either have to relent on this commitment — unlikely at the moment — or German politics are about to drift, messily enough, further in the post-democratic direction. Either way, the political representatives of Germany’s version of the deep state will remain under siege. “We have won it,” Merz declared in Berlin Sunday evening. Not quite, I would say. Not really. Not at all, actually.
We have to consider Trump’s war on the deep state, I mean to say, as something of a global phenomenon, or at least a phenomenon evident throughout the Western post-democracies. Among AfD’s core positions, those that win the party votes, are its opposition to excessive immigration and to the wasteful war in Ukraine, and the need to repair ties with the Russian Federation. In these aspects, AfD’s political combat bears a close resemblance to Trump’s.
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Restoring ties with Russia and negotiating a settlement of the Ukraine war would be big-enough blows to the deep state’s interests. Russophobia is a deep state perennial, and Ukraine has been the centerpiece these past years of the MICIMATT’s unceasing campaign to subvert the Russian Federation. But the other items on Trump’s list of topics discussed with Putin are not to be dismissed as knick-knacks. Taken together, they indicate Trump’s intention to end the Biden regime’s project to reduce Russia to pariah status by way of total isolation in the community of nations.
“The great history of our nations,” “the great benefit that we will someday have in working together:” This is a comprehensive restoration project, the neo-détente Trump favored during his first term with a lot of additional bulk to it. Implicit in Trump’s rhetoric is an assumption of equality deep staters such as Hillary Clinton have purposely dismissed. (Remember Barack Obama’s condescending description of Russia as a minor regional power?) In the bargain — I especially appreciate this — Trump acknowledged Russia’s role in the Allies’ 1945 victory over the Reich, which U.S. propagandists have disgracefully sought to erase from history at least since John Kerry’s years as Obama’s secretary of state.
The implications here are huge. The Europeans are in a state of shock — Europanic, we may as well start calling it — having sold their souls, their economies, and the well-being of their citizens to the Biden regime’s sanctions program and its cynical use of Ukraine as a battering ram at Russia’s borders. What now for them? Volodymyr Zelensky is more or less out of the conversation now — and at last. Trump, indeed, just dismissed the autocrat of Kiev as “a dictator.” He, Zelensky, appeared at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month as the helpless, hapless taker-of-orders he has always been but pretended not to be. There is much talk now of Trump’s new, improved plans for Russia decisively altering the post–1945 “order,” and I insist on the quotation marks in this reference.
Trump’s proposal for a new détente with Russia was childishly belittled in mainstream media during his first term, this on both sides of the Atlantic — kissed off as a matter of his affection for a dictator and nothing more. There were no significant policy concerns to be considered, no view of a world beyond the binaries the deep state has cultivated since the 1945 victories. We see the same this time. The New York Times coverage, typical of the rest, has been led by Maggie Haberman and Anton Troianovski, the former covering the White House and the latter the Kremlin, and there is no getting a sound report out of either of them. Read the stuff. It is all about Trump playing to his ego and Putin playing Trump with great dollops of flattery. No mention of the new security structure between Russia and the West, which is at bottom the very large and essential question.
Plus ça change, it seems to me so far.
It is far too early to draw conclusions, but I simply do not see the deep state taking this supinely. I have, indeed, been suspicious of Keith Kellogg, the retired general serving as Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, ever since he began, immediately after he was appointed, to bark threats of more sanctions and military action against Russia if Moscow did not accept a settlement favorable to Kiev and its sponsors. In this Kellogg strikes me as just the kind of figure the deep state imposed on Trump last time around — John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, et al — who were in place to subvert every good idea Trump had.
I wonder if Kellogg is not a sign of the subterfuge to come. He was not, I note with approval, on the list of officials Trump dispatched to Riyadh this past week.
And so to more of the watching and waiting.
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Tulsi Gabbard said some surprisingly gutsy things during her hotly contentious confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month. And in view of those surprising things, it was a surprise again to read that she has won approval of her appointment as Trump’s director of national intelligence. Hmmm. What further surprises are in store as she takes up her post?
In mid–January, when Gabbard abruptly announced that she would support the continuation of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, I was among many who were stunned — full of surprises, Ms. Gabbard — by her capitulation on this important question. Section 702, added to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008, authorizes the National Security Agency to surveille Americans without first obtaining court-issued warrants. I described Gabbard at the time as “a figure who has done some good things but who, as is now evident, has no sound political principles, no intellectual discipline, anything that is not negotiable.” I am short of retreating from this judgment. But as I watched segments of her hearings on C–SPAN, it occurred to me that this conclusion may prove premature, too harsh, or both.
Gabbard gave as good as she got — or better, indeed — as her interlocutors drilled in with the righteous pomposity common when a candidate not in perfect conformity with Washington’s orthodoxies sits opposite them.
Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, fairly obsessed on whether Gabbard condemned Edward Snowden as a traitor. The exchange turned into one of those infra-dig “Yes or no, yes or no, yes or no?” scenes until Gabbard, who as a congresswoman sponsored a House resolution calling for all charges against Snowden to be dropped, at last responded handily, “The fact is, he also — even as he broke the law — released information that exposed egregious, illegal and unconstitutional programs.”
That seems to have finished off the ultra-clean cut senator from the Rockies.
It was that way on several occasions during Gabbard’s grilling. Here she is on her controversial talks with Bashar al–Assad while serving in Congress at the height of the CIA’s covert op against the Assad regime in Damascus. The transgression in this case was — oh, my goodness — talking to an adversary. I urge readers to consider Gabbard’s riposte thoughtfully. It goes to that 21st century imperative I note from time to time: To see from the perspectives of others is a sine qua non in international relations now.
Gabbard on this theme:
I asked him tough questions about his own regime’s actions, the use of chemical weapons, and the brutal tactics that were being used against his own people…. I believe that leaders — whether you be in Congress or the president of the United States — can benefit greatly by going and engaging boots on the ground, learning and listening and meeting directly with people, whether they be adversaries or friends.
The exchange that truly captivated me, though, concerned Gabbard’s previous statements that the United States in the course of the covert operation to depose Assad, had supported al–Qaeda, the Islamic State, al–Nusra and other savage jihadists of their kind. “What was your motive,” Senator Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat, wanted to know, especially since Gabbard’s assertions matched — Gasp! — what the Russians and Iranians were also saying at the U.N. and elsewhere. (Curious, or maybe not at all, that it was the Democrats who wielded the sharpest hatchets here.)
Gabbard in reply:
Senator, as someone who enlisted in the military, specifically because of al–Qaeda’s terrorist attack on 9–11, and committing myself and my life to doing what I could do to defeat these terrorists, it was shocking and a betrayal to me and every person who was killed on 9–11, their families, and my brothers and sisters in uniform. When, as a member of Congress, I learned about President Obama’s dual programs that he had begun, really, to overthrow the regime of Syria and being willing to, through the CIA’s Timber Sycamore program, that now has been made public, of working with and arming and equipping al–Qaeda in an effort to overthrow that regime, starting yet another regime-change war in the Middle East.
DoD train-and-equip program, again, begun under President Obama, is widely known, looked at, and studied, that ultimately resulted in over half a billion dollars being used to train who they called “moderate rebels” but were actually fighters working with and aligned with al–Qaeda’s affiliate on the ground in Syria, all to move forward with their regime change and not acknowledging what was obvious at the time and what has unfortunately born true, which was that a regime-change war in Syria, much like the regime-change wars in Iraq, the toppling of Gaddafi [in Libya, 2011] and Mubarak [in Egypt, 2011], while these were all dictators, would likely result in the rise of Islamist extremists like al–Qaeda taking power….
Immanent critique, masterfully practiced. It was something not much short of brilliant to shove this much truth back down the throats of senators who presumed all the deep state’s lies could be deployed to discredit the candidate. There is more to Gabbard’s exchange with Kelly, and it is so exceptional I link that segment of the hearings here.
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There seems no arguing at this point that Trump decided, during his year in the wilderness of Mar-a–Lago, that, on his return to office, he would pursue a well-aimed, carefully calculated course of action against the deep state in as many of its manifestations as he could take on. Kash Patel, a former federal prosecutor, was confirmed this week as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and so is the latest of Trump’s nominees preparing to open another line of attack.
Patel’s appointment has two things in common with Gabbard’s. The FBI, like the intelligence apparatus, was at the very center of the deep state plots that more or less neutered Trump’s first term by way of extravagant disinformation campaigns, breaches of law, and various other forms of corruption. And as Patel made generously plain in the weeks before his Senate confirmation hearings, he, like Gabbard, intends to break with his agency’s entrenched norms. Patel, indeed, has just begun a purge that, if it proceeds as he intends, is certain to go well beyond anything Gabbard may manage.
There is the volte-face in relations with Russia, which Trump and his national security people appear to be consolidating at a remarkable pace since the Feb. 12 telephone call with Putin. And there is Trump’s proposal to convene a summit with Putin and Xi Jinping, a sort of 21st century Yalta, at which he would negotiate with the Russian and Chinese presidents to cut their military budgets by 50%.
Trump’s first mention of this latter idea was a passing reference, a couple of sentences, during a press conference that covered sundry other matters. I took this to be another of his many improvisations — impromptu proposals that seem to come spontaneously into his head in the course of one or another kind of public exchange. I assumed it would go about as far as asserting sovereignty over Greenland. Then came The Washington Post report that Pete Hegseth has ordered the Pentagon to find budget reductions of 8% per year for the next five years. Since then The Associated Press has reported that Trump’s defense secretary wants to see $50 billion in cuts — not quite 6% of the Pentagon’s declared budget — during the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
Taking all this bureaucratic commotion at face value, only deep state denizens could possibly object as a new defense secretary takes a run at the military-industrial monster, or as a new D.N.I. commits to giving the White House “clean” intelligence — clean as in accurate daily briefs untainted as they pass through the soiled mitts of deep state ideologues. And if there is one agency that befouled itself more than any other during the Russiagate years, and again during the operations to keep Trump out of politics and protect Joe Biden from impeachment for his everywhere-you-look corruptions, it is the FBI, from Christopher Wray, its disgraced-in-public director, on down to a lot of special agents.
O.K., three cheers, a lot of people are saying. I would say two, and leave this number open to reduction.
Consider carefully the Hegseth memorandum that went out to top generals and civilian Pentagon officials. There are many categories of expenditure exempted from budget reductions, including but by no means limited to the nuclear modernization project, attack drones, submarines, and — will these Strangeloves never stop?—an “Iron Dome for America.” Hegseth’s declared intent is merely a “realignment” such as we have seen numerous times before.
Two points. One, there are those commentators who now cast Trump as some kind of “revolutionary.” These people should take a long walk and reconsider their thoughts: Pete Hegseth and his boss are not in the business of dismantling the imperium — that last, best hope of which the late Chalmers Johnson wrote. Two, the military-industrial complex has more arms than one of those exotic Buddhist bronzes you see in museums. All 435 congressional districts, every legislator on Capitol Hill, the spooks, the Pentagon itself, the weapons contractors, who knows how many lobbyists: They all have an interest in keeping the MIC ticking over just as it is. Is Hegseth powerful enough to overcome the vigorous resistance that will come from these powerful quarters? What — our question right now — is his bureaucratic constituency such that he will get this done?
It was interesting, as that Colorado senator was heckling Tulsi Gabbard about her view of Edward Snowden, to see the social media posts Snowden sent from Russia. Just say it, he said (I paraphrase) in addressing Gabbard. Just tell them yes, I’m a traitor. It will get you confirmed. This makes perfect sense if you review the confirmation hearings of, say Antony Blinken, as he stood as Biden’s nominee to serve as secretary of state. These hearings are somewhere between rituals and political showmanship. I watched the Blinken proceedings back then on C–SPAN. Such a load of horse droppings I have rarely heard: None of the commitments he made to the assembled senators — diplomacy first, military action last; constant consultation with Congress, etc. — was ever fulfilled and never was he called on any of it.
Gabbard, as earlier recounted, stood her ground and protected her integrity on the Snowden question. But — a big “but” here — her capitulation on Section 702, which she had previously sought to repeal during her years in Congress, remains a critical betrayal of principle, vastly more serious than the Snowden business for the D.N.I.
As to Patel, he presents a determined figure as he speaks publicly about the need to shovel a lot of manure out of the horse barn Wray and others have made of the FBI. Prior to his nomination, Patel declared rather flatly his intention to shut down the FBI’s building in Washington and turn it into “a museum of the deep state.” It does not get much more pointed. And on Friday he announced plans to disperse a thousand special agents from the D.C. headquarters to field offices across the country.
Patel is a lawyer: He is sure to remain within the bounds of the law as he goes at this. But it is an open question altogether whether he will clean out the agency or the agency will, so to say, clean him out. In my read, the deeper Patel goes into the FBI’s dark corners, the more likely he is to encounter resistance comparably fierce to what Hegseth is surely going to find the deeper he drills into the Pentagon budget.
The Trump-as-revolutionary routine is, as we used to say, very high school. Way too overblown. In the matter of the deep state, we have to take the president and his people one question at a time for now. My cheers go to Russia, and an end to the war in Ukraine. These advances are the most consequential to date and, it seems to me, have the best chance of withstanding the counterattacks we are simply wise to expect.
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