Join as a member—or become a founding member.

The fourth branch

The 50th official, John Bolton, served as National Security Advisor in Trump’s first administration, though Bolton has been highly critical of Trump ever since.

These weren’t just any intelligence officials; they’ve held some of the United States’s most senior national-security posts—including three directors and two acting directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, along with one director of national intelligence. Meanwhile, Trump has nominated long-time critics of America’s national-security state to head up the United States Intelligence Community and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And he’s planning on asserting extensive control over the federal bureaucracy more broadly—having already signed an order eliminating job protections for up to 50,000 federal employees and allowing for their replacement with handpicked loyalists.

The new administration’s unifying language for this swift, aggressive set of initiatives is that it is finally and truly taking on the “deep state.” It’s language that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s listened to those around Trump for years, even back to his first term. But what exactly do they mean by it—and what exactly does taking it on imply?

Hugh Wilford is a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of CIA: An Imperial History and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. Wilford says there’s a curious intellectual history to the language of the “deep state”; there’s also no small measure of truth to this language. But the practical reality it expresses in the new U.S. administration is a specific clash, with specific contours, between the president and elements within America’s national-security state. As Trump’s cabinet picks suggest, prosecuting that conflict is a priority for him. Still, Wilford says, there are reasons—both on the horizon and already within Trump’s agenda—why he’s apt to find the American intelligence community far too useful to topple …

• “[The idea] appears to have originated in scholarship about Turkey and Egypt, where it described how military officers work together with their civilian allies to influence politics. Then it cropped up at an academic conference in Australia, attended by a Berkeley professor, Peter Dale Scott, who started using it in his writings and talking about it in right-leaning media—including on Alex Jones’s conspiracy-focused InfoWars radio show. Soon enough, Breitbart got hold of it; next, Fox News host Sean Hannity. So the ‘deep state’ was a rather obscure academic concept that acquired an unexpected purchase on the popular imagination.”
• “The CIA has committed excesses—but they’ve typically carried out such excesses, if not at the explicit behest of the White House, then at least on its implicit request. The Central Intelligence Agency follows White House orders more often than it behaves like a “rogue elephant,” as Frank Church, who chaired a congressional committee investigating intelligence abuses in the mid-1970s, put it. Church’s phrase really took hold of people’s imaginations—and partly because there’s really something to it: America’s intelligence agencies truly have committed domestic abuses.”
• “The current moment is unprecedented. Some presidents, especially John Kennedy, were highly suspicious of the power and influence of the founding and longtime director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Almost all presidents have expressed some form of unease about what ‘those guys out at Langley’—the CIA—are up to. … Langley’s biggest conflict with the White House was probably with Nixon, but even that falls short of the current level of mutual hostility. What’s going on now is really remarkable: Former CIA Director John Brennan criticized Trump in very harsh words; in return, Trump’s people sharply criticized Brennan. The hostility is mutual and visceral. I can’t think of a comparable historical example.”

Planning your next break or just feeling the urge to escape for a while?

And yet German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said that the Christian Democrats’ leader, Friedrich Merz, had made an “unforgivable mistake” and had crossed “boundaries that a statesman should not overstep.”

The offense? To pass the motion, Merz relied on votes from the Alternative für Deutschland, a populist-right party with extensive ties to Germany’s far right. For many years, all of Germany’s mainstream parties had agreed not to work with the AfD, either in sponsoring legislation or including them in a governing coalition—a consensus they’ve referred to as der Brandmauer, or “the firewall.” But the vote on the immigration motion ended it.

Why did the Christian Democrats do this?

Last March, just after AfD became the second-most popular party in Germany, Liana Fix looked at the reasons for their rise—and saw two things that likely influenced the Christian Democrats.

One is that German public opinion on immigration has been consistently moving toward the views of the AfD, which has focused on the issue for more than a decade. Polls showed that 66 percent of Germans supported Merz’s plans—including 56 percent of the voters for Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats.

The second thing is the transformation of German politics in the context of an ongoing shift across Europe. The European political landscape is now fragmenting, as small new parties emerge on the right and left. One major effect is to leave traditional center-right parties like the Christian Democrats with increasingly fewer options for partners to form majority governments or pass legislation—meaning that working with the AfD would begin to look less like a taboo and more like practical politics.

—Michael Bluhm

• The United States has launched a trade war with its immediate neighbors Canada and Mexico, triggering extensive retaliations. “We’re certainly not looking to escalate but we will stand up for Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Saturday.
• Thousands have been forced to flee their homes on account of massive flooding in North Queensland, Australia. Nick Dametto, a state member of parliament, says the inundation is happening “in places we haven’t seen water before, or for a very long time.”
• After closing for renovations, an aquarium in Japan has managed to cheer up a lonely sunfish by taping photos of human faces to its tank: “It’s curious and would swim up to visitors when they approached the tank,” according to Mai Kato, a member of staff at the aquarium.

• The world of entertainment and media drives new trends in business and the economy. It’s also complex and fast-moving. How to keep up? Read TheFutureParty, a free newsletter with the latest developments and insights from inside the industry. Sign up here.

Please send questions or comments here.

Interested in getting your teams or students

access to The Signal? Please be in touch.

Find us on Linkedin and X.

Add us to your address book.

Unsubscribe here.

© 2024