The Deep State Comes Out Of The Shadows
October 21, 2019
4 min
read
I&I
Editorial
Two
news stories published over the weekend had the same message. The State
Department was out to get President Donald Trump after suffering years of
“frustration.” At least these denizens of the deep state are being honest.
Politico’s
2,000-word story – titled “The Revenge of the State
Department” – begins by reporting on the fact that “current and former
Foreign Service officers have defied Trump administration orders and trudged to
Capitol Hill to testify before House committees investigating whether to
impeach the president.”
These
officials, the story says, are “furious,” “terrified,” “incredulous,”
“disappointed,” “fed up,” “livid,” with a “deep well of resentment,” in an
“unbearable” situation.
Some of
them, Politico reports, are using the hearings as a “platform to air long-held
grievances over Trump.”
And
their colleagues are “hailing them as heroes.”
What,
exactly, are these career State Department bureaucrats angry about?
They’re
mad that several of them “were demoted or sidelined following attacks by the
conservative media.”
They
complain about what they see as Trump’s “dangerous brand of diplomatic
malpractice.”
They’re
upset that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo didn’t publicly support Marie
Yavonovitch after Trump removed her from her post as U.S. ambassador to
Ukraine, and that Pompeo “is willing to sell out the department to keep favor
with Trump.”
They’re
also enraged that Pompeo gave a speech to the American Association of Christian
Counselors and talked openly about the importance of his faith. That, according
to Politico, “troubled many diplomats.”
William
Burns, deputy secretary of State under President Barack Obama, declared
in an article in Foreign
Affairs said to have “turned heads” in Washington that Trump’s
treatment of State Department officials was akin to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s
“savage campaign against ‘disloyalty’ in the State Department.”
Burns
conveniently overlooks the fact that there were communists in the
State Department. And Pompeo remarked that he appeared to be
auditioning to be Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s secretary of state.
The AP story is more of the
same. Diplomats are fuming because of Trump’s push to cut budgets and staff,
and this is “a moment of catharsis.”
So what
we have here are career bureaucrats who don’t like the way Trump is conducting
foreign policy. Why? Because they know better than some outsider who doesn’t
play according to the rules. There is no question that many of them would be
delighted to see Trump removed from office, not because he did anything
impeachable, but because they can’t abide by the 2016 election results.
Trump
Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had it exactly right when he said that “career
bureaucrats … are saying, ‘You know what? I don’t like President Trump’s
politics so I’m going to participate in this witch hunt.’”
Add
this to what we’ve learned about how the intelligence community and the FBI
have tried to undermine the Trump administration – events chillingly recounted
in Andrew McCarthy’s must-read book “Ball of
Collusion.” In it, he shows how the liberal Washington establishment
“exploited its control of law-enforcement and intelligence to help Clinton and
undermine Trump. This is a scandalous abuse of power.”
Trump’s
critics say that his claims about a deep state are the result of his paranoid
delusions. But after what the country has witnessed over the past three years,
and now the bragging by State Department officials bent on getting Trump out of
Washington, it’s the denial of the deep state that is delusional.
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