Posted on May 28, 2026
Donald And The Deep State
Iran leaks ought to teach him something
by
Daniel Clark
Strange,
we don't hear President Trump say much about "the deep state" these days, even
as it works to undermine him in the war against Iran. Perhaps that's because he doesn't recognize
what the deep state is when it comes to foreign policy, because he has
misidentified it so consistently for so long.
The deep
state is the term that Trump uses to describe elements within the federal
bureaucracy that abuse their powers in pursuit of their own objectives, in
opposition to those of the president. He
and his supporters have contended that this entity is comprised in some
significant part of Bushian establishment
Republicans, reacting like antibodies to those who threaten their
orthodoxy. This view is, to put it
diplomatically, contrary to reality.
It should have gone without saying
that conservative traditionalists are not the ones upsetting the constitutional
order by running a renegade operation within the executive branch. It is, of course, liberal bureaucrats who
subordinate their public service to their political activism, as we have known
at least as far back as the 1996 Gary Aldrich book Unlimited Access: An FBI
Agent Inside the Clinton White House.
It is also they who can count on the complicity of the media that is
necessary to succeed in subverting the Commander-in-Chief.
Loath as
Trump may be to see past his hatred of the Bush family, it should be clear to
him by now that President George W. Bush was the arch enemy of the deep state,
and not its evil puppet master. To cite
just one example that is of particular relevance today, Bush considered a
military strike on Iran late in his presidency, for the purpose of preventing
that nation from producing a nuclear weapon.
As if on cue, the National Intelligence Council, a group of analysts
within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released a National
Intelligence Estimate entitled "Iran's Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities." That report began with the highly
counterintuitive statement that, "We judge with high confidence that in fall
2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." The entirety of the report was more nuanced
than that, but the made-to-order headline was enough to forestall any potential
military operation.
That
incident was a harbinger of the subterfuge that Trump is facing today. Late last June, almost immediately after
Operation Midnight Hammer, a Defense Intelligence Agency report was leaked to
the press, claiming that the bombing raid only set the Iranian nuclear program
back by several months. More recently, a
New York Times report, citing anonymous sources, claimed that Iran's
missile stockpiles remain 70 percent intact.
Another leaked report claims the Iranians have already largely
reconstituted their military capabilities.
Still another suggests that Iran is better able to withstand the
economic impact of the war than America is.
If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been presenting an unrealistically
rosy impression of how the war has been going, the gathering media narrative is
doing the same thing, but from an enemy point of view.
Most disturbingly, the story was
leaked on Good Friday that one of our airmen was missing after having been shot
down, a revelation that needlessly informed the Iranians of his plight so that
they could try to get to him first.
Thankfully, they didn't, or else the Air Force colonel might have been
captured, and heaven only knows what else.
One would like to assume that this was not the leaker's intention, but
why wouldn't it be, if the overriding purpose was to thwart an American
military effort?
Perhaps
Trump could better understand what he's dealing with if he could take a fresh,
objective look at the role of the deep state in the war in Iraq. Contingency plans for the invasion of that
country were leaked onto the front pages of major newspapers. Evidence of Saddam's WMDs was concealed in
part by the deliberately gullible assumptions our own officials made about his
dual-use equipment and materials, as if deadly chemical precursors found in a
camouflaged ammunition dump might have been meant for innocent civilian
purposes. Official government reports
took their conclusions straight from the mouths of Saddam and his officers,
without any corroborating evidence.
Reports on Saddam's WMDs and his involvement in international terrorism
were introduced by heavily politicized summaries that contradicted much of the
substance of those same reports.
Remember
the Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame episode. In
2002, Joe Wilson was a former ambassador with no current position in
government, when he traveled to Niger to investigate whether Saddam had
purchased uranium from that country. He
had been sent on this mission by the CIA, upon the recommendation of his wife,
Valerie Plame, who was an analyst with the agency. Wilson conducted a couple dozen interviews,
and became satisfied that no such purchase had taken place.
The
following January, President Bush said in his State of the Union Address, "The
British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa," a claim that would become the basis for the
great "16 words" scandal. Wilson pretended
to refute this in an article he wrote for The New York Times, even
though his trip and the president's statement were not necessarily in
conflict. Bush had only said that Saddam
"sought" uranium, not that he acquired it.
Besides, there are other African countries that produce uranium, and
Wilson had not visited them all. Furthermore,
the British government stood by its conclusion, making the 16 words
unassailably true.
In the
aftermath of Saddam's overthrow, the question was rendered moot anyway, because
our military captured 500 tons of low-enriched uranium in Iraq, as well as one
of Saddam's secret recordings, in which he and two of his scientists discussed
a new method of uranium enrichment. His
nuclear ambitions were not seriously disputable, regardless of what some diplomat
might have told Wilson over a cup of tea.
Because Wilson had falsely claimed
that it was Vice President Dick Cheney who sent him on his mission, Cheney's
chief of staff Scooter Libby was explaining to reporter Bob Novak that this
wasn't true, when he referenced the fact that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA,
mentioning her by name. Then, the deep
state narrative became that the administration had revealed Plame's secret
identity as retaliation for her husband's having blown the whistle on The Big
Lie. Never mind that Plame had been unsecretively working in an office at CIA headquarters in
Langley since 1997, and that Libby, though he would later be convicted of
secondary, process crimes, was never charged with blowing her nonexistent
cover. Trump, who pardoned Libby during
his first term, should have no trouble recognizing the Wilson-Plame operation as
a prime example of the deep state in action.
During the
2004 presidential campaign, Joe Wilson publicly supported John Kerry, who in
1971 famously accused his fellow American soldiers of fictitious atrocities in
a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Valerie Plame would unsuccessfully run for
Congress in New Mexico in 2020, as a Democrat and a leading proponent of the
Green New Deal. These liberal activists
were arguably the two most famous deep-staters of all time, but how many like
them are anonymously toiling away in bureaus throughout the executive branch?
These are
the kinds of challenges President Trump is facing, and we can expect them to
increase in intensity as the war goes on.
He obviously understands that his efforts are being threatened by the
deep state. After all, he's the one who
coined the term. He has responded by
trying to deter future leaks through the intensive use of polygraph tests and
non-disclosure agreements, but those will be of limited effectiveness unless he
has learned to look for the right people.
It's time he figured out that the inhabitants of the deep state are not
dastardly warmongering neocons, they are not harrumphing establishment Republicans,
and they most certainly are not loyal to former president George W. Bush.
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