For much of the past decade, President Donald Trump and his allies have been waging a war against the so-called "deep state"—and the conflict has only escalated since Trump's return to power.
There's no official definition of the term, of course. Loosely, the deep state is the collection of bureaucrats, contractors, intelligence officials, and other official or even quasi-official entities that more-or-less retain their power no matter who occupies the White House or which party controls Congress. But it's more specific than that. Implicit in talk about the deep state is the idea that certain individuals outside the official chain of command wield the true power in the federal government, and that they frequently ignore or thwart the will of the people's elected and appointed representatives. In a nutshell, the deep state is undemocratic and unaccountable, even to powerful figures in the federal government.
Trump has cast the deep state as one of the chief antagonists of his populist movement, in no small part because such movements always require enemies (and the less well-defined the better). Much of what the second Trump administration has done so far—from the mass firings of federal employees to the appointment of unorthodox leaders at the Pentagon, FBI, and other key outposts—is probably best understood as a direct assault upon this perceived opponent.
