WASHINGTON – Sen. John Cornyn earned a spot on Donald Trump’s naughty list by saying the GOP should pick someone else for president in 2024.
The naughty list has a label, and Trump’s campaign applied it, asserting the senior Republican senator from Texas is part of the “deep state.”
That’s the purported cabal of FBI agents, Pentagon brass, spymasters and bureaucrats Trump says tried to derail and sabotage his presidency – the boogeyman at the heart of Trump’s campaign and of the rightwing QAnon conspiracy theory.
Trump has applied the term liberally, though hardly ever against a Republican elected official.
And he’s put a target on the “deep state” since launching his White House comeback bid in November.
“Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state,” Trump told a March 25 rally in Waco. “The thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”
Cornyn is hardly a faceless bureaucrat and historically, the concept of a deceitful state-within-a-state has excluded high profile elected officials like him.
He’s been the No. 2 Senate Republican and remains a top lieutenant to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He won his fourth Senate term in 2020, collecting 73,000 more votes in Texas than Trump did.
He campaigned with and for Trump that year. He defended Trump throughout his presidency, though – like many others – he distanced himself from the most offensive tweets and comments, and some policies.
He voted to acquit Trump at two impeachment trials.
Scorecards from the NRA and other groups show impeccable conservative bona fides.
Then, the transgression: Last Thursday, Cornyn told The Dallas Morning News that Trump’s “time has passed,” he can’t win a general election, and the party should find an alternative nominee.
Within hours, Trump’s campaign spokesman called him part of the “deep state rotting through government.”
Cornyn hasn’t responded.
It’s an accusation Trump himself has faced, incidentally.
“Trump has worked within the system,” Ron Paul, the former Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman, asserted on CNN in May 2016. “He has been part of the deep state that controls the politics.”
Widespread belief
An ABC/Washington Post poll three months after Trump took office showed that roughly half the public believed a shadow government from the Pentagon, spy agencies and other agencies tries “to secretly manipulate government policy.”
In a March 2018 Monmouth Poll, 74% of Americans said a “deep state” definitely or probably exists.
An NPR/Ipsos poll in late 2020 found that 39% of Americans believed a deep state had worked to undermine Trump.
That includes Sen. Ted Cruz who, unlike Cornyn, has echoed Trump’s assertions of hidden forces within the government.
“I’m here to tell you the deep state is alive and well,” Cruz said at the conservative Hudson Institute in September 2019. Its top objective at the time, he said, was to keep Trump from scrapping the “disastrous Obama Iran nuclear deal. Every single day the deep state at Treasury and State is working to frustrate President Trump’s decision.”
Trump has used the “deep state” as both punching bag and punchline.
During the COVID-19 crisis, he accused “the deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA” of slow-walking vaccine and treatment tests until after the 2020 election – putting their desire to hurt his reelection prospects above the lives of millions.
Earlier in the pandemic, he teased the nation’s chief diplomat, Mike Pompeo, saying he needed to leave a briefing early to get back to the “Deep State Department.”
This is the third presidential campaign in which Trump has vowed to “drain the swamp” and root out the nefarious, if possibly mythical, deep state.
Among his plans if reelected: purge thousands of mid-level career civil servants and replace them with loyalists. The mechanism would be an executive order Trump issued two weeks before Election Day 2020 called “Schedule F.”
The order, which Biden blocked, would reclassify as many as 50,000 positions as political appointees, on grounds they have some role in making policy. Such appointees serve at the president’s will.
The change would vastly expand presidential patronage and with it, control over FDA, EPA, the Education and Homeland Security departments, USDA and scores of other regulatory agencies.
Trump critics say he tried to engineer his own “deep state” by planting loyalists throughout the bureaucracy in his final months.
“Under the guise of stopping a coup that doesn’t exist… Trump is creating a shadow government without transparency, without democratic norms, without any kind of public process,” David Rohde, author of “In Deep: The FBI, The CIA, And The Truth About America’s ‘Deep State,’” told NPR in early 2020. “He’s creating a deep state of his own.”
Turkish origin
The term “deep state” originated in Turkey a century ago.
Kemal Atatürk, who became Turkey’s first president in 1923, created a secular state to replace the Ottoman Empire. For generations, high-level elements in the military and security services became its guardians, justifying brutal crackdowns on fundamentalists and others who threatened the political order.
The term took root in the United States around 2013.
A book published that year titled “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry,” looked at the growth of U.S. surveillance programs since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The title, co-author Marc Ambinder said, referred to a security state apparatus that – rather than stymying presidents – “was more of an enabler,” executing directives without congressional oversight.
That’s the opposite of “when Donald Trump began to complain of a deep state against him, a government within a government actively working to frustrate the will of the executive branch,” he said.
Two months after the book was published, National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked a trove of classified documents exposing widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The left and right alike began to invoke “deep state” to refer to eavesdropping by a federal Leviathan.
Ironically and perhaps unintentionally, Trump’s complaints about the deep state do track the traditional, Turkish meaning – insiders who enforce norms.
His own spy chief, though, said under oath he was unaware of any such entity.
“I don’t know what that is,” John Ratcliffe, then a congressman from a district east of Dallas, testified at his confirmation hearing. He was about to become director of national intelligence, and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., asked whether he agreed with Trump that a “deep state” controls the nation’s spy agencies and law enforcement.
Russiagate and deep state
Trump has regularly accused the deep state of trying to cheat him out of the 2016 election, citing the FBI’s investigation during that campaign into Russian meddling.
James Comey, the FBI director he fired shortly after taking office, oversaw that investigation. He’s sought to debunk Trump’s assertion.
In a May 2019 Washington Post column, Comey argued that if he or anyone else wanted to tarnish Trump during the campaign, they wouldn’t have kept quiet as they sought links between him and Russia.
Their discretion undermines “Trump’s whole `treason’ narrative,” Comey wrote. “A leak would have been very harmful to candidate Trump. Worst deep-state conspiracy ever.”
The term got new life in the past week when special counsel John Durham released his 316-page report. After four years of effort, he found no evidence of a Justice Department or FBI conspiracy against Trump. The report did criticize the FBI for opening the probe based on vague and uncorroborated tips.
That hasn’t stopped Trump defenders from taking the report as affirmation of the conspiracy theory.
“A corrupt FBI tried to rig the outcome by favoring one candidate over the other,” wrote New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin, in a column titled “Stabbed in the back by the Deep State.” “That’s the bottom line and everything else is detail.”
‘Rigged’ system
Throughout the 2016 campaign he cast himself as the champion of Americans beleaguered by a “rigged” system controlled by unseen and malevolent forces.
Trump first used the term “deep state” in June 2017. As documented by Factba.se, a service that tracked his presidential utterances, he retweeted Fox News host Sean Hannity, promoting a segment on “the Deep State’s allies in the media.”
Trump invoked the term on his own just after Thanksgiving that year.
He complained the FBI wasn’t following up on “Crooked Hillary emails.” “Why aren’t our deep State authorities looking at this? Rigged and corrupt?” he tweeted.
Since the term entered Trump’s lexicon, he’s routinely invoked it, most often in connection to the FBI probe into Russia’s election meddling.
Trump calls it “Russia, Russia, Russia,” a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.” And he’s often pointed at a trio of former FBI officials: former deputy director Andrew McCabe, former agent Peter Strzok, the lead investigator, and former lawyer Lisa Page. Text messages released in late 2017 showed Strzok and Page flirting as they disparaged Trump.
“These are nasty people. They are nasty and dishonest,” Trump told Ohio Republicans at an Aug. 24, 2018, dinner. “Is that deep state or what?”
Throughout the 2018 campaign he linked Democrats to “deep state radicals, establishment cronies, and their fake news allies.”
In Billings, Mont., on Sept. 6, 2018, he complained of “unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself.”
Cornyn is not unelected, of course.
He’s won his Senate seat four times – twice by 12 percentage points, once by a whopping 27, and most recently by 9.
