JUNE 10, 2024

A Deep State of His

Own
How Trump Plans to Weaponize America’s
Bureaucracy
J O N D . M I C H A EL S

Copyright © 2024 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint
this article, please visit ForeignAffairs.com/Permissions. Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/deep-
state-his-own
 A Deep State of His Own

A Deep State of His

Own
How Trump Plans to Weaponize America’s
Bureaucracy
J O N D . M I C H A EL S

I
n March 2023, Donald Trump kicked off his third presidential run in
Waco, Texas. His arrival coincided with the 30th anniversary of the
deadly confrontation that took place nearby between heavily armed
Branch Davidian cultists and federal law enforcement. When Trump took
to the stage, he framed the 2024 race as “the final battle.” In this battle, he
said, “either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.”
Lest anyone doubt his role, he announced: “I am your warrior, I am your
justice. … For those who have been wronged and betrayed ... I am your
retribution.”
In this rambling speech in a city many still associate with one of the
most violent anti-government standoffs in modern American history,
Trump underlined his intent to harness the full power of the government
upon his return to the White House. He would rely on loyalists within
federal agencies to pursue an aggressive agenda, which would include,
among other things, authorizing the largest deportation program in U.S.
history, purging supposed “thugs and criminals” from the justice system

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(an apparent reference to prosecutors and other law enforcement

personnel who will not bend to Trump’s will), policing women’s sports to
prevent transgender women from participating, and censoring classroom
instruction to ban certain kinds of lessons about race from U.S. schools.
This iteration of Trump is a far cry from the one who won the presidency
in 2016. Back then, Trump and his surrogates swore to “deconstruct the
administrative state” and thereby disable and deplete government agencies.
Now, the goal is profoundly different.
Trump no longer casts himself as a brash entrepreneur vexed by
meddlesome government regulators but as a messianic strongman keen on
maximizing state power to reshape American society, culture, and law.
And that means his relationship to the apparatus of the state will be
radically different. His plan, backed by a powerful network of right-wing
lawyers and activists in line for senior appointments should Trump prevail
in November, is not to obliterate federal regulatory and law enforcement
agencies but to colonize them, radicalize them, and weaponize them to do
their commander in chief ’s bidding. Instead of eradicating a purported
deep state, Trump is angling to create a real one—with the aim of
producing a government more powerful and partisan than the country has
ever known.
THE SHALLOW STATE

The malevolent, subterranean American deep state that Trump and his
supporters have been railing against since 2016 does not, in fact, exist. But
that will not stop Trump from inventing one from scratch. Scholars and
analysts have long used the term to describe powerful ministries and state-
run utilities whose entrenched officers do one of two things: either they
clash routinely with elected leaders, denying them the ability to govern
democratically; or they coddle them, insulating those leaders from legal or
political reckonings. The term has aptly described power dynamics in
countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where militaries
maintained close control of bureaucratic and political systems even when
civilians were nominally in charge. Scholars have rarely used it to describe
the United States. And rightly so.

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The United States does not have a deep state in large part because the
U.S. bureaucracy is notoriously weak. Federal agencies are very much
under the thumb of elected presidents and their politically appointed
administrators. There are no state-owned utilities of consequence and,
with the notable but practically neolithic exception of the Civil War, the
country has no culture or history of bureaucrats, military officers, or other
government functionaries engaging in subversive, usurping, or otherwise
anti-democratic projects. Careful observers of American administrative
governance point to a different reality: the United States’ bureaucracies are
chronically underfunded, understaffed, often micromanaged by the White
House, and regularly trussed up by Congress and the courts. Far from
being dangerously deep, the American state may be understood as
perilously shallow, a near-chronic condition enabled by successive
generations of Americans viewing government with great suspicion. The
state is already stretched thin when called upon to meet day-to-day
demands, never mind when it is expected to respond to acute crises
ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the serial coups across the
Sahel.
And yet, that state featured as a rhetorical punching bag in both
Trump’s first presidential campaign and his first term in office. Although
he pledged to “drain the swamp” in his 2016 campaign, and his strategist
Steve Bannon vowed to “deconstruct the administrative state” a month
after his inauguration, it took Trump some time in office to warm up to
the baseless claim that the country he now ruled was in thrall to a
perfidious “deep state.” But even then, it was all innuendo and talk, and,
perhaps just as important, talk that sounded vaguely familiar—a more
belligerent, coarser remix of classic Republican themes. Old-school
business elites have long lamented overzealous government regulation,
derided pointy-headed functionaries, and sought to shrink, starve, or
defang U.S. bureaucracy. And traditional isolationists have long
complained about the influence of diplomats, military officers, and defense
contractors who, they allege, entangle the country in international affairs
at the expense of protecting the homeland. Trump’s “Make America Great

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Again” (MAGA) movement tapped into a nostalgia for those

foundational precepts of mid-twentieth-century conservatism.
These attacks produced few meaningful changes.
In his first term, Trump achieved very little by way
The deep state does
of shrinking the overall size of government,
not exist, but that slowing the pace of regulation, or disciplining
will not stop federal employees who didn’t toe the MAGA line.
Trump from (Quite a few of the right-wing judges he appointed
inventing it. have, however, picked up Trump’s mantle and
continue to battle the bureaucracy.) Worse—for
Trump, that is—those government officials whom Trump and his
surrogates slurred and slandered as disloyal, including Anthony Fauci, the
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and
Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, regularly
outmaneuvered him while taking care not to show him up for the good of
the nation.
But Trump nonetheless succeeded in conjuring the deep state as an
adversary. Huge numbers of his supporters found his rhetorical campaigns
against government workers and government institutions eminently
persuasive. As a result, many Americans now accept the idea that, per
Trump, government officials are un-American, incompetent, and corrupt.
The power of this conspiratorial mindset has compromised the country’s
long-standing commitments to science, national security, democracy, and
the rule of law. For without those fantastical impressions, Trump would
have had a much harder time parrying the damning findings of the special
counsel investigation into possible collusion between his camp and the
Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election; muddying the prosecution
of key surrogates; discrediting a formidable group of diplomats and
military officers whose damning evidence led to Trump’s first
impeachment (for trying to extort political cooperation from the
Ukrainian government) in 2019; and, in 2020, fomenting anger against
public health officials whose COVID-19 policies were politically
inconvenient, against educators and bureaucrats he alleged were engaged

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in campaigns of “woke indoctrination,” and, ultimately, against election

officials certifying results for Joe Biden.
Trump and those he empowered and emboldened have already managed
to push out many capable public-sector workers at all levels of
government. Record numbers of federal senior civil servants quit as early
as 2017, and by the time of Biden’s inauguration in 2021, several key
agencies had been quite literally decimated. Amid this drain of talent and
experience, which has only made the American state shallower, many of
those still answering the call to daily service are now not only devising exit
strategies in case Trump prevails this November but also steeling
themselves for his possible retribution.
LOCKED AND LOADED

The candidate already has a governing blueprint in place: Project 2025:

Mandate for Leadership, a 900-odd page manifesto published by the
Heritage Foundation. Unlike the Trump of 2017, who was truly winging
it (and who began his presidency surrounded by a mixture of cronies and
mainstream Republicans), a Trump in the White House in 2025 will be
far more equipped to advance an especially strident agenda from day one.
Having remade the party in his own image (while banishing those he now
labels RINOs—Republicans In Name Only) and having partnered with
dexterous and determined right-wing ideologues from such think tanks
and advocacy organizations as Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, the
Claremont Institute, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, Trump is
gearing up to settle scores, reverse the modern civil rights revolution, and
reestablish the political, cultural, and economic supremacy of white,
Christian men. Ironically, to achieve his and his allies’ aims, Trump must
will into being that chimera that he has relentlessly assailed: a powerful
bureaucracy loyal to party over country.
First and foremost, Trump aims to push out civil servants who have
demonstrated abiding commitments to professional public administration
and to the rule of law. The Biden administration recently promulgated a
rule that protects career government workers from being reclassified as at-
will employees, precisely to thwart Trump’s plans to summarily dismiss

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tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of federal workers. But there is still

plenty a MAGA administration could do to disrupt and, with time, purge
the bureaucracy. Project 2025 prescribes, with varying degrees of
specificity, ways to exercise greater political control over senior managers.
Those senior managers would then use extant performance-review
procedures to more quickly and aggressively weed out unsatisfactory
employees. After all, in a government bureaucracy not driven by profits
and losses, managers have considerable discretion to decide what
constitutes unsatisfactory work when conducting performance reviews—
and could use that latitude, as they did under the nineteenth-century
“spoils system,” to strongly suggest to bureaucrats the benefits that would
come with internalizing and championing the political preferences of the
White House.
Any campaign that requires targeting individual employees, however
successful, would not immediately transform a government unit’s political
culture. Right-wing activists and Trump allies therefore want an incoming
Trump administration to seek legislative authority that would allow the
president to strip agencies or bureaus believed to be particularly hostile to
MAGA policies of their regulatory or enforcement responsibilities and to
transfer those powers to more receptive departments.
To further concentrate state power in the
presidency, Trump, via the Justice Department,
To achieve his
could side with plaintiffs challenging the
aims, Trump will constitutionality of so-called independent agencies
need a powerful —particularly the Securities and Exchange
bureaucracy loyal to Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and
party over country. the Federal Communications Commission. Given
the Supreme Court’s current composition and its
recent jurisprudence, a majority could agree that such agencies are
unconstitutional—precisely because of their insulation from the president
—and hold that the heretofore independent commissioners must serve
only at the pleasure of the president. Rulings of those sorts might well
engender the greatest consolidation of presidential power since the New

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Deal. In a further push in the direction of a truly imperial presidency,

Trump’s advisers want to prioritize legislation that would allow the
president to more easily terminate FBI directors.
Among the reasons why MAGA Republicans are so insistent on
maximizing presidential power is because they aim to use the state to
effect a cultural transformation that can only be described as Christian
nationalist in orientation. To propel this agenda, Trump’s team is eager to
install a phalanx of political appointees right away. Every presidential
transition team struggles to fully staff up, squandering valuable time and
political capital in the honeymoon period of the presidency. This was
certainly Trump’s experience the first time around, when it took years for
him to install like-minded officers in key positions across federal agencies
and inside the White House—and even then, some holdover officials
remaining on the job were well positioned to curb his most execrable
impulses, including commandeering the Justice Department to overturn
the 2020 election.
The urgency to ensure tight ideological alignment between the president
and his appointees is much greater this time around. Unlike in 2017,
Trump is equipped with radically transgressive and politically unpopular
goals—practically all of his signature policy proposals poll extremely
poorly. Since at least December 2023, the Heritage Foundation, along
with some 80 other right-wing groups, has been recruiting and screening
candidates to staff a Trump presidency. Through a centralized recruitment
clearinghouse, prospective officeholders can signal their interest and
worthiness by answering a series of questions that test their ideological
commitments, policy preferences, and political influences. As Heritage’s
president, Kevin Roberts, told The New York Times, his organization “is
committed to recruiting and training a deep bench of patriotic Americans
who are ready to serve their country on day one.”
The MAGA movement needs a robust, fiercely loyal bureaucracy to
conduct its broad, unpopular, aggressive, and, in many instances, legally
suspect regulatory agenda. Indeed, nothing short of a deep state
immunized from law and external politics would be willing and able to

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undertake it. Such a state will be primed, as Trump has called for, to
conduct mass deportations, prosecute the president’s political rivals,
complete and then police a wall along the southern border, mobilize the
military to fight crime in U.S. cities, and curtail access not only to
currently legal and safe abortion medications but also certain similarly
legal and safe contraceptive pills. In addition, Trump’s administrative
personnel must be willing and able to intensely scrutinize state medical
record-keeping on abortions, which some of Trump’s advisers believe
should be shared with Republican-run states to crack down on “abortion
tourism.”
THE DEEP STATE OF THEIR DREAMS

Entrenching tribalist political loyalties takes time, of course, particularly

because such highly partisan entrenchment isn’t coded into the DNA of
American bureaucracy. To the contrary, time and time again, civil servants
in the United States have proven themselves to be faithful, resourceful
stewards of the American people and the laws passed in their name. That’s
largely why Trump and his allies were so hell-bent on reclassifying all civil
servants as at-will employees—and why the Biden administration’s
preemptive move to impede any such reclassification was widely hailed by
those alarmed by the prospects of a second Trump presidency.
Short of moving new legislation through Congress to supersede the
Biden administration’s administrative rule, Trump and his allies may not
be able to build the deep state of their dreams—at least not in four years.
MAGA Republicans need more time. That’s why Trump and his allies are
working to make future Democratic victories less likely. Rather than strive
to hold the presidency through good-faith attempts at political persuasion,
Project 2025 calls for the termination of the U.S. Cyber Command’s
“participation in federal efforts to ‘fortify’ U.S. elections.” Heritage’s
governing manifesto also proposes relieving the Department of Homeland
Security of its work identifying misinformation and disinformation on
social media. Unchecked misinformation and disinformation campaigns
have tended to favor MAGA candidates and policies.

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The deepest of deep states, as traditionally understood, encompass more

than just federal workforces. Loyal backers in local government bodies and
private institutions further solidify a faction’s control over national politics.
Soon after the January 6 insurrection, right-wing organizations, well
aware of the decentralized nature of election administration in the United
States, began recruiting and training partisan loyalists to apply for staff
and volunteer positions on county election boards. Right-wing donors
have invested millions of dollars in supporting these efforts, which are
occurring at a time when vacancies have reached alarming heights. Given
the many, almost exclusively right-wing campaigns of political violence
and harassment directed at election workers in 2020 and again in 2022,
resignations by Democrats and mainstream Republicans alike have
become commonplace—and it’s been hard sledding to get similarly
minded citizens to take their place.
Similar dynamics are at play when it comes to stacking school boards
with Christian nationalist candidates who take a dim view of inclusive
academics and extracurricular activities. Having more partisans at the local
level not only increases compliance with right-wing federal directives of
the kind prescribed by Project 2025 but also helps nurture a farm team of
future state and national leaders.
AGAINST THE ODDS

The allure of Trump buoys an otherwise sinking Republican Party

weighed down by unpopular policies, scandals, criminal charges, and
incompetence. Under these circumstances, it wouldn’t be a boast for
Trump to claim, “After me, the flood.” And that’s precisely why his
institutionalizing of a deep state is such a crucial and alarming political
project. Only an antidemocratic institutional apparatus can preserve the
influence and power of this increasingly unattractive political movement,
which appeals to a rapidly diminishing slice of the American public.
There’s still time to stop Trump before he leads the country further
down the road to authoritarianism—but not much. The American people
have the opportunity to vanquish him and his agenda this November. But
assuming that the twice-impeached convicted felon prevails, it will be

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exceedingly difficult to thwart his realization of a deep state, not to

mention the policies that emanate from it. With a MAGA-friendly
majority on the Supreme Court, scores of allies on the lower federal courts
as well in Congress, state legislatures, and governors’ mansions, and a
sizable, cultishly loyal, and heavily armed base of political supporters,
Trump will have considerable leeway and plenty of backers. Limiting the
damage they can do will require preternatural vigilance, reflexes, and
peripheral vision. It will demand coordination among centrists, liberals,
and leftists. And it will need tremendous determination, in particular from
blue states, which must summon their political and economic power to
both resist and insulate their citizens from the transformation of the
federal government. The truest test of American exceptionalism will be
whether the country’s democracy can survive against these odds.

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