Hillary and her supporters felt that with her victory, the achievement of a totalitarian far-left utopia was within their reach. In short, if Hillary had won, the hard-left Alinsky acolytes taking over the Democratic Party would have had the chance to eliminate from the United States all those Hillary defined as “irredeemable deplorables”—that is, people she saw as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamaphobic” Trump supporters.
In her postelection book, What Happened, Hillary speculated that her presidency “would have been transformative” by implementing higher minimum wages, expanding social welfare programs, and increasing government intervention into our economic and social lives by a host of new regulations imposed by an ever-expanding corps of unelected bureaucrats.
The Deep State’s Plan to Recover Paradise Lost
The sense of frustration felt by the left with Hillary Clinton’s demise was so enormous as to be almost immeasurable. The November 2016 edition of the leftist publication the Nation appeared with a black cover, on which were printed the following words, with the first appearing in small print in gray, then proceeding to large print in white: “Mourn, Resist, Organize, Onward.”
“And so many of our hopes—for free public college, a livable minimum wage, expanded Social Security, a path to universal health care, paid family leave, an end to private prisons, the abolition of the death penalty—now lie shattered, along with the prospect of an administration that, whatever its limitations, had been shown to be open to pressure from the left,” wrote D. D. Guttenplan, an at-large editor for the publication. “Which means we have to apply even greater pressure from the left: to march in greater numbers, to shout out louder against injustice, and to summon and be prepared to sustain everyday massive nonviolent civil disobedience on a scale not seen in this country for decades.”13
To be so close, with what appeared to be a certain win for Hillary Clinton, and yet to lose was devastating for Hillary’s most committed supporters. Hillary Democrats were determined to see if the mounting resistance could prevent Trump from being inaugurated. If the resistance movement failed there, the focus would shift to identifying strategies that could lead to his impeachment and removal from office. At a minimum, Democratic Party resistance could transform into an obstruction movement that would prevent Donald Trump from enacting into legislation the public policy objectives he had articulated while running for president. An aggressive Democratic Party resist-and-obstruct movement, even if unsuccessful, could impair the effectiveness of the Trump presidency.
But for these dark, resentful, but determined Democratic ambitions to succeed, the Democrats knew they could count on the willing and enthusiastic cooperation of the Deep State.
So I don’t think it’s Trump versus Obama; I think it’s really the Deep State versus the president, the duly elected president.
—Representative Thomas Massie (Republican, Kentucky), February 2017
AS EVIDENCE OF THE Deep State’s antipathy toward Trump, one needs to look no further than at the illegal unmasking of US citizens that took place numerous times during the Trump campaign. This unmasking is a certain breach of the democratic process and shows the Deep State was out to get Trump—and would violate the law to do so. The concept of “deep politics” entered the national dialogue in a serious manner when the American public realized that there were dark forces at work behind shocking events. In 1976, the Church Committee concluded that the Warren Commission covered up the role organized crime had played working with the CIA to assassinate President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Ever since Watergate, the American public have come to expect that what we observe in the “overt politics” reported by the mainstream media has nothing to do with the “deep politics,” in which hidden forces predominate. The truth of the American Republic in the new millennium is that we have become accustomed to mobsters working with government intelligence agency drug dealers, financed by Wall Street and banks that are “too big to fail.” In the background are K-Street lobbyists in Washington ready to shape public policy and congressional legislation in favor of international corporations and the global elite who pay their hefty lobbying fees.
“The term [Deep State] was actually coined in Turkey and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary, and organized crime,” wrote retired congressional staff budget analyst Mike Lofgren in his 2016 book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.1 Lofgren has defined traditional Washington partisan politics as “the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections.” But the Deep State “operates according to its own compass regardless of who is formally in power.”2 This chapter explores three short vignettes from US history that demonstrate why President Trump must take seriously the threat to his presidency and his life represented by a Deep State that remains determined to remove him from office.
Unable to accept that Donald Trump might win the 2016 elections, the NSA in cooperation with CIA Director John Brennan—Barack Obama’s handler in the CIA since Obama emerged in national politics by winning a Senate seat in Illinois in 2006—began placing Trump and his aides under extensive electronic surveillance in an attempt to derail Trump’s candidacy. As WikiLeaks prepared to publish the emails of top Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, leaked from within the DNC, Brennan championed the “Russian collusion” narrative, seeking to delegitimize the Trump campaign. After the election, the CIA conspired with Democrats in Congress and the mainstream media to have Robert Mueller appointed as special counsel. Mueller was widely known in Washington as a former FBI director and a partisan Deep State operative with close ties to FBI Director James Comey. As special counselor, Mueller had one mission—namely, to develop the information needed to accuse Trump of rigging the election with Russia’s assistance. The plan called for Democrats in Congress to beat the mainstream media drum until Trump resigned or stepped aside for Vice President Mike Pence.
Should the Deep State fail to remove Trump from office through impeachment or a charge under the 25th Amendment that he is mentally incompetent, “executive action”—a CIA plan to assassinate Trump—is the Deep State’s last resort.3 The point is, unless Trump can be made to abandon his “America First” agenda, the globalists in the Deep State have already decided that Trump must be removed from the presidency—one way or the other.
The Military-Industrial Complex
The first vignette involves a warning that President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued to America upon leaving the White House after eight years as president. On January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his farewell speech to the nation in a televised address broadcast from the Oval Office. In that speech, Eisenhower sounded an alarm to future generations of Americans. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He continued with a sentiment that is less frequently repeated. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” he stressed. “We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry