Trump’s ‘Deep State’ Revenge
The panic set in just before midnight last Tuesday. “She’s in trouble,” one U.S. intelligence officer fretted as Kamala Harris’s blue wall looked ready to crumble, all but ensuring that Donald Trump would head back to the White House. “This is a disaster,” said another, who is retired but served during the first Trump administration and bears the scars.
Neither of these men who contacted me on Election Night is a partisan. Like most intelligence officers I know, they prefer to steer clear of politics. But based on their experiences during Trump’s first four years in office, they dreaded what was coming.
“We will demolish the deep state,” Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail this year, wielding his term of abuse for the career national-security workforce he thinks is secretly pulling the strings of American policy in service of sinister ends. Many federal-government employees have worked reliably for presidents they didn’t vote for. But this is not enough for Trump, who demands personal loyalty and has sought to oust those who don’t give it. He called government employees “crooked” and “dishonest” and pledged to hold them “accountable” during an interview with a right-wing YouTuber in August.
“We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national-security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them,” Trump promised in a video on his campaign website last year.
Trump has nursed this grudge against America’s spies for a long time. Shortly before he first took office, in 2017, he accused intelligence-agency leaders of using “Nazi” tactics, insisting that they had leaked the so-called Steele dossier, with its unsubstantiated, salacious claims about his dealings with Russia.
Ten days later, on his first full day as president, he visited CIA headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. He stood in front of the Memorial Wall—a marble shrine engraved with stars representing officers who died in the line of duty—and boasted about the size of the crowd that had attended his inauguration. As he meandered through a version of his campaign stump speech, my phone blew up with messages from intelligence professionals, many of whom had known some of the people those stars commemorated. They were outraged and appalled, but none called for revenge or even hinted at it.
And yet, Trump took office convinced that malevolent bureaucrats had sabotaged his campaign and were bent on undermining his presidency. He still believes it. Rooting out these perceived resisters and replacing them with avowed loyalists ranks high on his agenda in the second term. How will he do it? I’ve been asking current and former intelligence officials that question for the past few months, and with new urgency over the past few days. Here are three scenarios they fear.
Trump attacks “targets.”Trump could go after a curated list of people whom he’s identified as unreliable. Some of these targets have high profiles nationally: He has long railed against James Comey, the onetime FBI director he fired, as well as other senior intelligence officials from the Obama administration, including James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the ex–CIA director. These men became voluble public critics of Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community while he was in office. Their outspokenness was controversial in the intelligence community, and it underscored the extraordinary risk they felt that Trump posed to national security.
But when Trump demonizes bureaucrats, he’s not talking just about these bold-faced names. He and his allies have also singled out many lesser-known officials and lower-level employees for their alleged sins against the once and future president.
Recently, The Washington Post reported that the American Accountability Foundation had compiled a “DHS Bureaucrat Watch List” of officials who it said should be fired for failing to secure the U.S. border. The nonprofit group—funded by the conservative Heritage Foundation—says it “deploys aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging, rapid response, and Congressional investigations.” It has published the officials’ names and faces online. Two currently serving officials who know people on that list told me they feared that their colleagues could be subjected to additional harassment from Trump or his political supporters.
[Read: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’]
Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and an associate of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, has compiled his own “deep-state target list” and promotes it on right-wing podcasts and social media. Raiklin’s list includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, as well as lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments. It even names some of these people’s family members.
Trump, once in office, may come after the people on these lists with the authority of the federal government. He could subject them to capricious tax audits, or harass them with investigations that force them to acquire expensive legal representation. He could also revoke the security clearance of any current or former official, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to do their job as a government employee or contractor who requires access to classified information. There’s a precedent for this method: In 2018, Trump said he had revoked the clearance still held by Brennan, the ex–CIA director, because of his criticism of the administration.
Trump fires employees en masse.Shortly before he left office, Trump issued an executive order that would let him fire, essentially at will, tens of thousands of federal employees who enjoy civil-service protections. The ostensible grounds for dismissal would be resistance to the administration’s policies. Joe Biden canceled Trump’s order with one of his own. But Trump has promised to reinstate the order on the first day of his administration, enabling him to fire large swaths of federal employees and replace them with allies who support his goals.
Emptying national-security agencies of thousands of experienced workers could jeopardize U.S. national security, according to Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent, and Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA officer. “The institution of a ‘loyalty test’ in any part of the civil service would drastically undermine the effectiveness of our agencies and erode the public’s faith in their legitimacy,” they wrote in an article for Just Security. “As a more specific concern, the politicization of the intelligence community would wreak havoc on our national security and be profoundly dangerous for America.”
One obvious shortcoming of this strategy: If Trump jettisons layers of government employees and managers who run the national-security apparatus—the people who keep tabs on foreign terrorists, monitor Chinese espionage against the United States, and the like—who will replace them? Presuming Trump even has a long list, quickly installing thousands of possibly inexperienced personnel into vital national-security positions would be disruptive and distracting.
Officials leave under pressure.Employees of the national-security agencies who conclude that, on principle, they can’t work for Trump could voluntarily resign in large numbers. Having witnessed the president-elect’s serial attacks on alleged deep-state plotters, these officials may not wish to stick around to find out whether they’ll be next.
Several current and former officials I spoke with in recent days said they either were contemplating retirement, some earlier than they had planned, or knew people who were. Some suspect that remaining in their job could put them at risk. In his first term, Trump sought to declassify information about the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference and possible links to his campaign. Officials worried then, and still do, that this could jeopardize people who worked on the case, as well as human sources overseas.
A vindictive new attorney general could publish the names of those in the Justice Department and the FBI who investigated Trump’s alleged removal of classified documents from the White House—for which he was charged with felonies. Intelligence officers who have worked undercover face the particularly unnerving possibility that public exposure could jeopardize their sources.
Officials might tough it out, but if they opt to resign before Inauguration Day, they will create vacancies at the upper echelons of the national-security establishment during what promises to be a tumultuous transition from Biden to Trump.
In our conversations, officials clung to one sliver of hope, and not unreasonably. Many of the national-security leaders Trump appointed in his first term were politically divisive and lacked experience, but they were not out to dismantle the organizations they led. John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, have been on the proverbial shortlist to have top positions in the next administration. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has selected Mike Waltz, a Republican congressman from Florida, to serve as his national security adviser. Waltz is a retired Army colonel who argues that the United States should help end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East so that it can focus on the strategic challenge that China poses.
[Nicholas Florko: There really is a deep state]
Career employees would probably feel relieved by these choices, if only in comparison with the more extreme candidates who have surfaced in recent months. But other signs suggest that Trump is heading in a less moderate direction. On Saturday, he announced that he would not ask Mike Pompeo, his former CIA director and secretary of state, to serve in the Cabinet. Pompeo, who was expected to be a top candidate for defense secretary, is a staunch advocate of assistance to Ukraine, arguably putting him on the wrong side of Trump’s plans to end the war with Russia “24 hours” after taking office. Trump has also said that he will not ask former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley to join his administration.
Trump also insisted over the weekend that Senate Republicans agree to recess appointments, a signal that he intends to staff the executive branch with people who might not be able to win Senate confirmation if their nomination were put to a vote.
Senator Rick Scott of Florida, whom Trump allies support for majority leader, publicly embraced the idea. “I will do whatever it takes to get your nominations through as quickly as possible,” Scott wrote on X.
Turning away from broadly palatable Republicans and trying to skirt confirmation battles raise the chances that Trump will turn to hard-core loyalists, such as Kash Patel, a former administration official who fantasizes about deep-state conspiracies; Richard Grenell, an online pugilist who alienated foreign allies as ambassador to Germany; and Flynn, Trump’s onetime White House adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia and was later pardoned. The appointment of those officials would signal that the revenge campaign is in full swing.
One sign that it could already be under way came yesterday. Trump tapped Stephen Miller to be his deputy chief of staff, where he would be well situated to oversee the implementation of the executive order removing civil-service protections. Miller is well known as an architect of Trump’s earlier immigration policies. He would presumably work closely with Thomas Homan, whom Trump has announced as his new “border czar,” on the president-elect’s promised mass deportation of undocumented people in the United States. But during the first administration, Miller also oversaw the ouster of top officials at the Homeland Security Department whom he and Trump deemed insufficiently loyal and not committed to the president’s agenda, particularly on border security. If Trump is looking for an aide to mount a campaign against ostensibly intransigent personnel, this time across the whole government, Miller is perfect for the job.