Trump Wants to Purge the Deep State So He Can Weaponize It
How bad could a second Donald Trump term get? That depends on how serious he is about replacing the career bureaucrats who staff the security state with MAGA loyalists ready to carry out his most demented policies.
Former president Donald Trump speaks at the Israeli American Council National Summit on September 19, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
During the recent presidential debate, Kamala Harris once again described the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as Donald Trump’s plan for a second term. Trump himself has repeatedly thrown the think tank and its plan under the rhetorical bus, even though a great many of the people who worked on it had roles in his first administration. He’s claimed he didn’t read it, which is plausible enough. It’s difficult to imagine Donald Trump reading a 920-page document of any kind. Whether he’ll implement some or all of the proposals found there is an entirely different question.
Like clockwork, Heritage cooks up a right-wing maximalist wish list of what it would like from each prospective Republican administration every four years. In that sense, there’s nothing particularly special about this particular program. Really, liberal warnings about Project 2025 are a proxy for a much larger set of anxieties about how just how bad a second Trump term could get.
In 2016, many progressives believed that Trump represented an imminent “fascist” threat to the very existence of American democracy. His first term seemed to reveal this rhetoric as baseless hysteria. He did many of the things that any Republican would do, like cutting taxes for the rich, weakening environmental protections, and appointing union-busters to the National Labor Relations Board and antiabortion justices to the Supreme Court. All bad enough, of course, but the promised MAGA dystopia never quite came. His failure to deliver on his signature 2016 promise to “build the wall” is emblematic here. His administration reinforced or replaced barriers in some stretches of the border, but less than fifty miles of the border got completely new barriers.
Does this mean, though, that the MAGA dystopia will never arrive?
Let’s take it as a given that a classical police state where all opposition parties and labor unions are banned (i.e., actual fascism) is off the table, and that analogies to German and Italian history don’t shed much light on these questions. Nevertheless, Trump making the American state significantly uglier and more authoritarian than it already is remains a distinct possibility.
First Time Farce, Second Time Nightmare?
Trump’s policy accomplishments in office the first time around look like those of a relatively normal Republican. When he tried to push beyond the establishment’s comfort zone, he didn’t get much traction.
One theory of the case is that Trump never intended to do much beyond this baseline, despite lots of campaign rhetoric suggesting otherwise. To soberly assess the potential for a far more dystopian second Trump term, though, we need to understand the theory of the case that’s been embraced by Trump himself and many of his allies and supporters: that he was systematically blocked by the “deep state” (sometimes “administrative state”) of career bureaucrats in Washington, DC, especially in the national security state.
This isn’t just a matter of blame shifting. There’s a standard proposed solution to this problem in the MAGA camp, and on this point Project 2025 and Trump’s own rambling pronouncements (and J. D. Vance’s more coherent and direct ones) are in perfect accord. This time, they all agree, the deep state needs to be systematically purged. Once it’s staffed by ideologically dedicated Trump loyalists, the real fun can begin.
Trump vs. the Deep State
Trump makes extravagant claims for his time in the Oval Office. Greatest economy ever, fear and respect from foreign powers, renewal of America across all dimensions, and — of course — the largest inauguration audience in US history. But this braggadocio is paired with an even deeper sense of grievance. Among MAGA conservatives, there is a widespread and not unfounded belief that Trump’s exercise of power was deliberately frustrated by government personnel, both high and low.
Cabinet appointees manipulated Trump away from his stated priorities and toward their preferred policies, occasionally going so far as to refuse to carry out direct orders. FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and state-level investigations and prosecutions began before he was sworn in, culminating in two impeachments, jail time for a number of his loyalists, and financial damages and even felony convictions for Trump himself once he left office. All of these results were generated by due process, and Trump is almost certainly guilty of much of what he’s been accused of. Still, he and his followers can plausibly complain about differential treatment. Other presidents have done as bad or worse and have escaped any real consequences.
Put all this together, and you have a narrative about obstruction and persecution that resonates powerfully with Trump’s base, helping to explain one of the most genuinely weird things about a Trump/Vance campaign that’s had to contend with a lot of accusations of “weirdness.”
Jacobin readers notwithstanding, one of the few unifying points in American life is an admiration — carefully stoked, deliberately encouraged — for the military and agencies of national security. The US military consistently ranks at or near the top of major institutions for public confidence, with 61 percent of respondents in the most recent Gallup poll awarding them either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence. (Only “small business,” at 68 percent, came in ahead of this number.) In a similar poll breaking down confidence in government agencies, Americans gave the Department of Defense (DOD) a 53 percent good or excellent performance rating, with the FBI and CIA tied at 46 percent — healthy numbers in light of the overall lack of public confidence in major institutions.
That confidence in the national security state is both stoked by and reflected in the media that Americans consume. Think of the interminable, multimedia “Jack” franchises (Ryan and Reacher alike). Veterans are revered throughout media, and current and former intelligence officials are regularly held up as fonts of insight and policy guidance — consider Joe Biden’s repeated invocation of the intelligence community open letter denouncing Trump. Even after the questionable timing of his announcement of the Hillary Clinton investigation, former FBI director James Comey remained publicly respected, even by the Democratic staffers whose careers he tanked.
In light of all this, Trump and the MAGA movement’s open hostility toward many of these agencies is remarkable. It also makes a lot of sense in the aftermath of Trump’s first term, and some of the terrifyingly ambitious plans he’s announced for a second — crucially, what he calls in screaming all caps in the 2024 GOP platform formulated in Mar-a-Lago “THE LARGEST DEPORTATION PROGRAM IN AMERICAN HISTORY.” Any serious attempt to carry out such a program would require an extensive operation to manage data; track undocumented residents; locate, detain, process, and deport targeted individuals; and overcome any resistance, particularly from sanctuary cities, counties, and states.
Similarly, the Republican platform touts plans to militarize the border with Mexico, tighten restrictions on foreign visitors (i.e., the “Muslim ban,” which Trump wants to bring back and “expand”), and increase federal law enforcement. Oh, and impose ideological policing on colleges and universities. There’s also a plank in that platform calling to, again in all caps, “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN.”
One reason why Trump’s first term never fully realized the dystopian hellscape predicted by his liberal critics was the lack of a motivated and capable coercive arm. Reluctant officials at the mid to high level, accultured to the relatively more moderate Barack Obama–George Bush governance style and anxious about their post-Trump futures, effectively delayed implementing Trump’s policies. They sought lengthy legal reviews and argued about the limits of their authority. Their attitudes were shared by the government attorneys conducting those reviews. Politically appointed cabinet secretaries and agency heads could be (and were) dismissed, though their replacements were rarely both capable and motivated, but career civil servants enjoyed the protection of a personnel system staffed with colleagues and too opaque for the relatively sparse Trump cadres to navigate.
Small wonder then that the official platform, sounding more than a little like a concise Project 2025 on this point, includes plans to “hold accountable those who have misused the power of Government to unjustly prosecute their Political Opponents,” proposing to “root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees.” Beyond the motivations of vengeance and loyalty, there is a substantive need for a sizable federal law enforcement and security apparatus, unburdened by moral or legal scruples, to carry out the platform’s draconian pledges.
Trump’s two brushes with assassination can only reinforce the desire to make sure the national security state has been purged of anyone suspected of disloyalty. The apparent attempt last Sunday was on about the level of numerous attempts on the life of Barack Obama a decade ago, but the one in July was far more dramatic. Trump came literally within inches of losing his life, and the incident underscores the fact that the same security services that Trump has accused of plotting his downfall are also responsible for his protection.
That an assassin was able to reconnoiter the rally site, range the distance to Trump’s dais, mount to firing position on an unsecured roof, and take the shot that grazed the presidential candidate’s ear certainly raises questions. Incompetence may be a more likely answer to those questions than conspiracy, but Trump himself may lean the other way. And this could compound his preexisting desire to clean house.
Put that together with his frustrations with obstruction during his first term, from the DOD and its supposedly “woke” generals slow-walking redeployment to the Mexican border, the DOJ’s vigorous pursuit of cases against him, or the roster of former agency heads publicly calling him unfit to govern. In light of these, a radical reform of the national security state could look like an urgent necessity for his political program and even his personal survival. And a far more vengeful version of Trump wielding a far more ideologically pliable security state could be very dangerous indeed.
Does any of this mean that the grimmest predictions about a second Trump administration will be correct? Not necessarily — but this time there’s a plan. So don’t count out that MAGA dystopia just yet.