 "Donald Trump has embraced the deep state — and it’ll backfire on America")
When Donald Trump came to power for the second time in January this year, one expected him to take the fight to the “deep state” that many believed had hijacked the American administration. Trump, to his credit, made the right noises, especially during the election campaign when he pledged to supporters that voting him back into the presidency would help him “demolish the deep state”.
Five months into the Trump presidency, many of his domestic supporters are disappointed already. As Ali Swenson writes in her Associated Press report, Trump, having long warned people of a government ‘deep state’, is under tremendous pressure to expose, if not dismantle, it. “His Justice Department has not yet arrested hordes of “deep state” actors as some of his supporters had hoped it would, even as the president has been posting cryptic videos and memes about Democratic politicians,” she writes.
When the Americans voted for Trump this time, they expected a break in this Washington consensus where “the choice” was “between Coke or Pepsi, with the voters merely rubber-stamping one of the two preselected choices”, as author Mike Lofgren writes in his book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.
According to Lofgren, this “was the playbook as it had been rehearsed for many weary years”. He explains, “Republicans would stoke up the culture wars, fanning their touchily emotional base into an incandescent rage over Obama, the Kenyan Muslim socialist who had usurped the presidency, and Hillary, the bête noire of all true conservatives and Obama’s anointed successor. Democrats, for their part, would say, ‘Vote for us, because Rush Limbaugh!’ According to the playbook, economic issues like Wall Street regulation and trade were supposed to remain strictly between the forty-yard lines, while debates about foreign policy would tightly focus on the glory of killing bin Laden or the shame of Benghazi, not on whether we could ever hope to fix the Middle East with military force.”
Trump, the outsider, threatened to disrupt this sinister consensus. He asked uncomfortable questions. He also pledged to expose the fixed match between the Republicans and the Democrats played under the prying eyes of the deep state.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsBut today, Trump seems to have become a different man. Maybe he has always been like this—shifty, unpredictable, and unreliable. But this time, in five odd months, his transformation is complete, dismantling the idea of Trump as we knew him in the past decade or so. His friends have changed; so have his priorities. His most trusted ally, Elon Musk, has fallen out with him. And his National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, has been shifted to the United Nations as its ambassador.
Coming to Waltz, many believe he has paid the price for the ‘Signalgate’ scandal. But had this been the only reason, then Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth too should have faced the music for creating another Signal messaging chat that included his wife and brother, where he shared similar details of a March military airstrike against Yemen’s Houthi terrorists. Waltz would often call for closer ties between Bharat and the United States, while at the same time emphasising the threat that China poses to the world, especially in alliance with Pakistan.
This Watzian worldview would have fitted well within the pre-January 20 Trumpian ecosystem, but today the Donald has pulled apart everything he seemed to believe before the inauguration of his second term. What Trump may not realise today, but someday he definitely will, is that with his U-turn he has not just squandered a geostrategic opportunity for the United States to realign the American priorities to the long-term US interests but also lost the goodwill of a sixth of humanity when not many were willing to give him a chance, especially outside the US.
Disappointment with Trump within America will have political ramifications, but displeasure abroad will have geopolitical complications.
Trump is today the antithesis of everything he epitomised five months ago. One can see the fundamental contradiction in his worldview from the fact that while he continues to fight Harvard, during his recent visit to West Asia, he hankered after Saudi-Qatari money, little realising (or maybe he doesn’t give a damn) that it is this petrodollar that has created the wokeist monster on American campuses. All through his campaign and before, Trump invoked the Islamist ghost, but when the time was ripe to put the jihadi djinn in the bottle during Operation Sindoor, launched by the Modi government to make Islamabad accountable for the gruesome Pahalgam killings, he fumbled. Rather, he took a conciliatory position, advising the leaders of Bharat and Pakistan to have a “nice dinner together”.
He followed this up by crossing many other red lines, beginning with his pompous misinformation about brokering a ceasefire, even when Bharat has been unequivocal in reiterating the bilateral nature of the dispute. Just like his predecessors, Trump made the mistake of equating Bharat with Pakistan, calling the latter a “great nation”. Not very long ago, the Donald was on record wondering why the US funded a terrorist state like Pakistan. He would even call out Islamabad for hiding Osama bin Laden for six years and ask when it would apologise.
As if that were not enough, Washington has invited Pakistan’s jihadi general, Field Marshal Asim Munir, to attend the US Army Day events. One of its top generals, Michael Kurilla, Commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), has praised Pakistan as a “phenomenal partner” in counterterrorism.
Trump’s astounding U-turn can also be seen in his administration’s recent decision to put an entry ban on travellers from 12 countries, including Afghanistan and Myanmar. Ironically, Pakistan has not just been missing from this list but also the one about countries that face “partial travel restrictions”. The exemption given to Pakistan—a country that has become synonymous with jihadi terrorism and would not long ago proudly claim to have fathered the Taliban to give itself a strategic depth—defies logic, except when one realises that Trump has embraced the deep state. This treacherous reality is also evident when one is told about the growing American presence and intervention in Bangladesh in the last few months.
It has been a longstanding opinion of this author that America wants to engage with Bharat but only as a senior partner. It’s an unequal relationship that it seeks with Delhi. Bharat’s role in the West’s scheme of things is nothing more than that of a pawn—a strategic pawn, of course—needed to checkmate the Dragon. But the success of Operation Sindoor, where Bharat could do to a nuclear-armed nation what others could not even comprehend, and that too within a few hours of military exercise, has dazzled both its friends and rivals. America is suddenly alarmed: It believes it just cannot let a new rival (Bharat) rise in the battle to subdue the old one (China).
This may explain Trump’s sudden outreach to China. This may also explain why Trump (even when we ignore his family’s dubious business interests in Islamabad) wants to give Pakistan a fresh leash of life.
Will it work? Will the Trump-deep state design slow down, if not crumble, Bharat?
The growing American belligerence may slow down Bharat’s growth and rise, but the fundamentals of the nation are strong. What America doesn’t realise is that not having Bharat by its side will lead to the decline of the US faster than it might slow Bharat’s rise. In all this, China (and Pakistan) can have a sigh of relief. When things were going awry for Emperor Xi, when the Chinese economy was set for massive decline, if not freefall, the Donald came up Nixon-like to give Beijing another shot at superpowerdom.
Trump’s deep-state embrace has a message for Bharat: That it is alone in the global powerplay. Russia and Israel are the only reliable friends, but even they have compulsions: The Ukraine war has pushed Moscow closer to the Chinese fold, and such is Tel Aviv’s history and geography that it just cannot but overly rely on the Americans.
The good thing is that Bharat has all the wherewithal to survive this storm. It needs to keep consolidating its economic gains by compensating for global trade/tariff challenges with its aatmanirbharta movement. With time, as Bharat continues to grow economically and geostrategically, the inner contradictions in the West-China-Pakistan alliance would emerge. There would be no stopping Bharat thereafter. The Americans, that day, would rue the missed Trumpian opportunity to not just keep Bharat by their side but also keep the US on the right side of history.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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