Media Brags About Deep State Plot to Stop Trump

After alleging for years that former President Donald Trump and his supporters are “conspiracy theorists” for warning about the Deep State’s attempts to undermine American democracy, the corporate media is now openly detailing the left’s plans to use the federal bureaucracy to undercut Trump should he win a second term this November.

On February 16, the Associated Press ran an article entitled, “Trump wants to fire thousands of government workers. Liberals are preparing to fight back if he wins.” The piece details how “liberal organizations in Washington” are “quietly trying to install roadblocks” to thwart Trump’s agenda if he returns to the White House.

“A collection of activists, advocates, and legal experts is promoting new federal rules to limit presidential power while urging Biden’s White House to do more to protect his accomplishments and limit Trump in a possible second term,” the AP reports. Some of those rules include efforts to make it more difficult for the president to fire career bureaucrats and place limits on the president’s authority over the military (something which would seem to be a flagrant violation of the Constitution).

At least part of this plan already appears to be taking effect. As the AP reports, Biden’s Office of Personnel Management is on track to finalize a new rule in April that would prohibit future administrations from reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers in order to make it easier to fire them. If Trump or any future president wanted to reverse the rule, he “would likely have to spend months — or even years — unwinding it.”

In other words, a major media outlet is now plainly acknowledging that there is an effort underway to ensure that, no matter the outcome of the election this fall, the federal bureaucracy will continue to implement Biden’s agenda. Not only that, but the AP is giving the scheme favorable coverage.

For conservatives, the idea that a cadre of liberal activists and bureaucrats are conspiring to stymie Trump’s policy priorities is hardly shocking. What is alarming, however, is the openness with which the media is now reporting on that effort – something which could signal the start of a campaign to legitimize an all-out mutiny by the federal bureaucracy should Trump win this November.

As far back as Trump’s 2016 campaign, conservatives have been sounding the alarm about schemes by career bureaucrats to influence election outcomes and otherwise undermine a duly elected president. In each case, Democrats and the liberal media have decried those warnings as “conspiracy theories” – only for those theories to be proven correct.

During the 2016 race, it was the “Russiagate” hoax, where the Obama administration, Clinton campaign, and corporate media conspired with top officials in the intelligence community to push the narrative that Trump was a “Russian asset.” Anyone who opposed or even questioned this narrative was slandered as a “Putin apologist,” while Trump and his top campaign operatives were also mocked by the media for claims that the FBI spied on his campaign.

It was only years later that the public learned definitively through Congressional investigations, the DOJ Inspector General’s report, and ultimately the Durham Report that, as the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board put it, “Trump really was spied on.” The “Trump-Russia collusion” narrative was completely fabricated in order to launch a bogus investigation into Trump.

While Trump ultimately overcame that plot, the Deep State continued its attempts to thwart and undermine Trump at every turn during his four years in office.

From intelligence officials feeding false reports to the media about a supposed “Russian bounties” program on U.S. troops, to bureaucrats throughout the government continuing to infuse left-wing climate change talking points into Trump administration documents, liberal-minded government workers attempted to use their offices to hamstring Trump’s agenda and ultimately his re-election bid. As Bloomberg reported in 2017, “Across the government, career staffers are finding ways to continue old policies, sometimes just by renaming a project.”

For the left, of course, these endeavors are heroic efforts to protect the country from Trump’s supposedly evil policies. As liberal commentator David Rothkopf, who wrote an entire book lauding the Deep State’s efforts to undermine Trump, argued in an interview with NPR, “Veteran government officials served as guardrails, preventing initiatives that were illegal, unworkable, immoral or against the country’s interests.”

What doesn’t appear to have occurred to Rothkopf – or anyone in the liberal establishment – is that it is voters, not bureaucrats, who are empowered by the Constitution to decide what is “immoral” and “against the country’s interests.” The American people make that decision at the ballot box, where they choose a leader to enact a specific agenda that taxpayer-funded government agencies exist to facilitate. The idea that unelected career bureaucrats should have the power to veto any policy they disagree with is completely antithetical to the Constitution and to the very idea of representative government.

However, the left has for the better part of a decade now been insisting that Trump is an existential threat to democracy who must be stopped at any cost. The idea of wielding the federal bureaucracy as a weapon against Trump and undermining the will of the voters in the process has now become so normalized that the AP can write about it and the story generates virtually no buzz in the wider media landscape.

If Trump wins re-election this November, reversing this plot to sabotage his second term may prove to be a necessary first step before pursuing any other policy priorities.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Ohio. You can follow him on X @ShaneHarris513.