READ: Trump is creating the "deep state" he decried

After a purge of federal employees, the White House is re-stocking the government with loyalists.

Donald Trump rose to power on a promise to vanquish the so-called "deep state."

In Trumpian mythology, this faceless bureaucracy was conspiring to undermine the president's will and resist the mandate of the people. His supporters imagined shadowy operatives inside the federal government communicating in secret and thwarting their champion from the inside.

“I am your retribution,” Trump told his followers during the campaign, resolving to gut the government of those disloyal to him.

Now, less than a year back into power, Trump is making good on that promise to oust legions of federal employees. But instead of merely eradicating a deep state, he is going further and doing something historic, hypocritical, and heavy with irony: he’s constructing one of his own. As I write this, the White House is building a sprawling political machine embedded inside the federal bureaucracy, one that is loyal not to the Constitution, but to Donald J. Trump.

The evidence of Trump’s deep state grows by the week, and the blueprint is shockingly clear. It’s a two-parter. First, the administration has sought to purge employees deemed uncooperative while curtailing or delete agencies seen as disobedient. Second, Trump’s lieutenants plan to re-stock the federal government with MAGA loyalists to continue their movement for a generation or more. That phase is only just beginning, and it’s received scant attention.

The first phase is well underway, of course. In recent months, Trump has initiated one of the largest purges of career civil servants in U.S. history. The administration's excuse is cost-cutting, but the reality is far more sinister. These are ideological purges to make way for MAGA loyalists. The agencies being emptied are not random. They are, in many cases, the same institutions that served as checks on Trump during his first term — agencies that I personally saw refuse to implement unlawful presidential orders or whose leaders warned Trump against violating the Constitution.

Now they’re paying the price.

Entire offices at the Department of Education, Department of Justice, CDC, FEMA, and even the National Weather Service have been wiped out — each of them places that had once challenged Trump — whether it was his desire to kick immigrant kids out of public schools, to investigate political enemies, to cover up the pandemic’s fatal impacts, to withhold aid for disaster survivors in blue states, or to rewrite weather forecasts with a Sharpie. He doesn’t forgive such law-abiding defiance.

And the list goes on. USAID has been functionally eliminated. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has seen a ninety-percent workforce reduction. Voice of America has been gutted and replaced with right-wing propaganda. Even the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has seen swift and unforgiving firings, despite the fact that America is grappling with one of the largest cyber attacks in the history of the world. Why? Because the agency defied Trump in 2020 by affirming the election was actually secure.

Trump is not trying to make government leaner. Believe me, the president doesn’t care about the size of the federal government. These are the moves of a strongman clearing the field. That’s the real story.

The civil-service purges alone are a cause for alarm. Great alarm, in fact. But what’s being built to replace hollowed-out agencies is more disturbing.

In his first term, Trump was furious that career federal employees weren’t willing to protect his personal self-interests. Too many stubbornly insisted on upholding their oaths to the Constitution. So today, the president is determined to fill those roles with allies — for the long haul. His people have been planning it for years.

Well before taking office, Trump’s team drew up lists of “tens of thousands” of individuals to install into government jobs, not just for the political appointments that presidents are usually allowed to make. As Steve Bannon put it, the goal was to bring “shock troops” into government and fill the agencies with “a rising generation of assassins.” That’s starting to happen.

Despite years of assailing the “Deep State,” Trump and his allies are working to build one of their own — to make sure the MAGA movement remains entrenched inside the government for a generation or more.

Trump’s allies are mounting a hostile takeover of the civil service, i.e. the roles that operate the machinery of government, regardless of who is in office. Nowhere is it more evident than in federal law enforcement.

Cops are important to the president but not for the reasons you’d hope. Trump understands that the most powerful domestic force in America isn’t Congress or the courts. He knows that it’s the men and women with badges and guns. You can see it in his face when he greets them in the field, looking at them like they’re his private police force, and he treats them like bit players in his own production.

“Wow,” he said once when I was with him at the border, putting his hands on the shoulders of an ICE agent, “you are straight out of central casting.”

Trump knows these agents are essential to his consolidation of power, which is why his federal reconstruction effort is starting with the police.

At ICE, for instance, the administration is building what will soon become the nation’s largest law-enforcement agency. They’ve launched a hiring blitz that includes 10,000 new agents, thousands of new border officers, massive signing bonuses, and student loan forgiveness. Meanwhile, the eligibility age has been lowered and training has been slashed, with the obvious goal of luring and fast-tracking applicants who align with Trumpism, even if they’re woefully under-qualified.

At the FBI, the story is just as bad. After firing top agents and replacing the director with MAGA loyalist Kash Patel, Trump’s team has reduced the bureau’s training period to just eight weeks. That’s it. Just two months — and you, too, can become an all-powerful federal law enforcement agent, capable of investigating independent members of the Federal Reserve board, Democratic senators, and presidential critics! They may soon drop the college degree requirement altogether.

Meanwhile, the president’s surrogates and online influencers have been flooding the internet with memes glorifying brute-force policing and vigilante justice, as a sort of siren call to a specific type of recruit. For instance, DHS’s normally professional and mundane social media channels have been spewing memes with nativist, xenophobic, chest-thumping overtones intended for MAGA audiences. The message couldn’t be clearer: come join us, be one of us, serve the man, not the mission.

None of this is about reform. The purges combined with the hiring binge are meant to upend the civil service altogether. And it begins with a “great replacement” inside of federal law enforcement agencies, where nonpartisan officers are being booted-and-backfilled with a politicized security force.

This won’t end with ICE and the FBI. The Trump administration’s campaign to replace federal employees with hard-right diehards will continue across agencies until the White House has stacked the government. Ultimately, they hope to install a MAGA deep state that will continue advancing Trump’s agenda long into the future, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

What’s extraordinary about all of this is that, until now, there never was an actual deep state. There was no interconnected cabal of rebel government employees. Whatever “resistance” there actually was, it was loosely comprised of people who were terrified by Trump’s worst impulses — his inclination toward illegality and unconstitutional actions — and who declined to break the law on his behalf. In any presidential administration, Democrat or Republican, we should want public servants to speak truth to power and prevent the boss from taking actions that are unlawful.

Yet with remarkable irony and zero self-awareness, Donald Trump is busily constructing the “deep state” he once decried. He crafted a brand identity as a warrior against an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy. But in his first year back, he’s reshaping that very bureaucracy to be unaccountable to anyone but himself, willing to bend the rule of law, and united by a dark vision of America.

It goes without saying that a government that serves a singular man instead of a mission isn’t much of a republic. It’s something else. Something we’ve all seen in history books but never thought we’d see here in America. The scaffolding of autocracy is going up right in front of us, and the construction workers are being hired for their loyalty to the leader.

The deep state is real. Because Trump is building it himself.