In Deep also pays attention to the Trump administration’s privatization of foreign policy. Among other things, Rohde describes at length how the efforts in Ukraine of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, helped lead to Trump’s impeachment. Not surprisingly, Republican stalwarts have failed to thunder paroxysms of outrage over this dubious practice as they do over the supposed deep state.
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As Rohde repeatedly reminds us, negative partisanship increasingly drives our politics. With social chasms underlying most of the divide, don’t expect it to disappear anytime soon. In our cold civil war, elections have morphed into safety valves and battlefields. Wisconsin’s potentially lethal conflict over mail-in ballots is just the latest reminder.


In assessing the existence of a deep state, or otherwise, it is worth remembering what Steve Bannon had to say about it – the same Steve Bannon who skippered Trump’s upset victory and signed Virgil’s paycheck back in his Breitbart days. As Bannon admitted to James Stewart of the New York Times, the “deep state conspiracy theory is for nut cases”, because “America isn’t Turkey or Egypt”.

True enough, but our freedom and trust continue to erode with no end in sight.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/26/in-deep-state-review-david-rohde-donald-trump-intelligence-barack-obama