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1/7/20

USA: Trump Vs. the "Deep State"? - - by Stephan Richter and Richard Phillips,

The ardent defenders of President Trump’s reckless foreign policy claim that the “deep state” is out to get the President of the United States. Do they have a case?

In November 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States in large part because he promised to be an agent of change. It would be hard for anyone to deny that he has fulfilled that promise in ways that will shape global politics and society for decades to come.

Whether he is voted out of office this coming November, is impeached and removed from office in 2020 or retires from the office after serving for a second term, Trump will have left an indelible imprint on America’s self-perception. And he will have significantly changed the world’s perception of the United States of America in the process.

On the foreign policy front, whenever Trump and his supporters have encountered some resistance to their radical moves, they have deployed and succeeded in implanting in the consciousness of many Americans the concept of “the deep state.”Turkish roots of the Republicans’ “deep state” claim

While that term is deployed as a tool to describe a malign influence on U.S. foreign policy in the era of Trump, it is important to reflect on the term’s origins in the world of international politics. It hails back to the 1990s and is, tellingly, a translation from Turkish.
 
It was used to describe deliberately obscured operations of the Turkish military to protect its turf against civilian oversight by democratically elected politicians. In the effort to elude proper political control, the Turkish military engaged in shadowy alliances with criminal interest.

The “deep state” exists, or does it?

The only real parallel that makes the “deep state” term vaguely applicable is that it is indeed the U.S. military that has at times resisted the execution of Donald Trump’s spur-of-the-moment decisions.

But U.S. military brass has not done that by colluding with shady characters, much less criminals.

The sad reality is that collusion with shady characters is indeed the modus operandi of the current U.S. President.

The President is able to pull this off because Congressional Republicans, long a bulwark against Presidential overreach, have completely fallen in with the radicalism and extreme risk-taking that has become the hallmark of the Trump Administration.

Blame your enemy for what you plan to do yourself

In many ways, the “deep state” claim follows a long-established pattern of the Republican Party’s communications strategy. It holds that, in order to avoid being (correctly) blamed for inappropriate or even illegal actions, just charge that it is the Democrats who are actually engaging in such practices.

In the hyper-charged political atmosphere that has prevailed in the United States for some time, that approach almost always works.

It works for two reasons. First, Democrats more often than not find themselves completely blind-sided by the often-preposterous charges of such equivalency. Second, making the charge, whatever it may be, is enough to unleash the fighting spirits of the Republicans’ own supporters, especially in the right-wing media.

Read the complete report at: Trump Vs. the "Deep State"? - The Globalist

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