Trump attacks “deep state” and “swamp.” Here is the difference

Donald Trump has promised to do many things once he reoccupies the White House. Among the most famous, and most desired by his biggest fans, is his vow to drain the swamp and demolish the deep state.

The first challenge, and undoubtedly the most important, of such a project is that of definition. What is the Deep State? And what is the swamp? Are they different? How so?

Trump has no clear answer. He often uses the terms interchangeably. And he's not alone. Many media outlets do the same.

This is understandable if you're trying to get into Trump's head (which I don't necessarily recommend). During his first administration, he was repeatedly undermined by leaks and other schemes within the federal bureaucracy, including his own Cabinet. Whether this is the work of the Deep State or the Swamp is something of a distinction for someone who divides the world into friend and foe. But any serious effort to eliminate either requires making distinctions.

As the metaphor suggests, the swamp is a hot, humid ecosystem rife with malaria and teeming with all manner of creatures, each with their own agenda. (And if you've spent a summer in Washington, D.C., you know the term has more than figurative plausibility.) The idea that the nation's capital is a pestilential redoubt where politicians go native once they contract the disease Potomac fever has been around for generations. The George W. Bush administration even issued a practical memo to its staff on how to spot signs of infection.

The term deep state, by contrast, conjures up a colder, more sterile image of disciplined, professional, and secretive operators, networked across government and united around a single, nefarious agenda.

The biggest difference between these two concepts is the most important: the swamp exists; this is not the case with the deep state.

My Dispatch colleague Kevin D. Williamson likened the Deep State to the term Vikings, a catch-all for a disparate collection of pirates, traders, slavers, settlers, quarrelsome potentates and others. Vikings fought Vikings all the time because the Vikings were not a monolithic or unified group.

And neither do the warring factions and fiefdoms that make up Washington. For example, the Wall Street Journal recently reported on intense infighting between and within various intelligence agencies over the origins of COVID-19. The FBI's deep state headquarters, according to many in Trump World, was fairly convinced that the pandemic began with a lab leak, the newspaper reported, but competing agencies conspired to prevent that verdict from reaching the president's ears.

The idea that the Deep State is an evil organization, like Hydra in the Marvel comics or SPECTER in the James Bond films, is little more than a conspiracy theory. It relies on the bizarre assumption that government bureaucrats and political operatives are incredibly competent and disciplined in performing top-secret tasks, but rather incompetent and lazy in their day-to-day work.

And then there is the swamp. This catch-all term describes something real: Washington's vast, cacophonous conglomeration of favor-seeking, rent-seeking, harassment, self-dealing, and special pleading interests. The founders called them factions.

What makes the swamp so difficult to drain is the collusion between the state and these factions. The real savings will not come from a purge of the federal bureaucracy, whose workforce has not grown appreciably since the 1960s. As political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. recently pointed out, a large Part of the bureaucracy consists of contract managers for private sector companies. Businesses and nonprofits, including defense contractors and health systems, employ more than three times as many people who are ultimately paid by taxpayers than the federal government.

These factions are also political constituencies. And that's why I think we'll hear a lot more about fighting the deep state in 2025 than we will about draining the swamp. The great thing about conspiracy theories is that they cannot be disproven. Attributing failures to dark forces is common practice for politicians because it is difficult to arouse the anger of their voters.

Furthermore, there is little evidence that Trump has any desire to drain the swamps to the point of rewarding the swamp creatures he loves. Industrial policy and protectionism, two of its top priorities, are among the oldest forms of backwaters because they create new markets for exemptions, subsidies and anti-competitive lobbying. Indeed, the proliferation of Big Tech tycoons and cryptocurrency speculators around Trump makes it look like Mar-a-Lago is collapsing before our eyes in the Everglades.

@JonahDispatch

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