President Donald Trump seems to be suffering a political death of a thousand cuts—from anonymous sources throughout the government providing information to the press about his missteps, misjudgments, and misbehavior. The Trump administration and its allies are up in arms, blaming an unprecedented effort to smear the president and undermine democracy itself.
This defense rings false. The forces arrayed against Trump are hardly unprecedented—presidents have had to deal with such challenges again and again, ever since the country was founded. The real difference is Trump himself, who is supplying his opponents with seemingly endless opportunities to embarrass him.
Conservative supporters of Trump have a new favorite catchphrase—the “deep state,” meant to convey an occult alliance of anti-Trump officials in and around the government who are intent on destroying him. This is a convenient excuse, but the deep state is nothing new, at least if it is understood as executive officials and bureaucrats who offer up information outside the chain of command. After all, Mark Felt served as “Deep Throat” for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal, helping to bring down the Richard Nixon administration. Indeed, the deep state is as old as the government itself. Thomas Jefferson was infuriated that Alexander Hamilton seemed to be sharing confidential cabinet discussions on foreign policy in his anonymous articles. James Madison, for his part, suggested in his articles that Hamilton was a monarchist, a view informed by Hamilton’s confidential speeches from the Constitutional Convention.
That we have had a deep state since the 1790s demonstrates a fundamental truth: Public officials are not always going to follow the party line. They are human beings, after all, capable of exercising their own judgment, based on their own interests and understandings of right and wrong. This is human nature, and it has influenced the course of American politics since the very beginning. Even assuming that today’s leakers are motivated by politics, rather than concern for the general welfare and anxiety that Trump is serving it poorly, hardly excuses Trump. It is the duty of the president, in his capacity as head of the executive branch, to manage these officials—not to bellyache when his mismanagement leads to politically embarrassing leaks.
Many of the leaks have come from the White House itself, which is staffed with Trump’s own people. News outlets have taken of late to bragging about how many sources they have inside the West Wing. Such leaks are not a product of the deep state at work, but rather Trump’s inability to staff the White House with competent officials who can be counted on to remain loyal to him in times of trouble.
And what of the notion that the president is beset by partisan enemies, especially in the press? No doubt this is true to some extent, in that the press is manifestly ill-disposed toward the president. But how is this any different from its attitude toward other Republican presidents in the last half-century? Was not the media harder on Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush than they were on Democratic presidents? Of course. The press is made up almost uniformly of Democrats, and there is an obviously liberal slant to much of the “mainstream” news. But this has been a constant problem for Republicans—and not an insuperable one. Many Republican politicians have thrived despite the hammering they took from the press.
Maybe the press is more partisan now than it was in the past, but this is mitigated by the fact that this is an industry in a swift decline, and conservatives have more opportunities to get their message out than ever before. Yet Trump is in a substantially worse political position at this point in his administration than any Republican president since the invention of public opinion polling.
It is axiomatic that one cannot explain change with a constant, and the deep state and our partisan press are constants. The difference is Trump himself. He has comported himself in ways unbecoming a chief executive. That this misbehavior has been aired publicly does not, cannot excuse Trump.
Did the deep state instruct Trump to tweet that President Obama was tapping his phone line? No. Did it insist that Trump ask FBI director James Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn? Of course not. Did it induce him to fire Comey in a spectacularly incompetent way, then brag about it to the Russian foreign minister? Nope. Did it encourage him to keep the counsel of political hacks and dandified showmen with too-close relations with the Russian government? Again, no.
Did our partisan press dupe Trump into being rude on his telephone call with the Australian prime minister? Did it insist that he mismanage the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare? Did it pen the poorly written executive order regarding immigration from Muslim-majority countries, then botch the rollout of the order? Did it force him to make the manifestly untrue statement that his inauguration crowd was comparable to Obama’s? Nonsense.
Donald Trump is responsible for all these errors. And importantly, they are quite different from the mistakes that previous commanders in chief have made. In sum, they point to a man who is out of his depth, who lacks the discretion, acumen, and temperament to manage the executive branch. That the deep state is pointing this out to a partisan press does not alter the basic facts of the situation.
Trump is the author of his own misfortune. The challenges he faces are no different from those other presidents have had to encounter. Blaming the deep state or the partisan press is simply shooting the messenger
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
