Trump II: What happens when Deep State conspiracy theorists become the establishment?
The list of people poised to enter the new administration reads like a who’s-who of tin-foil-hatters and anti-establishment agitators, so when the oath of office is taken to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution’, how much damage will they do to America’s institutions ? Gabriel Gatehouse reports
The weeks leading up to today’s inauguration of Donald Trump have been strange for me. I’ve spent many years investigating the paranoid underbelly of American politics. I’ve hung out with people who believed in a sprawling conspiracy theory called QAnon – which held that the levers of power had been captured by a cabal of satanic paedophiles. Others believe in a vast plot to steal the 2020 election. They’re convinced America is in the grip of a shadowy and malign Deep State.
These people were once on the fringes. They would occasionally poke their heads above the parapet – as they did on January 6, when a mob of enraged Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Mostly though, they existed beneath the surface of mainstream America.
But since Trump’s victory in November, I’ve been tracking the nominees and appointments to his new administration. Again and again, I’d recognize names and faces from my time on the weirder fringes of the Maga world.
Take Kash Patel, for example, a government lawyer who had crossed my radar during Trump’s first term in office. Patel had won Trump’s trust thanks to his efforts to discredit investigations into links between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin. (To be fair, the narrative that Trump was a Russian agent, which emerged from the Steele dossier and consumed the American media for years, was massively overcooked.)
I last came across Patel in 2022. He’d left government service and was enjoying a moment in the spotlight telling his story on Maga-inflected podcasts. He had written a children’s book called The Plot Against the King. (No prizes for guessing who the king is. I’ll give you a clue: the villain of the story is a character called Hillary Queenton who tries to bring him down by alleging he cheated by working with the “Russonians”.)
Patel seemed destined for the kind of niche internet stardom that flames out quickly. But no. Patel has since written another book, for grown-ups this time: Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy. In it, he lays out how he believes the FBI is at the heart of a vast conspiracy. The book includes a list of names, “enemies” he has suggested should be “targeted” under a new administration. Now he’s Trump’s nominee for director of the FBI.
Senators last week quizzed Pam Bondi, a Florida attorney who claimed there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and who is now Trump’s nominee for the post of attorney general.
She could not confirm that she believed Joe Biden had legitimately won in 2020 (he did). But in response to questions about Patel’s list, she did offer this: “There will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” That may or may not sound reassuring to the likes of Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and dozens of others whose names appear on the list and who fear a return to the dark days of McCarthyism.
Perhaps the most intriguing figure on Trump’s list of nominees is Robert F Kennedy Jr. In April last year, I went to one of his rallies on Long Island. At the time he was running for president as an independent, railing against corruption and divisive rhetoric from both the Republicans and Democrats.
To be honest, he sounded quite reasonable. America, he said, was in the midst of a public health crisis, caused by a diet of ultra-processed food. He wanted to put an end to the revolving door between government regulators and the food and pharmaceutical industries they’re supposed to oversee. Sensible stuff.
At the rally, RFK Jr. – as he is usually known – was clearly on message, trying to put his reputation as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist behind him. But the public record of his pronouncements suggests otherwise. He has long maintained that vaccines cause autism, an assertion for which there is no credible evidence.
At a dinner in New York a few months earlier, he’d told supporters that Covid was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” and that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese were “people that are most immune.”
In 2023, he told Tucker Carlson that the U.S. was manufacturing bioweapons in Ukraine, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who led America’s response to the Covid pandemic, was running a covert bioweapons program under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services. If Trump has his way, RFK Jr will soon be in charge of that department.
The department in charge of biodefense in the United States is indeed part of HHS, which has provided funding to biolabs in Ukraine, China and elsewhere to study and prepare for emerging biological threats, such as terror attacks or pandemics. But there’s no evidence of any secret biological weapons program.
In a way, you can understand why a man like RFK Jr might be drawn to conspiracy theories; a man whose uncle, John F Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963, and whose father was gunned down in 1968. In both cases, he believes (not without some justification) that the State knows more about those assassinations than they have been willing to reveal.
The question is: what happens when anti-establishment conspiracy theorists take power? The list of people poised to enter the new administration reads like a who’s-who of tin-foil-hatters and red-pillers, people who believe that American democracy has been captured by a Deep State cabal.
Elon Musk, who spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars on the Trump campaign, has leaned heavily into the “cabal of pedophiles” narrative. Now he’ll oversee a new Department of Government Efficiency, responsible for slashing the size and scope of the administrative state.
Will Musk and his friends cut through the dysfunction that besets any vast bureaucracy, dismantle the vested interests – call it legalized corruption if you will – that swathes of the American electorate clearly despise and distrust? Or will they merely embed themselves within the system and play the game to their benefit?
Or, with their Post-it notes and bits of string, do they usher in a new era of paranoia, in which the awesome power of the federal government is weaponized against their political opponents?
When Trump takes the oath of office, swearing to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”, will he and his entourage in fact achieve the opposite: erode America’s institutions and become the Deep State of their own nightmarish fever dreams?
Devotees of QAnon talked about a “coming storm”, in which the imagined cabal would be arrested, the “traitors” tried in military tribunals and – in extreme cases – executed. When the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, they thought that moment had arrived. It hadn’t.
With all its many flaws, the United States is a mature democracy, with relatively robust institutions. They survived one Trump administration. They may well survive a second. But over the past four years, there has been an unprecedented erosion of faith in the establishment. Now that the insurgents are taking over, it feels like a storm could be about to break.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments