Trump Battles the ‘Shadow Government’

The President of the United States is often called the most powerful man in the world, but the forces arrayed against Donald Trump are unprecedented. To the 63 million Americans who voted for him, the campaign to undermine President Trump is downright frightening.

The first sign of trouble came when the President’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn, was forced to resign. A telephone call between General Flynn and the Russian ambassador was wiretapped by one of our intelligence agencies, and its contents were leaked to the press.

We still don’t know if the Flynn wiretap was properly authorized by a court order, and Judicial Watch is suing to find out. But we do know that whoever leaked its secret contents to the press is guilty of a felony.

With blood in the water, the so-called deep state went to work to against Trump’s other appointees, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As Rush Limbaugh commented, “They’re trying to isolate Trump from the people he trusts ... from the best people around him.”

The term “deep state” was coined to mean the permanent governing class, the people who really exercise power regardless of who is elected. Also known as the shadow government, the deep state includes our intelligence-collecting agencies such as the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI.

On his way out the door in January, Barack Obama made a drastic change in the way these intelligence agencies operate. As reported by the New York Times, Obama wanted to make sure that raw intelligence was widely shared across many government agencies, where it could then be easily leaked to the press.

With Obama’s support, according to the Times, “there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible, and to keep the reports at a relatively low level of classification, to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government.” This had the effect of leaving a “trail of bread crumbs.”

The “bread crumbs” of unverified information were then leaked to the mainstream media, a vast industry devoted to generating “fake news” against President Trump and his supporters. As Steve Bannon said to the White House press corps, the media have become “the opposition party” to this president.