WHITE BRO KULTURKAMPF 

Want to understand why Trump won the election? Look at pop culture.

How entertainment, from Morgan Wallen to Twisters, predicted the MAGA pivot.

by Kyndall Cunningham

Updated Nov 15, 2024

Singers Post Malone and Morgan Wallen performing at the 57th Annual CMA Music Awards on November 8, 2023

 Frank Micelotta/Disney via Getty Images

Earlier this year, conservatives on social media claimed an unlikely new icon. It wasn’t a podcaster with questionable views or a libertarian businessman selling a course or any particular ideology. It was actress Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria star and the recent lead of the rom-com Anyone but You.

Following her Saturday Night Live hosting gig in March, two conservative outlets published columns heralding Sweeney as a return to conventional beauty standards of the ’90s and early 2000s — or as, Bridget Phetasy for the Spectator put it, “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack.” Both pieces postulate that, by wearing low-cut dresses and playing up her sexuality, Sweeney was inviting men to gawk at her, therefore raising a middle finger to “woke culture” and the Me Too movement.

Sweeney hasn’t publicly aligned herself with the right in any way. (Her family’s politics, though, were the subject of controversy in 2022, which may have something to do with the right’s eager embrace of her.) Rather, her ascension as a throwback-y, hyper-feminine sex symbol has given conservatives the rare mainstream Gen Z figure on whom to project their values. For those paying close attention, the past year was rife with springboards for the conservative message.

In the hindsight following Trump’s reelection, it seems the zeitgeist of 2024 was a foreshadowing of his return to office and something forecasters might have considered a little more seriously. “Bro country” singers became the artists de jour, going head-to-head with female pop singers on the charts and, in many cases, outperforming them. The buzziest new reality shows were about Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and Mormon TikTokers. Conservative films from smaller distributors, like the biopic Reagan and Daily Wire documentary Am I Racist?, made millions at the box office. Nominally apolitical podcasters and streamers, from Joe Rogan to the Nelk Boys, hosted presidential candidates and took on an increasingly political valence.

It’s a sharp turn from the liberal-coded pop culture of the Obama years and the sort of trends that took off in response to Trump’s first presidency — comic-book movies with a progressive edge like Wonder Woman and Black Panther, social commentary films like Get Out and Promising Young Woman, not to mention the explosion of drag culture.

Joel Penney, an associate professor at Montclair State University, says the overall conservative feel of pop culture at the moment is, in many ways, a response to the Me Too movement and the notion by its detractors that “masculinity is in crisis.” At the same time that we’re seeing Sweeney receive praise for representing “traditional” femininity, the All-American straight white “bro” is getting renewed cultural attention.

“There’s been a lot of this trying to restore these strong male role models in pop culture, whether it’s Tom Cruise in the Top Gun remake or these ‘bro’ podcasters and country singers,” Penney says.

2024 was all about the straight white bro

We can see this happening most visibly in mainstream music. It’s not just that country music — a Southern genre with a past and present of conservative politics — has emerged in the mainstream over the past two years — with much controversy. It’s that this class of musicians — Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Jelly Roll, Luke Combs, Shaboozey, and the newly rustic Post Malone — are glaringly male. Shaboozey’s unprecedented achievements in an overwhelmingly white genre add a refreshing element to this conversation. Beyoncé also released a successful country album this year featuring Shaboozey and an array of Black female country artists. Cowboy Carter’s lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em,” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, a shorter amount of time than Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, and Shaboozey’s No.1 songs this year. Nor was she recognized by the country establishment, getting completely shut out of the Country Music Association awards. Overall, it seems like country fans and the average young person, who’s listening to more country music these days, are still more eager to hear dudes croon about beer.

Outside of the charts, these country singers have also become mainstream personalities and subjects of celebrity gossip. In the span of roughly a year, Bryan went from a little-known alternative country crooner posting YouTube videos to a celebrity whose personal relationships are being analyzed by TikTok users and explained in the pages of People. Jelly Roll and his wife, influencer and popular podcast host Bunnie XO, have also become a recognizable celebrity couple, while Wallen’s dating life and public antics have become Page Six fodder.

Singer Zach Bryan and influencer Bri LaPaglia a.k.a. Brianna Chickenfry at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards held at Crypto.com Arena on February 4, 2024, in Los Angeles. Gilbert Flores/Billboard via Getty Images

Elsewhere in pop culture, figures seemingly designated for a more male, conservative audience have gone mainstream. First, there was the viral video of a woman from Tennessee being asked about oral sex outside of a bar — a very bro-y Girls Gone Wild-inspired genre that’s emerged on TikTok — and offering a memorable onomatopoeia. There’s also the viral Florida-based father-and-son duo A.J. and Big Justice, who do food reviews at Costco. With the exception of Big Justice’s sister and mother — who’s literally referred to as the “Mother of Big Justice” in videos — this expanded universe of “Costco Guys” is made of white men and boys from Florida and New Jersey rating foods in a cartoonishly macho manner.


They’re not explicitly expressing MAGA as a value, but they’re trafficking in spaces that have been less visible in recent years: rural and suburban enclaves, featuring white, heterosexual, male, and even “bro-y” talent that was out of vogue in recent history.

One can assume that the current MAGA-coded fabric of mainstream culture correlates with a generation of young people who identify as more conservative than their parents, although Penney says the relationship between pop culture and politics is a two-way street. While the media can reflect growing opinions and interests of the moment, it can also be used to shape it.

“Pop culture doesn’t just emerge out of nowhere,” says Penney, who wrote the book Pop Culture, Politics, and the News. “We’re seeing attempts to shape the culture that are increasingly coming from the conservative media ecosystem.”

Conservatives carved out a space for themselves at the movies

In March, Ben Shapiro’s media company the Daily Wire released its first theatrical movie, the “satirical” documentary Am I Racist?, which earned $4.5 million its opening weekend. Currently, it’s the highest-grossing documentary of the year along with a handful of other conservative nonfiction films including the Catholic documentary Jesus Thirsts: The Story of the Eucharist, the Dinesh D’Souza-directed Vindicating Trump, and the creationist movie The Ark and the Darkness all making the top 10 list.

2024 saw other movies from conservative studios and right-wing producers make notable financial gains. Despite overwhelmingly negative reviews, the Ronald Reagan biopic, Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid, broke into the top 5 at the box office when it premiered in August, doing particularly well with older, white, and Southern audiences. Over the summer, the Christian media company Angel Studios also released the pro-adoption movie Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trout, marketed by Daily Wire+. While it made significantly less money than its 2023 predecessor Sound of Freedom, which had a vocal fan base of QAnon supporters, its nearly $12 million worldwide earnings are still a massive accomplishment for a small Christian film with no movie stars.

While the performance of these movies has not bred the same immediate concern of something like Sound of Freedom, it does provide a potential incentive for major studios to start courting a movie-going crowd that’s felt alienated by mainstream Hollywood.

Actors Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones in the 2024 film Twisters. Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, and Amblin Entertainment

Warner Bros has yet to produce its own Sound of Freedom, but we’ve seen hints that Hollywood is interested in movies that at least appeal to white, Southern, and conservative audiences. American nostalgia bait came to the fore in the summer blockbuster Twisters. The Oklahoma-set film with a star-studded, country-infused soundtrack did particularly well in Southern cities and theater chains in middle America, outperforming initial estimations. While it’s probably most accurate to describe the film as decidedly apolitical with some patriotic markers, it does see the white, blond savior (played by Glen Powell) emasculate the movie’s other male main character, Latino storm chaser Javi (Anthony Ramos). Powell happened to produce another piece of Americana, Blue Angels, a look at the US Navy’s flight demo squadron, and the fourth highest-grossing documentary of 2024. He also co-starred with Sweeney in Anyone but You, a film released at the end of 2023 that crossed the $200 million mark in early 2024.

Penney says corporations will try new strategies and pander to different audiences, as they’ve done with Marvel and Disney’s diversity pushes in recent years, based on what they think will benefit them financially. They’re not really thinking about political impact.

“That was very much the reality of capitalism at work,” Penney says. “[Disney] was trying new strategies, not because they were really, truly convinced that they were going to save the world through expanding diversity, but they were getting a sense that that’s what the audience wanted. It was a response to Me Too and Black Lives Matter and things that actually resonated with our culture to a degree.”

This pendulum swing from the sort of diversity-focused art that dominated pop culture during the Obama years to what we’re seeing now is hardly unprecedented. Specifically in music, country’s popularity as a genre has historically corresponded with a push in right-wing politics, from the jingoist anthems following 9/11 to “Okie From Muskogee” during the Nixon years. Pop culture has also seen movies with conservative and/or religious themes, from American Sniper and The Passion of the Christ, break the box office. If this current moment tells us anything, it’s that we’re stuck in an ouroboros of shifting political values and corporate interests.

Suffice to say, it’s not a question of whether we’ve been here before but whether we’re paying attention to what these signals all mean. With an honest look at our media landscape, were the results of the election truly that surprising?

Kyndall Cunningham is a culture writer interested in reality TV, movies, pop music, Black media, and celebrity culture. Previously, she wrote for the Daily Beast and contributed to several publications, including Vulture, W Magazine, and Bitch Media.

 

Vultures and artificial intelligence(s) as death detectors: GAIA develops a high-tech approach for wildlife research and conservation

Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW)

 

image: 

AI data scientists and wildlife biologists analyse and interpret data from vulture tags and develop an Artificial Intelligence for behaviour recognition. The GAIA I³ Lab at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in Berlin brings together state of art expertise in Wildlife Biology and Artificial Intelligence development.

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Credit: Photo by Jon A. Juarez

In order to use remote locations to record and assess the behaviour of wildlife and environmental conditions, the GAIA Initiative developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that reliably and automatically classifies behaviours of white-backed vultures using animal tag data. As scavengers, vultures always look for the next carcass. With the help of tagged animals and a second AI algorithm, the scientists can now automatically locate carcasses across vast landscapes. The algorithms described in a recently published article in the “Journal of Applied Ecology” are therefore key components of an early warning system that can be used to quickly and reliably recognise critical changes or incidents in the environment such as droughts, disease outbreaks or the illegal killing of wildlife.

The GAIA Initiative is an alliance of research institutes, conservation organisations and enterprises with the aim of creating a high-tech early warning system for environmental changes and critical ecological incidents. The new AI algorithms were developed by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS and the Tierpark Berlin.

The death of wildlife is an important process in ecosystems – regardless whether this is a regular case, such as the successful hunt of a predator, or an exceptional case caused by the outbreak of a wildlife disease, the contamination of the landscape with environmental toxins or illegal killing by people. For the investigation of mammalian species communities and ecosystems it is therefore important to systematically record and analyse these regular and exceptional cases of mortality. In order to achieve this, the GAIA Initiative makes use of the natural abilities of white-backed vultures (Gyps africanus) in combination with highly developed biologging technologies and artificial intelligence. “This combination of three forms of intelligence ­– animal, human and artificial – is the core of our new I³ approach with which we aim to make use of the impressive knowledge that wildlife has about ecosystems”, says Dr Jörg Melzheimer, GAIA project head and scientist at the Leibniz-IZW.

Vultures are perfectly adapted by millions of years of evolution to detect carcasses across vast landscapes quickly and reliably. They have outstanding eye-vision and sophisticated communication that allows them to monitor very large areas of land when many individuals work together. Vultures thus fulfil an important ecological role by cleaning landscapes of carrion and containing the spread of wildlife diseases. “For us as wildlife conservation scientists, the knowledge and skills of vultures as sentinels are very helpful to be able to quickly recognise problematic exceptional cases of mortality and initiate appropriate responses”, says Dr Ortwin Aschenborn, GAIA project head alongside Melzheimer at the Leibniz-IZW. “In order to use vulture knowledge, we need an interface – and at GAIA, this interface is created by combining animal tags with artificial intelligence.”

The animal tags with which GAIA equipped white-backed vultures in Namibia record two groups of data. The GPS sensor provides the exact location of the tagged individual at a specific point in time. The so-called ACC sensor (ACC is short for acceleration) stores detailed movement profiles of the tag – and thus of the animal – along the three spatial axes at the exact same time. Both groups of data are used by the artificial intelligence algorithms developed at the Leibniz-IZW. “Every behaviour is represented by specific acceleration patterns and thus creates specific signatures in the ACC data of the sensors”, explains wildlife biologist and AI specialist Wanja Rast from the Leibniz-IZW. “In order to recognise these signatures and reliably assign them to specific behaviours, we trained an AI using reference data. These reference data come from two white-backed vultures that we fitted with tags at Tierpark Berlin and from 27 wild vultures fitted with tags in Namibia.” In addition to the ACC data from the tags, the scientists recorded data on the behaviour of the animals – in the zoo through video recordings and in the field by observing the animals after they had been tagged. “In this way, we obtained around 15,000 data points of ACC signatures ascribed to a verified, specific vulture behaviour. These included active flight, gliding, lying, feeding and standing. This data set enabled us to train a so-called support vector machine, an AI algorithm that assigns ACC data to specific behaviours with a high degree of reliability”, explains Rast.

In a second step, the scientists combined the behaviour thus classified with the GPS data from the tags. Using algorithms for spatial clustering, they identified locations where certain behaviours occurred more frequently. In this way, they obtained spatially and temporally finely resolved locations where vultures fed. “The GAIA field scientists and their partners in the field were able to verify more than 500 of suspected carcass locations derived from the sensor data, as well as more than 1300 clusters of other non-carcass behaviours”, says Aschenborn. The field-verified carcass locations ultimately served to establish vulture feeding site signatures in the scientists’ final AI training dataset – this algorithm indicates with high precision locations where an animal has most likely died and a carcass is on the ground. “We could predict carcass locations with an impressive 92 percent probability and so demonstrated that a system which combines vulture behaviour, animal tags and AI is very useful for large-scale monitoring of animal mortality”, says Aschenborn.

This AI-based behaviour classification, carcass detection and carcass localisation are key components of the GAIA early warning system for critical changes or incidents in the environment. “Until now, this methodological step has been carried out in the GAIA I³ data lab at the Leibniz-IZW in Berlin”, says Melzheimer. “But with the new generation of animal tags developed by our consortium, AI analyses are implemented directly on the tag. This will provide reliable information on whether and where an animal carcass is located without prior data transfer in real time without any loss of time.” The transfer of all GPS and ACC raw data is no longer necessary, allowing data communication with a significantly lower bandwidth to transmit the relevant information. This makes it possible to use a satellite connection instead of terrestrial GSM networks, which guarantees coverage even in remote wilderness regions completely independent of local infrastructure. Even at the most remote locations, critical changes or incidents in the environment – such as disease outbreaks, droughts or illegal killing of wildlife – could then be recognised without delay.

In recent decades, the populations of many vulture species declined sharply and are now acutely threatened with extinction. The main causes are the loss of habitat and food in landscapes shaped by humans as well as a high number of direct or indirect incidences of poisoning. The population of the white-backed vulture, for example, declined by around 90 percent in just three generations – equivalent to an average decline of 4 percent per year. “Owing to their ecological importance and rapid decline, it is essential to significantly improve our knowledge and understanding of vultures in order to protect them”, says Aschenborn. “Our research using AI-based analysis methods will not only provide us with insights into ecosystems. It will also increase our knowledge of how vultures communicate, interact and cooperate, forage for food, breed, rear their young and pass on knowledge from one generation to the next.” GAIA has so far fitted more than 130 vultures in different parts of Africa with tags, most of them in Namibia. Until today, the scientists analysed more than 95 million GPS data points and 13 billion ACC records.

White-backed vultures and a jackal at a carcass 

Vultures are perfectly adapted by millions of years of evolution to detect carcasses across vast landscapes quickly and reliably. They have outstanding eye-vision and sophisticated communication that allows them to monitor very large areas of land when many individuals work together. Vultures thus fulfil an important ecological role by cleaning landscapes of carrion and containing the spread of wildlife diseases.

Credit

Photo by Jan Zwilling

The development of the AI algorithms require a distinct multi-step process that includes data acquisition in the wild and from vultures under human care, data annotation and AI training. The new AI algorithms were developed by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS and the Tierpark Berlin.

Credit

IIllustration by Clara C. Anders

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Journal

Journal of Applied Ecology

DOI

10.1111/1365-2664.14810 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Death detector: Using vultures as sentinels to detect carcasses by combining bio-logging and machine learning

Article Publication Date

18-Nov-2024

In America’s gripping political chess game, what is really at stake?

As Harris and Trump go head to head in November, the fate of Empire hangs in the balance.

Faiq Zafar 

DAWN

Published November 1, 2024 

Said Lord Byron famously, “While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls — the world.”

As America’s high-octane presidential race makes inroads into its final stretch, it invokes many of Byron’s apocalyptic overtones.

“In this election, your freedom, your democracy, and America itself is at stake,” Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris said at an event in Greensboro, North Carolina. “This is the one. The most existential, consequential, and important election of our lifetime.”

As they brace for the great November showdown, Democrats have garnished their political rhetoric with similar allusions to the apocalypse should Trump take the White House in November. Of course, these clichéd talking-points don’t really explain some of the truly damning developments in their own camp. And there have been quite a few.

One such moment came gunning for Harris as she interacted with voters at a supermarket in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was asked to comment on an endorsement she had recently received.

In a move that had flabbergasted political pundits, journalists, and voters alike, former vice-president Dick Cheney, once vilified by Democrats, backed Harris for the top job, putting his weight behind a campaign he initially seemed to share little common ground with. Surprising still was a visibly excited Harris celebrating Cheney’s endorsement as if he was Santa Claus:

“I am honoured to have their endorsement. I think that leaders who are well-respected are making an important statement. (That) it’s okay to put country above party.”

The “well-respected” leader in question is the decorated and unapologetic architect of the illegal Iraq War, a self-described ‘Darth Vader’ who notoriously signed off on the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ [read torture] programme, is liable for prosecution under every anti-torture and war crime statute known to man, and who, during his tenure under the Bush administration, crossed off murderous atrocities against the Global South like items off a grocery list. For Harris, however, there’s more to a person than the war crimes they commit.

At the time of writing, Harris is currently touring the country with his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, in a bid to tap into the conservative GoP base.

Democrat VP Kamala Harris campaigns alongside former Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) in Ripon, Wisconsin. Source: NPR

Arriving on the heels of more than 200 Republican endorsements, the Cheneys’ patronage of the Harris/ Walz ticket signals the latest development in a wider pattern of explicit bipartisan reshuffling, the likes of which Washington has seldom seen before. Legacy conservatives like the Bush family, Mike Pence, Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troy, Geoff Duncan, and Jeff Flake, to name a few, have disavowed a second Trump presidency as a ‘unique threat to democracy’, thereby accentuating a burgeoning chasm within the GoP camp.

In a country where bipartisan consensus on any given issue is generally inconceivable, Republicans and Democrats have banded together amidst hollow slogans of ‘Country Above Party’ in unprecedented fashion, hoping to insulate the Oval Office from Donald Trump by any means necessary. To this end, nothing is off-limits. Goalposts will shift, ideologies and dogmas, hitherto uncompromisable, will be forsaken, bitter adversaries shall embrace like star crossed lovers, and once impregnable party lines shall be permeated with relative ease.

People who view the labyrinth that is American politics through a partisan lens don’t know how to make sense of these glaring contradictions. They tend to perceive these shifts as occasional glitches in a political simulation underpinned largely by a two-party system.

Thus, they are confused when more than 700 current and former national security officials from either side of the political aisle flock to endorse Harris as someone with the “temperament and values needed to serve as commander-in-chief”. They are bewildered at how politicians who profess to stand for global peace and prosperity, human rights, and individual liberty, bring themselves to ally with imperial hawks like the Cheneys, the Clintons, and the Bushs.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

For political theorist and professor at the University of Chicago, Dr John Mearsheimer, such people miss the forest for the trees. Per Mearsheimer, the segmentation of American politics into a Republican and Democratic orientation is a game of smoke and mirrors — a remnant of a bygone era in American political life.

“I like to refer to the Republicans and the Democrats as Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” he said in a panel discussion with economist and Columbia professor, Dr Jeffery Sachs. “There is hardly any difference between the two parties.”

For many, this taps into a kind of Jungian dream — it reinforces something about America most people have known to be true for the longest time, but just didn’t quite know they knew it yet. Take for instance, the presidency of Democratic sweetheart Barack Obama. Voted into power amidst slogans of hope and change, Obama’s campaign had vowed to do away with many of the ills that had plagued the Bush years. However, incessant GoP filibustering ensured much of Obama’s domestic agenda never saw the light of day. Not only was the President unable to get many of his innocuous appointees into office, Republicans relentlessly impeded progress on issues like immigration reform, minimum wage increases, gun reform, climate change, and any domestic issue that would have aided in the real life amelioration of the American working class.

The GoP obstruction, however, did not seem to stop Obama from picking up the threads on many of his predecessor’s more controversial policies, all of which he had spent an entire campaign run deriding.

The Obama years saw citizens liquidated without due process, prisoners detained without charge, dragnet surveillance on the American people, and unprecedented witch-hunts against federal employees through the Insider Threat Programme.

Obama also spearheaded an increasingly deceptive recovery of the stock market after the 2008 financial crash, during which individual stock ownership plummeted to record lows, while cash-rich corporations lined their pockets via stock-buybacks. National economic inequality skyrocketed, GDP growth outran wage growth, and Wall Street remained unreformed, creating highly leveraged markets which were increasingly susceptible to breakdowns.

On the foreign policy front, Obama, who had run on the promise of putting an end to Bush’s forever wars, orchestrated regime change operations in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, without so much as a peep from the adversarial Republicans that packed both Houses of Congress. When it came to capitulating to the status quo, Obama’s answer was always, “Yes We Can!”

A relatively unknown Obama embraces superstardom at the 2004 DNC keynote address. Source: Politico.com

To the uninitiated, this bipartisan convergence on issues of international governance, economics, and war but never on domestic issues like healthcare, infrastructure, gun reform, and education would appear to be somewhat of a random coincidence. But Mearsheimer’s thesis points to a larger pattern at play — a deeper collusion than what meets the eye.

If this hypothesis does hold true, and the Republican/ Democrat divide is just mere political theatre, what is it about Trump specifically that disrupts this script? What remarkable threat does he pose that makes him such an anathema to the American political class?
Pied Piper

Trump first burst onto the political scene in 2015 as little more than a second-generation plutocrat with a discernable last name, a flamboyant flair for showmanship, and no political experience save for an ill-advised interest in Obama’s birth certificate. His initial bid for the presidency commanded little, if any respect, least of all from his eventual rival, Hillary Clinton.

In a leaked memo published by Wikileaks, it was in fact Clinton who intentionally orchestrated the elevation and propulsion of Donald Trump to the party nomination as part of what she termed the “Pied Piper” strategy — a concerted effort by the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to deliberately encourage media coverage of far-right Republican candidates, such as Donald Trump, in the Republican primary. The prevailing theory was that these candidates — seen as extreme or unelectable — would be easier for Clinton to defeat in a general election.


Leaked memo by the Clinton campaign calling for the implementation of the ‘Pied Piper’ strategy in 2015. Source: WikiLeaks



Few things in history have backfired with such ferocity. Not only had the Clinton campaign grossly miscalculated just how despised Hillary was to an enormous chunk of the American population, the timing of the strategy did not do the campaign any favours. 2016 was a turbulent time in American history. The forever wars, the 2008 financial crash, and the advent of the culture wars had pushed America to the brink of political exhaustion. In a climate sullied by such volatility, the ‘Pied Piper’ strategy essentially sought to put out fire by drenching it in gasoline, and up until this point, Trump was actually the DNC’s accelerant of choice.

Fast forward to 2024 and the same DNC now assails him as a parousia of Hitler, a “threat to our democracy in a way we have not seen,” as per Harris’ running mate Tim Walz during the vice-presidential debate on October 1. Of course, Walz’s derision of Trump would demand a lot more credibility had he not been running on the same ticket as Kamala Harris, who secured the party nomination in what can only be described as a blatant disregard for democratic procedure at best, and a palace coup orchestrated within the party’s elite ranks, at worst.

Widely regarded as one of the most unpopular vice-presidents in American history with a dismal favourability rating of 16 per cent as of June 2024, Kamala was nobody’s first choice to lead the Democratic presidential bid. When President Joe Biden was forced to withdraw from the race in July following an embarrassing night on the debate stage, he merely passed the baton to Harris, snubbing the conventional primary process wholesale. Harris then relied on the elite cadre in the Democratic Party to garnish her nomination with the requisite legitimacy. A candidate whose unpopularity rendered her unable to secure a single delegate in the 2020 primaries now leads the Democratic party ticket in 2024, bypassing any primary polling whatsoever.

Eight years on from the Pied Piper strategy, what danger does a political outsider like Trump pose to the Democratic establishment for them to feel compelled into such extremities?

When Trump took the national stage against Clinton in 2016, his populist, ultra-nationalist rhetoric against immigrants, Muslims, women, minorities, and people of colour was not only expected, it was welcomed by a DNC which saw his far-right slants as easy conquest for a relatively moderate Clinton.

However, often the most dangerous lies are those interspersed with the truth. In a political masterstroke that eventually killed Hillary’s presidential aspirations, Trump punctuated his radical outbursts and far-right jingoism with something far more potent. Americans were angry. And Trump showed them exactly who to blame. His cries of ‘Drain the Swamp’ (“swamp” being a metaphor for entrenched political interests) instantly appealed to an enraged conservative mob that had found itself relegated to the peripheries of globalisation for far too long.

His characterisation of Washington as a corrupt cesspool of self-serving careerists carved him more than 304 electoral votes amidst a political storm no one predicted. In a bid for political relevance, Trump’s populism inadvertently tapped into something astoundingly powerful. Was he merely throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks? Or did he inadvertently stumble upon some kind of fourth wall?

Democrats have branded Trump’s rhetoric as the unhinged chauvinism of a power-hungry populist bent on destroying America’s democratic infrastructure. Such terms of endearment, however, are hardly surprising. In American political lore, the deep state has largely occupied a kind of mythological status, an enigma akin to that of the Loch Ness monster. Questions about its existence rarely evoke a serious answer, whistleblower accounts are laughed off as heresy, and any analysis with respect to its existence rarely breaks into the news cycle. Beneath the deflections and the distractions, the veneers and the illusions, the pertinent question remains: is the deep state real?
The Loch Ness monster of Washington

October 16, 1962 — a day that has lived on in America’s public consciousness in infamy. At 8:45am on a chilly autumn morning, a pajama-clad John F Kennedy breezed through a copy of the Washington Post when he was interrupted by a flustered McGeorge Bundy. The national security adviser apprised the 45-year-old president of an ominous escalation in the Cold War: photographic evidence from U2 flight missions over Cuba had unearthed Soviet nuclear-tipped missile installations in secret launch sites across the island, setting into motion a geopolitical chess game that would later claim notoriety as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In frenzied cabinet Room deliberations, panic-stricken members of Kennedy’s inner circle locked horns on what the best response to Khurshchev’s betrayal might look like. All diplomatic gloves had come off, and the iron fist dictated the order of the day. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sought the president’s green light for a ground invasion into Cuba, an escalation that would most certainly bring the country into direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed foe, one which could very well wipe the US off the face of the Earth. The cabinet was deadlocked, leaving Kennedy with a political dilemma of potentially world-ending implications. The sheer gravity of the moment was not lost on attorney-general Robert Kennedy, who passed a note to his brother, reading: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbour.”

As the cabinet ran the arduous calculations of a potentially apocalyptic fallout, an indecisive Kennedy took leave, effectively breaking the meeting. Instead of staying with his aides in the West Wing to calibrate a policy response, the president found himself at a cocktail party on the other side of DC, at the Georgetown residence of famed columnist Joseph Alsop. On the eve of a possible nuclear war, when the fate of the world rested in his hands, the American president was photographed amongst friends, eating, drinking, laughing.

President Kennedy at the residence of Joseph Alsop on October 16, 1962. Source: Politico Magazine

It was a move that perplexes Cold War historians to this day. When America stood one misstep away from nuclear Armageddon, why did its commander-in-chief forego his war room for a dinner date in Georgetown?

Conventionalists attribute this seeming erraticism to the president wanting to maintain a guise of normalcy, for fears of prematurely revealing his hand to White House watchers in the press. For the careful observer, however, the night provides one of those unique momentary glimpses behind the veil of political pageantry, when power, in its most unabashed and unadulterated, stripped of all theatrics and veneers, effervesces to the surface of history long enough to be palpable.

Much like Kennedy, many of Alsop’s guests that night were people who dominated the Georgetown scene and similar high-end neighbourhoods in DC in the 60s. According to Gregg Herkins’ groundbreaking book, ‘The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington’, at this party were people Kennedy could not afford to ignore, people who commandeered true power in the Beltway during that time.

Men of importance like the far-east chief and future director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) William Bolby, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Chip Bohlen, the CIA’s longest-serving director Allan Dulles, one of the CIA’s founding fathers Frank Wisner, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among others, joined Kennedy at the Alsops’ on the night of October 16. It was here, at a small domicile two-and-a-half miles from the Capitol, that the policy response to the missile crisis was brokered.

The idea of faceless, conspiratorial cabals maneuvering the political and economic trajectory of a polity from the cold, dark corners of government can probably be traced back to the dawn of the nation-state itself. Indeed, it was this rudimentary conceptualisation that fuelled political rhetoric during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, when the concept of the deep state was first operationalised. In the case of America, however, the deep state is anything but.

In his book, ‘The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government’, former Republican Congressional aide Mike Lofgren draws on decades of political experience to recount first-hand run-ins with the American deep state. Born, not out of some clandestine conspiracy but a natural evolutionary process of Empire, the American deep state is not so much sinister (although it possesses menacing aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

Unlike its Ottoman counterpart, agents of America’s deep state operate in broad daylight, playing by a set of neo-conservative dogmas rooted in the triumphalism of the Cold War. For these operatives, America is the indispensable nation, the city upon a hill whose vast military aptitude affords it the moral imperative to establish its footprint across the globe. It is an incredibly robust consensus incentivised by an intimately connected network of money, a collective ideological subscription to global American primacy, and cutthroat careerism to specific and powerful elements of corporate America.

Over the years, it’s come to be known by many names. Some have called it the “military-industrial complex”. Others have called it names like “the Establishment” or the “the Blob”. Neither do justice to the elaborate, sophisticated, oft-times impressive machinery that is the deep state.

As per Lofgren’s detailed account, the deep state is underpinned by the Department of Defence, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, and the Justice Department. It also envelops critical areas of the judiciary, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are an enigma even to most members of Congress, and certain federal trial courts like the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The metaphorical fort is held together by a rump Congress, consisting of the congressional leadership and some members of the defence and intelligence committees.

One of the principal actors greasing the wheels of this elaborate machinery is the department of the treasury, owing to its unilateral jurisdiction over financial flows, its extensive bureaucracy devoted to enforcing international economic sanctions, and its natural symbiosis with Wall Street. Over the years, the treasury has quietly become the mecca of a new kind of national security operation, with some of its day-to-day execution outsourced to American financial institutions, including but not limited to major banks, investment firms, and payment processors, in almost the same way that the Pentagon has outsourced military logistics in war zones to private contractors.

Under regulations like the Bank Secrecy Act and partnerships with agencies like the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), these institutions are on the frontlines of financial surveillance, and help monitor, enforce, and comply with government directives of sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) measures.

In a special series in the Washington Post called ‘Top Secret America’, Dana Priest and William Arkin described, in addition to its public sector arm, the staggering scope of the privatised deep state. As of 2024, there are more than one million contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number far greater than that of cleared civilian employees of the government. This is supplemented by the capital and grandeur of Wall Street, which injects the cash needed to keep the political arm of the deep state quiescent as an illusory puppet show. Should an over-zealous politician forget his place and threaten the status-quo, Wall Street floods the streets of Washington with cash to help hired hands remember exactly who runs their town.

This inverted relationship is also true of the visible government and Silicon Valley, defined by Lofgren to include not only quintessential hardware and software companies, but the telecommunications infrastructure that enable these devices to work. Following the dotcom revolution of the late 1990s and the industry’s explosive boom during the 21st century, the Valley has largely outgunned traditional smokestack industries as a credible generator of unimaginable wealth. Its research-and-development capabilities are essential to the clandestine operations of the deep state — from globe-spanning surveillance technology to the avionics, sensors, and guidance systems in every military plane, ship, tank, missile, and drone, the Valley has proven to be the deep state’s crown jewel.

In terms of its scope, financial resources, and sheer global reach, the American deep state is a truly anomalous phenomenon. That said, it is hardly an optimal design. Its predisposition to expensive, futile wars, its sheer incapacity to forecast and respond to the 2008 stock market crash, and its manifest blindness to the blowback of its own policies are, in fact, rather routine. The lofty castle of the deep state has long stood upon pillars of salt and sand; were it not for a perverse incentive structure that rewards failure and redresses it as success, it would have collapsed long ago.
A ‘benevolent’ world empire

It would be pertinent to note that the deep state was not always a staple in American politics but has mutated over the years as an unintended consequence of a specific kind of political dogma. In fact, the isolationist years before 1941 saw the US maintain only the 17th largest military force in the world — impressive nonetheless, but nowhere near the nuclear-powered merchant of death it is today.

A product of the gruesome realities of the Second World War, the attainment of workable nuclear weapons was almost certainly the deep state’s moment of conception. The Manhattan Project and the Office of Strategic Services were the most expansive government projects in recorded history, shrouded in cabbalistic secrecy. Entire sequestered cities ranging from Oak Ridge in Tennessee to Los Alamos in New Mexico sprung up in a matter of months. As Lofgren put it ever so eloquently, “If the deep state is an evolved structure, nuclear weapons were the genetic mutation that gave it the key characteristics it possesses today: a penchant for secrecy, extravagant cost, and a lack of democratic accountability.”

The deep state is born — the ‘Trinity’ bomb at Los Alamos. Source: National Park Service



By 1945, what Time magazine publisher Henry Luce heralded as the ‘American Century’ was at hand. With the power of the Gods in the palm of their hand, Washington was entranced by an overwhelming sense of destiny to uplift the world from the ruination of war. In the decades following the War, the administrative state quietly waded through the waters of the Cold War, augmenting its influence on American political life, one silent victory at a time. With the National Security Act of 1947 and the establishment of the Department of Defence, the CIA, and the president’s National Security Council, there was an institutionalization of a permanent national security apparatus for the first time in American history. Ideological support for this apparatus soon followed with NSC-68, a 1950 White House policy document sketching out a grand strategy for containing communism by means of a permanent peacetime military buildup. As America locked horns with the Soviets, the deep state festered beneath the murky waters of Pennsylvania Avenue, slowly infecting and intellectually corrupting the American political class.

A copy of Henry Luce’s infamous article ‘The American Century’ in Time Magazine. Source: Time Magazine

Kennedy was as good an exemplar of this intellectual corruption as any. In one of the most conveniently misremembered ironies in American history, it was Kennedy, the darling of American liberalism, who campaigned on an imaginary “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. He accused the incumbent Dwight Eisenhower — chief organiser of American victory in Europe during the War — of being weak on defence, taking baby steps towards the Missile Crisis in Cuba which would later go on to define his legacy.

In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower, cognisant of the dangers of a permanent war mentality, famously warned about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” embodied by a new “military-industrial complex.” By that time, however, America had long crossed the Rubicon, and there was no turning back. The war machine’s new sweet tooth for the glacé of conflict gave rise to the Domino Theory — an idea that the spread of communism in one country would trigger a chain reaction in others. As history would have it, American troops laid waste to Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Grenada, and Panama, among countless others, lest the first domino fall.

When the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve itself in ‘91 in a death knell to the USSR, America, left without a worthy adversary on the global stage, was caught completely off-guard. For decades, the Cold War had provided balance to international relations, with the United States and the Soviet Union representing a clear global dichotomy: capitalism, democracy, and free markets versus communism, state control, and authoritarianism. With the death of the Leninist dream, communism as a credible global ideology, a hedge against America’s vulture capitalism, essentially died as well.

This left America crippled with a national identity crisis. With no grand villian to justify its foreign policy, military posture, and global strategy against, the US and its allies were left without a clear narrative for global engagement. For the first time ever in recorded history, the world was, in the truest sense of the word, truly unipolar.

The Malta Summit 1989 — President George W. Bush and President Gorbachev shake hands, signaling the end of the Cold War. Source: The Malta Independent

Realising the gaping ideological vacuum created by what Charles Krauthammer famously called ‘the unipolar moment’, a budding group of neo-conservative thinkers saw gold in the streets. Rooted in a nationalist history of American exceptionalism that advocated for aggressive military and political assertions of democracy and liberalism, the neo-conservative revolution chalked out a new approach for international engagement.

The founding group for this new policy approach was the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a think-tank formed in 1992 on the “fundamental propositions that assert the belief that American leadership is good for both America and for the world”. In full cognisance of the unimaginable military might that lay at their feet, William Kristol, who acted as Project Chairman for PNAC, and Robert Kagen, co-founder of the PNAC, authored a critical policy document which was to later become the ideological foundation for the American Empire.

The document, titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” called on the United States to realise the moral imperative of its military prowess and assume its role as a “benevolent global hegemon”, a world empire which would use its military might to promote, and if need be, impose, liberal ideals of democracy and freedom. For the neo-cons, the unipolar moment was a stabilising force in international relations, a moment truly unique in human history and one wherein America needed to strike whilst the iron was hot. As authors of the Empire’s origin story, the neo-cons advocated maximum military and diplomatic engagement to ensure US values and influence dominate the international system.

In the decades that followed, the neo-conservative revolution slowly infiltrated the highest levels of government. In the Clinton administration especially, necons like secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright espoused a kind of hubris many have since come to know all too well: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

Sure enough, wherever there was danger, the wrath of Empire, ruthless and swift as it is, made sure to follow. Where danger didn’t exist, it was simply manufactured all the same.

The phenomenon of cooked intelligence is best embodied by the summer of 1996 when American neo-conservative thinkers Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others authored a policy document for the new Israeli Prime Minister at the time — a young hardliner who went by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu. The document, titled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ reflected a broader neo-conservative vision for Israeli dominance in the Middle East, with Israel functioning as the Empire’s guard dog in the region. The Clean Break papers advocated brute military engagement, regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and strong deterrence capabilities for Israel. During the Bush Jr years, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser, along with other neo-cons like Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, occupied key strategic positions in the administration.

The 9/11 attacks presented the neo-conservatives with a unique opportunity to realise their foreign policy agenda and impose American ideals of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. At a time when American sentiment was at its most vulnerable, Netanyahu was called in to testify before Congress in 2002 as a “regional expert”. Realising his one shot at securing the realm, Netanyahu’s testimony was perfectly in conjunction with the Clean Break papers. Addressing Congress, Netanyahu laid the groundwork for a regime change operation against Saddam Hussein, claiming that doing so would rid the region of Islamic fanaticism and usher in a new era of peace and stability.

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Suspiciously enough, intelligence reports citing the existence of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq popped up in the media soon after, with the United States putting boots on the ground in Iraq less than a year later. The Clean Break was finally underway, and the neo-cons’ insatiable thirst for war quenched at last — until the next one, of course. For more than three decades, the “benevolent hegemon” stoked war and violence across the world, leaving destruction, instability and despair in its wake. Little did it know that its day of reckoning was not too far off.


Benjamin Netanyahu testifies before Congress in 2002. Source: Vox.com


Red Caesar

Over two millennia ago, Rome stood somewhat of a similar inflection point. At the time, the Empire had already become an imperial force and was overstretched militarily across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. As a result, domestic resources flailed thin. Economic inequality ran amuck, with Roman senators, bureaucrats, and patrician families hoarding exorbitant amounts of wealth as the plebeians and slaves were left fighting for scraps.

From within this cesspool of ideological corruption, political rot, and economic inequality rose a charismatic populist who vowed to return the dying empire to its former glory. His explosive rhetoric found an audience amongst an increasingly discontented polity. He galvaniSed the public against an entrenched aristocracy that commanded real power behind the toga-wearing mules of the Senate, and threatened to tear the very fabrics of the state apart. His ascendency was challenged at every step by the oligarchic structure that ruled Rome. When this populist finally grabbed hold of the reins of power, he never let go. And Rome chose to follow him every step of the way. So goes the story of Julius Caesar.

More than 2,000 years later, America finds itself at a crossroads similar to that of the great Republic it has modeled itself after. The neo-con revolution of the 90s and its subsequent infiltration into the Bush Jr and Obama administrations empowered the deep state, tossing America into the throws of the forever wars, overstretching its military and economic resources to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Presently, the US maintains more than 750 military bases across 80 different countries, increasingly at the cost of domestic infrastructure, social programmes, and other pressing needs. The repulsion of the Glass-Steagall Act through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which allowed commercial banks to engage in investment banking, coupled with the overall deregulation of Wall Street, upped the risk prevalent in the financial system; this culminated in 2008 with the worst financial crisis in the US since the Great Depression. As working-class Americans lined up to cash unemployment checks, Obama, in lockstep with his hawkish secretary-of-state, spent trillions in wars of choice in the Middle East, all the while lining the pockets of cash-rich corporations and the military-industrial complex back home.

With Americans seething with frustration, something had to give. In September 2011, protesters chanting “We are the 99pc” flooded the streets of New York City in what is now known as the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. A protest against the wealthiest 1pc, it derided the rampant economic inequality, corporate greed, neoliberal economics, and large financial institutions for causing the 2008 financial crisis.

On the opposing side of the political aisle, festering discontent amongst the public culminated in the Tea Party movement. A grassroots conservative response to the federal government’s actions post the 2008 financial crash, the movement called for limited government, fiscal conservatism, lower taxes, and a reduction in the federal deficit.

A grassroots consensus against the cistern of corruption and greed in Wall Street on both sides of the political aisle spooked the dark agents of the deep state, sending its extensive machinery into overdrive. With liberals and conservatives coalescing around the shadow state’s cash cow, danger to the status-quo was palpable. There was a need to break this overwhelmingly powerful consensus at the roots with something relatively superficial, but rooted in just enough reality to fragment society back into their ideological camps. Enter the culture wars.

Around the same time as the Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements, the media dramatically ramped up coverage of racism, embracing novel theories of racial consciousness hitherto unheard of in American political discourse. Brilliant reporting by Zach Goldberg in Tablet magazine uncovers what appears to be a clear trend in liberal newspapers around the consequential 2011 mark, when the OWS and the Tea Party movements were galvanising the youth in droves. Around 2011, there was a notable surge in terms like “racism”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, and “racial inequality” among others, reported in some of the most widely read newspapers in the country. Take for instance the following graph, which displays the usage of terms “racist(s)” and “racism” as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from 1970 through 2019.






Around 2011, instances of the word “racist/racism” shot up considerably. Similar trends are apparent for other culture war mainstays, suspiciously around the same 2011 mark.






To be clear, racism undoubtedly permeates American society as an incredibly serious problem. However, did American society coincidentally grow more racist in the aftermath of the OWS and Tea Party movements than it was in the 1990s, when Bill and Hillary Clinton labelled young people of colour “superpredators” from behind the Seal of the President of the United States? This apparent shift in liberal reporting in 2011, amidst inflammatory rhetoric by American politicians and pundits, fractured American society in ways it still hasn’t quite healed from. Post 2011, the fracture was graphically evident.






In December 2006, 45pc of white Democrats and 41pc of white Republicans reported knowing someone they considered racist. By June 2015, this figure surged to 64pc for white Democrats but stayed at 41pc for white Republicans. Surprisingly enough, among Black and Hispanic Democrats, the trend was in the opposite direction. By inflating a very real social issue and manufacturing a culture war, the media created a political playing field ripe for a populist demagogue.

In 2016, with political frustration at fever pitch, the threads of Empire finally gave way at the seams. On the Republican side of the political aisle, a culturally disenfranchised conservative mob nominated a populist in Donald Trump to the GoP ticket. In the Democrat camp, it took a socialist like Bernie Sanders to energise a young progressive base increasingly disillusioned by Obama’s capitulation to the establishment. The 2016 moment was truly unique, with two anti-deep state candidates across the political aisle galvanising an incredibly angry base.

The Democratic party establishment successfully quashed the Sanders threat by stacking the deck in favour of dedicated neo-con and deep state darling, Hillary Clinton. In July 2016, WikiLeaks published a trove of DNC emails, revealing that party officials had discussed ways to undermine Sanders’ campaign in favour of Clinton.

Additionally, in a deliberate effort to minimise Sanders’ exposure, the DNC scheduled a limited number of debates on weekends or holidays, at times fewer viewers would tune in. This played right to Clinton’s advantage, who had a higher name recognition at the time. Superdelegates — party officials who can vote for whomever they choose at the convention — cast their vote for Clinton uncharacteristically early in the primary process, curating an impression of inevitability around her candidacy and thereby discouraging potential Sanders supporters.

The Republican camp was far less successful in dealing with Trump, who was already a known commodity and had a flair for waddling through media attacks unscathed. There was something about a non-traditional renegade lambasting legacy neo-cons in the Republican primaries that was like a breath of fresh air for an incredibly frustrated conservative base.

“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction; there were none. And they knew there were none … obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We all make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.”

Such outbursts were virtually unheard of in Washington. The fact that the barbs were clearly aimed at Jeb Bush, brother of former-president George W Bush Jr, who stood a couple of feet away from Trump on the debate stage, was cathartic for a conservative base that had grown increasingly disillusioned with the war-crazed neo-cons that dominated the GoP at the time. Like a Red Ceasar rising from the ashes, Trump’s brash insults and radical jingoism, supplemented with Hillary’s Pied Piper strategy, radically reconfigured the boundaries of acceptability in modern US politics, threatened to “demolish the deep state”, and usher in a new era in American politics.

Trump had a radically different foreign policy agenda than many of the neo-cons he railed against. Though not strictly an isolationist, Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda hinted at a voluntary disbandment of Empire. Corporate America’s dealmaker extraordinaire, he hoped to foster better relations with the deep state’s cardinal foe Vladmir Putin, renegotiate the establishment’s prized NAFTA, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific partnerships, reevaluate US engagement with NATO, and pivot US foreign policy away from the neo-conservative thinking of yesteryears toward a more non-interventionist approach.

During his first presidency, however, Trump’s efforts to renegotiate the terms of political power with the administrative state were mitigated by the ‘adults in the room’, a trope popularised by an anonymous 2018 submission to The New York Times by a former White House staffer. In an op-ed titled “I am the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, the staffer reassured readers that the president did indeed face substantial internal resistance within the West Wing.

“The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.”

This time around, the Trump threat is far more dangerous. With deep state stalwart Joe Biden out of the running, his protege Kamala Harris has been forced to take off the training wheels and enter the race with the backing of the entire deep state machinery behind her.

From assassination attempts to a cascade of civil and felony indictments, all efforts to prevent another Trump run have yet failed. What the establishment has celebrated as deserved prosecution against a rogue former president has been decried as ‘lawfare’ by bipartisan legal experts — selective justice, lacking any sound legal foundation or precedent.

The hush-money case in New York City, for instance, is almost laughable, especially when predators like Bill Clinton strut across Democratic National Conventions to rapturous applause, and are paraded as one of its greatest Democratic exports to the White House. The Georgia ‘election interference’ case calls into question the First Amendment rights of a former president to voice concerns regarding the integrity of an election — a right the Democrats seemed to have no qualms with when Hillary Clinton attributed Trump’s 2016 victory to “Russian interference” without any evidence or proof.

With respect to Trump’s prosecution in the ‘classified documents’ case, the Democrats seem to forget that Joe Biden was exonerated by a special counsel for virtually the same transgressions. From gag orders limiting Trump’s ability to comment on his own prosecution to the imposition of absurd fines to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in what can only be perceived as an open effort to enforce personal bankruptcy, the legal machinery of the state seems to have been deployed in a nakedly partisan fashion. However, it only seems to have pushed Trump toward a harder line of attack.

Courtroom sketch of Donald Trump during the Georgia election interference proceedings. Source: Reuters

At a rally in Waco, Texas, Trump framed his onslaught against the shadow government in apocalyptic terms.

“Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state”

However, much like Caesar, Trump’s defiance of the old Gods stems, not from an ideological commitment to democracy, but from a misplaced belief in his own divinity. He has successfully tapped into the rampant disillusionment with the status quo to rack up currency for his own political ambitions.

This time, Trump carries a blueprint for amassing unprecedented power, developed by a constellation of ‘America First’ conservative organisations. Under Project 2025, a policy document developed by the Heritage Foundation, Trump is expected to install loyalists into key appointment positions, staving off any more “adults in the room”. In fact, the former-president has noticeably recruited a more radical inner-circle. Unlike his previous stint, the Republican party now constitutes a much deeper bench of Make America Great Again (MAGA) loyalists as compared to 2016, with deep state sceptics like JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Pompeo, and Stephen Miller expected to take critical cabinet positions.

Trump is also expected to reimpose the Schedule F order, which would be one of the most profound changes to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Under the order, presidents may increase political appointment positions from 4,000 to more than 50,000, making almost every major federal programme subservient to the Oval Office, effectively disintegrating the deep state.

However, Trump’s animosity towards the administrative state has attracted unlikely and dangerous allies. This time, the GoP campaign is backed by one of the richest men on the planet — Elon Musk, who up until March 2024 publicly disavowed any affiliation with Trump, has grown to become a valuable arrow in the former president’s quiver. From dedicating near unilateral algorithmic support for the Republican hopeful on his platform X to promising a $1 million giveaway for registered voters in key swing states, rarely has someone of Musk’s stature thrown themselves so explicitly behind a political candidate.

Though he may hide behind the kind of inflammatory rhetoric and far-right conspiracy theories typical of MAGA rednecks, Musk is no ideologue. In fact, his patronage of Trump is as close to a marriage of convenience as it gets. Trump’s bid to harness over-expansion of the administrative state provides Musk with a golden opportunity to realise his own political designs. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly earmarked the tech boy-wonder as his “efficiency” czar, a potential head of a new ‘government efficiency commission’. If this pans out, Musk shall have tremendous sway over the very government institutions that regulate his companies, institutions Musk has an adversarial history with.

Musk joins Trump at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Source: The Atlantic

Therefore, as Harris and Trump lock horns in November, the fate of Empire hangs in the balance. The election confronts Americans with two radically different paths. One, of a deep state candidate representing a decades-long entrenchment of global American primacy, and the other of a populist demagogue who threatens to tear the Empire down to its last shreds and build it anew in his image. November 5 is truly a contest between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

Exactly who will win this high-stakes game of thrones is not known. What is known is that the losers will be the American people.


The author is a student at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, and is interested in political, historical and social affairs.