In Which I Try to Understand Trump's Left Wing Supporters and Why I Think They Are Wrong

To be clear, I am not a follower of Glenn Greenwald.*  I stopped following him some time during the Obama Administration, not so much because I disagreed with him, but because I found him too depressing to bear.  Nonetheless, I agreed with his basic view that Obama had sold out to the national security state (the Deep State, as its enemies now call it), and that to do so was, perhaps, inherent in the office. I found Obama disappointing on civil liberties.  I was broadly open to the view that the national security state had captured the presidency and there was no escape.

So why have I sold out and become a supporter of the Deep State (the national security state) now?

But her e-mails!

Certainly a lot of one-time Greenwald fans, myself included, would respond by flipping the question.  Why have Greenwald and others like him seemingly become such Trump fans? Do they seriously think that Trump is a civil libertarian?  After all, if we have a deep state, then ICE and Customs and Border Patrol are presumably part of it, and Trump has been eager to take the gloves off both agencies.  He pardoned the vile Joe Arpaio, as un-civil libertarian a figure as one can imagine.  Recently released depositions by the January 6 Committee detail Trump's desire to use the military to suppress the 2020 riots and even to recall and court martial retired military officers who criticized him.  These are hardly the acts of a civil libertarian!  Even Trump's credentials as a military non-interventionist are in question.  He tried to economically strangle the governments of Iran and Venezuela (something Greenwald would presumably criticize in any normal president), dropped the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB) on Afghanistan, and came perilously close to starting war with Iran on several occasions.

So why the affinity?  Presumably Greenwald would answer that, although Trump has been bad, he is less bad than any other President, especially GW Bush.  He would presumably also say that the real danger to civil liberties is not in any particular leader, but in the national security state, that Trump sees as an avowed enemy and wants to dismantle.  

And I suppose I should give credit where it is due.  Trump may call for jailing his opponents, but that is just empty talk.  And he really does want to dismantle any national security agencies that have targeted him. Greenwald has reacted with indignation that the national security state has sought to undermine a duly elected President. The indignation is justified when Trump wants to do something that is within is discretion as commander-in-chief, such as withdraw troops from a particular area.  

But Greenwald et al miss two important points here. Point number one is that if you are going to uphold the power of a duly elected official, it is incumbent on the official to respect the results of elections.  If you are going to talk about the duty of national security officials to be subordinate to duly elected officials, then duly elected officials had better recognize that they are subordinate to the voting public and accept election results.  Greenwald appears to dismiss Trump's refusal to accept his loss as a minor matter.  Maybe he ultimately thinks that respecting the authority of duly elected officials is, after all, less important than undermining the power of the deep state.

 But this ignores another important point as well.  Greenwald is quick to point out that Trump is not so bad, from a civil libertarian standard, as GW Bush.  But what made Bush so bad?  It wasn't that he let the Deep State run amuck and ignore the authority of a duly elected President.  Bush's fault -- as expressed through Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo -- was the exact opposite.  He claimed for a duly elected President unlimited power over the Deep State -- power unbounded by any treaty or statute. 

In other words, what we need to curb the power of the Deep State is not to subordinate it to duly elected officials, even if those duly elected officials recognize themselves as subordinate to We, the People and respect election results.** No, what we need is to acknowledge that the Deep State, duly elected officials, and even We, the People are still all subordinate to a common superior -- the rule of law.  (Hence the quote above). And we need to recognize that elected officials and the deep state can both be threats to the rule of law. And we need to think when the President and the Deep State clash (as they invariably will), that we should stop reflexively siding with one or the other, but side instead with the rule of law.*** 

This is a difficult balance to make. Subordinate the national security state too far to the President and it becomes his private police force. Give the national security state too much independence and it goes rogue.  But in the case of Trump, the answer is not difficult. The reason Trump has not trampled on liberties the way that GW Bush did is that the deep state stopped him.  Read the depositions if you doubt it.  Trump's objection to the Deep State was always first, that his power over it was never as absolute as he wanted and, second, that it investigated him.  In other words, that it upheld the rule of law.

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*Note: I am using Greenwald as a shorthand for the pro-Trump far left that so resembles the pro-Trump far right.
**And that is why people on my side of the aisle find ourselves in a most uncomfortable alliance with Dick and Liz Cheney.  Because Cheney's theory of unbounded executive power always contained the qualification that this power was inherent in a duly elected executive who respected election results.

***And I should also add that I think a lot of Trump's leftwing supporters really want to dismantle the national security state altogether and see Trump as the man for the job.  But I think that, the world being what it is today, the national security state is a necessary evil.  I also think that they are quite wrong in thinking that Trump wants to dismantle the Deep State, as opposed to turning it into his private praetorian guard.