I recall where people who love Trump now were in the 1980s, when our "Deep State" was killing doctors, teachers, nurses, and especially clergy in Central America. They were buying hook, line, and sinker into Ronald Wilson Reagan (note the letters 6 6 6) administration lies about those murders--first denying they were murdered, and then saying, Oh, they were just Commies, anyway. Such Reagan fans who are now Trumpists were, back then, totally in thrall with what they now suddenly deride as the "Deep State." What is sad, pathetic, ironic, and frankly a little weird, is that now, when there is a real probability that the president they support, i.e. the Orange Caudillo, is compromised by a foreign power out to undermine the United States, these very same people or their ideological descendants have decided there is a "Deep State" after all.
For those who care, the irony of the use of the phrase "Deep State" is an unconscious borrowing of the phrase from a certain element of the sectarian left over the decades. When used in those circles, and I can point to a book by Peter Dale Scott from ten years or so ago called "The Road to 9/11," where he uses the phrase "Deep State," it simply means the permanent establishment put into solid place at the start of the Cold War, what Gore Vidal called "the National Security State." It consists of those in and out of government who supported and promoted the narrative that we know as the Cold War. I said "unconscious" because the Trumpists who have cult like devotion to everything "Trump" have never heard of, let alone, read Peter Dale Scott, and, if they tried to read Vidal or Chomsky, they would get too bored--not enough pictures, I suppose.
What we are seeing today, though, is more than the John Birch Society mindset from the 1950s through 1970s that found a certain element of the National Security State establishment too "liberal" and "Communist influenced" (the JBS' view was that the Council on Foreign Relations was pro-Soviet, and later believed the Trilateral Commission was completely pro-Soviet). What makes this current attack on American institutions from the right wingers and assorted Trumpists who oppose the "Deep State" different is this anti-American attack goes to the very heart of hating everyone in government who dares to wonder about Trump's compromised relations with Putin. What we see with Trumpists is a cultist, fascistic, irrational and time limited version of Peter Dale Scott's scholarly critique of institutions and historical analysis of the past near century. As I have said before, this is another manifestation of August Babel's early 20th Century formulation of German anti-Semitism as the "Socialism of Fools"--so that one properly applies Babel's conclusion to say "Trumpism is the Socialism of Fools."
For Trumpists of today, their embrace of labels from old lefties, such as "Deep State," and their belief in any number of conspiracies that would make Oliver Stone wince, is precisely what Hermann Goering was after when he, Hitler, and their Nazi cohorts, pushed the name of their party as "National Socialism," for it combined symbols and sometimes language (not substance) of socialism with a substantive program that was fascistic, and based upon cult-like devotion of the cult's leader who acts to undermine and tear down important government institutions--at least until he has the full levers of dictatorial power.
Right now, at this moment, the answer is to laugh at, deride, and ultimately get past our Trumpists, and simply...and hopefully (gulp!)...outvote them. Some of these Trumpists will eventually come back to reality. Others will never return to reality, and be similar to old Nazis in Germany after WWII, sitting on the porch or in their living room mumbling about Jews. Such people who will never return to reality will, in the words of the first post-WWII American pretender-to-the-throne caudillo, General Douglas MacArthur, simply fade away.
