Donald Trump has promised to do many things once he reoccupies the White House. Among the most famous, and most desired by his biggest fans, is his vow to “drain the swamp” and “demolish the deep state.”
The first and arguably most important challenge for such a project is definitional. What is the deep state? And what is the swamp? Are they different? How so?
Trump doesn’t have a clear answer. He often uses the terms interchangeably. And he’s not alone. Many in the media do the same.
That’s understandable if you try to put yourself inside Trump’s head (something I don’t necessarily recommend). During his first administration, he was repeatedly undermined by leaks and other schemes from within the federal bureaucracy, including his own Cabinet. Whether this was the work of the “deep state” or the “swamp” is something of a tomayto-tomahto distinction for someone who divides the world into friends and enemies. But any serious effort to get rid of either one requires making distinctions.
As the metaphor implies, the swamp is a hot, humid, malarial ecosystem teeming with all manner of critters, each with its own self-interested agenda. (And if you’ve spent a summer in D.C., you know the term has more than figurative verisimilitude.) The idea of the nation’s capital being a pestilent redoubt where politicians go native once they contract “Potomac fever” has been around for generations. George W. Bush’s administration even issued a handy memo to his staff on how to spot signs of infection.
The term “deep state,” on the other hand, conjures a colder, more sterile image of disciplined, professional, secretive operators networked across government and united around a single, nefarious agenda.
The biggest difference between these two concepts is the most important one: The swamp exists; the deep state doesn’t.
My Dispatch colleague Kevin D. Williamson has likened the deep state to the term “Vikings,” a catchall for a disparate “collection of pirates, traders, slavers, settlers, squabbling potentates” and others. Vikings fought Vikings all the time because the Vikings were not a monolithic or unified group.
And neither are the warring factions and fiefdoms that make up Washington. For instance, the Wall Street Journal recently reported intense infighting among and within various intelligence agencies over the origins of COVID-19. The FBI—deep state HQ, according to many in Trump World—was fairly convinced that the pandemic started with a lab leak, the newspaper reported, but competing agencies conspired to keep that verdict from reaching the president’s ears.
The whole idea that the deep state is an evil organization, like Hydra in the Marvel comics or SPECTRE in the James Bond movies, is little more than a conspiracy theory. It’s based on the bizarre assumption that government bureaucrats and political operatives are incredibly competent and disciplined at doing supersecret stuff but fairly incompetent and lazy in their day jobs.
Then there’s the swamp. This catchall term describes something real: Washington’s vast, cacophonous conglomeration of favor-dealing, rent-seeking, back-scratching, self-dealing, special-pleading interests. The Founders called them “factions.”
What makes the swamp so hard to drain is the collusion between the state and these factions. Real savings won’t come from purging the federal bureaucracy, a workforce that hasn’t grown appreciably since the 1960s. As the political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. recently noted, a huge share of the bureaucracy consists of contract managers for private-sector firms. Businesses and nonprofits—from defense contractors to health care systems—employ more than three times as many people who ultimately get paid by taxpayers as the federal government does.
Those factions are also political constituencies. And that’s why I suspect we will hear a lot more about fighting the deep state in 2025 than we will about draining the swamp. The nice thing about conspiracy theories is that they can’t be disproved. Blaming failures on shadowy forces is standard fare for politicians because angering their constituencies is hard.
Besides, there’s little evidence that Trump has any desire to drain the swamp so much as to reward those swamp creatures he likes. Industrial policy and protectionism, two of his top priorities, are among the oldest forms of swampiness because they create vast new markets for exemptions, subsidies and anti-competitive lobbying. Indeed, the proliferation of Big Tech moguls and cryptocurrency speculators around Trump makes it seem as if Mar-a-Lago is subsiding into the Everglades before our eyes.
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