John Tower, Republican, was the co-chair. And there was an amazing Senate investigation chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. And I go in the book back to the 1970s, and that's where it really starts. ROHDE: So there's a long, long history - particularly the FBI and the CIA - of abusing Americans. GROSS: Why do you think it's caught on in the way it has, this whole idea that there's a deep state and that people in government are conspiring against Trump? But it is a very, very effective political tool to discredit people that the president now uses as aggressively as anyone. And one of my core goals was to try to understand, you know, what it is and does it really exist.

The piece is - and this is part of the problem, is that the term is thrown around. It's this view that there'll be this relentless liberal effort to expand government across the United States. So if you are a schoolteacher in your town or a police officer or, you know, a fireman, you're a part of the deep state, too. It's an ever-growing government, and anyone who kind of supports it or participates in it - in the Breitbart essay, it's even local government officials. ROHDE: So for Republicans and conservatives, the deep state is an administrative state. So when Bannon publishes in Breitbart this article about how the deep state is undermining Trump, what does this article mean by the expression deep state. GROSS: Yeah, it concluded by saying that there's a great power struggle underway between Trump and the deep state fed by over $4 trillion a year in federal spending. The first time it's really introduced to a really broad American audience is an essay in Breitbart, the news website that was run by Steve Bannon at that point, that declares that there is a war underway between the deep state - the administrative state, an ever-growing government that, to conservatives, wants to take away our rights and liberties - and the new president, Donald Trump. And then he was frustrated how the term was sort of hijacked, and it becomes much more in use after the 2016 election. He was on Alex Jones' radio show and talked about it. That's a sort of ever-expanding government, an administrative state. There's a different meaning that's emerged for conservatives. They are worried that there is a sort of cabal of defense contractors and generals who relentlessly push the country into war after war. And this is the kind of liberal fear of a deep state. And he applied it in a book he wrote in 2007, and he talked about sort of the military industrial complex. And I tracked him down and interviewed him. And I've searched around as part of this whole research effort, and the first time it was applied to the American government was by a University of California, Berkeley, professor, Peter Dale Scott. ROHDE: So for decades, political scientists used it to talk about, actually, the military in Turkey and its efforts in that country to limit democracy, and it really wasn't applied in the United States. GROSS: Where did the expression deep state originate? And what was it regionally intended to mean? And I think this is sort of a wake-up call, you know, for the establishment - I'm a member of it as a mainstream journalist - and scientists and doctors and policy experts that we're really not trusted by large numbers of Americans. There was a poll in early 2018 that found more than 70% of Americans felt there was a secret group of unelected officials and generals who influence American policy in Washington. Why did you want to write a book about the so-called deep state?ĭAVID ROHDE: It struck me as a journalist that it's amazing how widespread this belief has become. In 2009, he shared a Pulitzer Prize with a team of reporters for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan.ĭavid Rohde, welcome to FRESH AIR. He's a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, who was held captive by the Taliban for seven months. Rohde is executive editor for news at The New Yorker online.

Rohde says one recent example of how Trump is trying to expand presidential power is the claim he made at Monday's press conference that he has total authority over deciding when states should reopen. My guest David Rohde has written a new book titled 'In Deep: The FBI, The CIA, And The Truth About America's 'Deep State.'' It examines and discredits Trump's claims about a deep state, traces the history of the expression deep state, looks at how presidential power has changed since Nixon and how President Trump has expanded presidential power while weakening the checks and balances on his own power. President Trump and some of his allies have blamed the deep state for trying to undermine his presidency.

Deep state