What is the “Deep State”? How will President Donald Trump dismantle it? And why is it more likely that he will end up re-constructing it with a deeper, more biased political complexion.

If you are Donald Trump and his supporters the deep state is a living, breathing conspiracy  of liberals who thwart their ambitions and conservative beliefs of how America should be run.

The deep state are a swamp of the journalists, teachers, university professors, lawyers, judges, civil libertarians, civil servants and politicians who believe that Trump lost the 2020 election and should be held accountable for his many alleged crimes.

To Trump and his supporters the deep state is comprised of regulators who block libertarian-minded Republican businessmen from opening an open-cast mine in a national park. Or they are the petti-fogging bureaucrat who stops them from planting a vegetable patch in their front garden. In short, the enemies of the deep state are those who believe that the state has gone too far in encroaching on individual liberties.

Americans love to hark back to the free-wheeling early days of the Republic. In 1800 the ratio of un-elected federal and state employees to the population as a whole was 0.05 percent. In 2024 the proportion had increased five-fold.

There are good reasons for the multiplying civil service. Over the past 225 years the world has become more complex. Special interest groups have proliferated. Elected officials have passed millions of new laws which now require an army of civil servants to administer.

A series of surveys by Partnership for Public Service show that roughly 60 percent of those civil servants are Democrats as opposed to 45 percent in the population as a whole. They also donate to liberal causes, especially if they are involved in environmental protection, diplomacy, education, social services and civil rights—the areas where Trump wants the biggest cuts. The military, homeland security and immigration are largely immune from the Republican axe and enmity. Not surprisingly their ranks are disproportionately filled with conservative Republicans.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tasked with the job of reducing the federal budget by $6 trillion by cutting the workforce by 75 percent. They plan to achieve this by using Trump’s decree powers to hold a bonfire of regulations. No more regulations, no need for civil servants to administer them.

To further swing the civil service away from the liberals Trump wants to replace some of the sacked employees with MAGA loyalists. At the moment about 4,000 federal jobs are political appointments. Trump says he wants to increase that number by a factor of 15. The American civil service already has more political appointments than any other G7 country. Trump’s plans will make it even more so. The Deep State will become more swamp like.

Republicans have made it clear that they will not stop with the civil service. Their target is the entire liberal establishment. The man earmarked for the job of Director of the FBI is Kash Patel. He has said that he will use the agency to pursue Trump’s enemies across the board.

Patel has a wide array of weapons available to him. There are straightforward criminal investigations. These have already been threatened against those who spearheaded impeachment proceedings against Trump during his first term. They include former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Congressman Adam Schiff and former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney.

The charges don’t need any substance. The mere threat means that the targets are forced to lawyer-up at great expense and effort. Their families are already being subjected to social media harassment and death threats from MAGA loyalists.

Another tool is the withdrawal of security clearances from high-ranking civil servants and former politicians. They rely on retaining those clearances for private sector jobs when they are out of office. No clearance. No Job. No money. No influence.

America is proud of its free press. The problem is that a free press relies on profits to remain free. If profits fall then the media becomes susceptible to frivolous law suits and political pressure. They then either have to settle quickly out of court—as ABC News recently did—or resort to self-censorship to stay in business. Donald Trump has outstanding law suits against the Pulitzer Prize board, journalist Bob Woodward, the Des Moines Register, CNN, CBS and MSNBC. He has also threatened to withdraw the broadcasting licenses of ABC, CBS, MSNBC and CNN.

So far Trump has not threatened any individual academics. He has, however, said he would withhold federal funds and accreditation from universities which he believes are opposed to his conservative values and policies.

The soon-to-be inaugurated Trump has also promised retribution against lawyers and judges who have crossed his path. He has demanded the imprisonment of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, who led investigations into the January 6 riots and the Mar-a-lago documents case. Trump has also demanded the dismissal of Judge Arthur Engoron and Judge Juan Merchan. The former presided over his civil sex abuse trial and the latter over the Manhattan trial which found him guilty of 34 fraud charges.

Chief Justice John Roberts has warned that such attacks undermine the independence of the judiciary. But Trump’s Supreme Court appointments have already called that independence into question.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".