As one who popularized the term 'deep state,' I'd like to correct current assumptions

With impeachment hearings underway, conservatives' favorite catchphrase, the "deep state," has gotten a thorough airing.

• Stephen Miller, the White House's hard-line immigration adviser, called the Ukraine whistleblower a "saboteur," adding, "I know the difference between a whistleblower and a deep state operative."

• Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., an ally of President Donald Trump, described GOP colleagues insufficiently protective of the administration as people "whose allegiance is more to the Deep State than it is to the president."

• " 'Deep state' diplomats caught up in Trump impeachment fight back,"said the Washington Times, reporting on current and former diplomats testifying for impeachment investigators.

As the author who popularized this term, I'm invoking the privilege of correcting them. There is no deep state as the right imagines it — that is, a secret cabal of government insiders hellbent on undermining the White House. Rather, it is Trump himself, under the camouflage of populist rhetoric, who has overseen the open expansion of the deep state: entrenched interests gaining outsize influence and setting their own policy agenda, unchecked by the will of the people, their elected representatives or the civil servants meant to regulate them.

I wrote my book "The Deep State" to capture a phenomenon I had noticed over my 30 years as a Republican staffer in Congress. Despite the fiercely partisan atmosphere of the Obama presidency, policy largely remained on the same course as under his predecessor, George W. Bush, who had foundered on the twin rocks of a Middle East quagmire and a financial meltdown. Barack Obama continued Bush's misadventures abroad while committing a huge, unforced error of his own by intervening in Libya. He cleaned up the financial crash by bailing out banks but providing little relief to homeowners. Even his health care bill, which Republicans decried as virtual Stalinism, copied the conservative Heritage Foundation's 1990s proposal. It seemed that whichever party controlled government, a kind of GPS ensured that the arrow always pointed in the same direction: toward money.

The term "deep state" first came into wide usage in Turkeys in the 1990s, and described the combination of finance, industry, and military and intelligence organizations in Turkey that made certain that policies would remain the same, no matter how the government changed. I first encountered it in the John le Carré novel "A Delicate Truth," which describes British financial and private intelligence circles knowing secrets long before Cabinet ministers did.

When I published "The Deep State" in 2016, it garnered favorable reviews and some affirmation on the left. But in the fever swamps of the far right, where conspiracy theories about black helicopters and FEMA concentration camps were the daily diet, the book really raised the temperature. In 2016, "deep state" appeared only 64 times in TV transcripts, according to an NPR analysis. In 2017, the phrase rocketed to 2,300 mentions, and then to almost 5,000 in 2018.

The term quickly became a cliché, spawning copycat books by right-wing ankle-biters, in which they labeled whatever they disliked the "deep state." Former congressman Jason Chaffetz wrote that the deep state consists of "an army of bureaucrats" who shielded Obama and are out to undermine Trump's agenda. Other authors have claimed that the deep state's mission is to "replace our Nationalist state with a Globalist-Communist State." Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant and Republican fixer, even offered it as an explanation for his car accident last year: "I am a consistent critic of the 'Deep State' — that's why I think I'm targeted." It became clear to me that political ideas, once loosed into the world, are like viruses: They spread, mutate and become antibiotic-resistant.

When Trump entered the Oval Office on a promise to "drain the swamp," he was already the right's avatar for the struggle against the imagined deep state. And when, in 2017, Trump adviser Steve Bannon said he suspected that something like the deep state was trying to undermine his boss, the phrase became an official Republican weapon. Trump himself has used it in a barrage of tweets and speeches, including at a rally in Louisiana last month.

The irony becomes obvious when we examine the Trump administration's policies, which have taken the worst features of his predecessors and put them on steroids. His Cabinet of billionaires and centimillionaires, like Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Steven Mnuchin, makes Bush's appointees look like a Bolshevik workers' council. Trump's tax cuts are overwhelmingly tilted toward the rich. The Pentagon is even more bloated than before. The president presides over rampant self-dealing (such as holding official events at his own properties and failing to divest his holdings or place them in a blind trust) that may even exceed the Harding administration's corruption.

And it is Trump who established a shadow foreign ministry of private individuals like Rudolph Giuliani and his associates, accountable neither to the State Department nor Congress. Mounds of witness testimony suggest that these people bullied and extorted a friendly country, Ukraine, pressuring it to assist Trump's re-election. As congressional Democrats have started investigating this abuse of the public trust, Trump allies have denounced their efforts as a deep state "coup."