Trump’s D.I.Y. Deep State
How the once and future president dooms his own foreign policy
When it comes to foreign policy, Donald Trump is an enigma. During presidential campaigns, he blasts neoconservatives for involving America in Forever Wars. After he’s elected president, he hires neocons and other hardliners to work in the White House. Officials who filled key roles in his first administration, and the new appointees slated to do the same in his second, read like a Who’s Who of ultra-hawkism. Different men, same story.
While all sorts of explanations for Trump’s contradictions are possible—he’s all talk, or he’s under donor pressure, or he just likes tough guys—one theory has given some advocates of foreign policy restraint (including yours truly) a measure of solace, namely, that Trump uses the hawks as a means to pursue dovish ends. Evidence for this comes from reports about how Trump in his first term liked to have a warmongering John Bolton by his side, just to scare people. “Bolton can be the bad cop and Trump can be the good cop,” one Trump official explained to Axios in 2019. “Trump believes this to his core.”
But there’s a big problem: The hawks who staffed Trump’s first administration didn’t enable him to advance his peace agenda. Instead, they actively thwarted it. Trump often complains about the “deep state,” the alleged network of intelligence officers and other civil servants who persist across administrations of both parties and stifle the will of presidents. But a closer look at his appointments shows that Trump, in his first administration, created his own cabal of unruly warmongers—and that he’s gearing up to do the same in his second.
In theory, assembling a team of bad cops enhances your leverage. In practice, at least for Trump, this strategy has entailed putting savvy and highly ideological hardliners in charge of important government functions, such as staffing executive agencies and overseeing day-to-day administration. And it has meant that Trump has hawks whispering in his ear, preparing his daily briefs, debating other officials in cabinet meetings—in short, influencing his thinking about international crises.
Bolton is a case in point. Even prior to becoming national security adviser in 2018, the mustached mandarin was a regular fixture in the Trump White House, where he advocated for a hardline Iran policy. In his 2020 White House memoir The Room Where It Happened, Bolton recalls that on multiple occasions in 2017 he had urged Trump to withdraw from the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal and start treating Tehran like an implacable enemy. Bolton writes that he had been so satisfied with these conversations that he wanted to have more and more of them. “I wondered, in fact, if I could do much more if I were actually in the Administration.”