Marc Ambinder

If the norms and interests of the deep state, however you want to define them, are seen as being threatened by some powerful actor — in this case, the president himself, it is both accurate and kind of scary to notice that people can use secrets to try and stop him. If you oppose Trump, you might be willing to forgive these transgressions because a greater good is served. You might. Or you might wonder what will happen if the U.S. elects a president whom you might support, but who wants to, say, cut off an important mechanism for obtaining secrets used by the NSA or constrain the military’s ability to bomb targets overseas, in the case of Trump, a lot of the leaks seem to be coming from within his own circle. Some obviously come from secret-keepers who are genuinely worried about his mental capacity. Others — who knows? There is no organized conspiracy, but the threshold for disclosing information to people seems to be a lot lower.

It really took off in the first months of 2017, as Mike Flynn got into trouble, his defenders said he was a victim of the deep state. I don’t think so. The deep state didn’t make him lie to the FBI, or lie to Mike Pence before Pence did an interview on national TV. Nevertheless, it became a common term.

In the United States, the idea of a deep state offends our common notions of representative government and transparency, so it’s easy to use the term as a weapon against enemies and as a catch-all explanation when things don’t go the way they ought to. This is dangerous because we live in our bubbles, and we are less likely to accept the non-conspiratorial answer for something if it doesn’t fit for our preconceptions.