Why Trumps War on the Deep State Is FailingSo Far

So for right now, let’s consider the damage—both tangible and intangible—as a work in progress: non-trivial, potentially severe, but so far not catastrophic, and difficult ultimately to assess.

And despite all of that, I think we can say that, broadly speaking, the apparatus of democratic rule-of-law governance had held up reasonably well so far. Trump aspires to corrupt the Justice Department, but he has not yet managed to corrupt the Justice Department. He aspires to use the FBI to go after his political enemies, but he has not yet managed that either. He aspires to an intelligence community that will validate his premises, but he has not managed to get one. At the end of the day, Trump has not managed to shut down the Russia investigation. He has not managed to fire his attorney general or his deputy attorney general—both of whom he evidently hates. He has not even managed to rid himself of the lowly deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe—though he so clearly wants that particular scalp—who will retire in March and not be removed before then. He’s already angry at his new FBI director, Christopher Wray.

The president is evidently incredulous about his inability to corrupt these institutions. He waxed frustrated about it, for example, in a recent radio interview:

But you know, the saddest thing is, because I am the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing and I am very frustrated by it. I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her dossier, and the kind of money… I don’t know, is it possible that they paid $12.4 million for the dossier . . . which is total phony, fake, fraud and how is it used? It’s very discouraging to me. I’ll be honest, I’m very unhappy with it, that the Justice Department isn’t going . . . maybe they are but you know as President, and I think you understand this, as a President you’re not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something and at some point, maybe we are going to all have it out.

One might look at all of this as evidence that Trump is not wholly unwise, so he announces his intentions to do all sort of bad things but then ultimately does not pull the trigger on many of them. I think the better understanding is that he is, at least for now, meaningfully constrained—both by politics and by law and rules.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-trumps-war-deep-state-failing%E2%80%94so-far