Last December, avowed Trump enemy and ultra-liberal commentator Keith Olbermann, voicing the sentiments of the Washington political establishment, called President-elect Donald Trump a “treacherous Russian whore” and vowed “we will get you.” And as subsequent events have proven, this was no idle threat. Since Trump’s election, a torrent of leaks, lies, and innuendoes — courtesy of the so-called “fake news” outlets — have kept Washington in the thrall of manufactured scandal. Although now in a minority in both houses of Congress and a large majority of state legislatures across the land, radical liberal Democrats are determined to bring the federal government and the entire country to a standstill, by any means necessary, rather than let President Trump and the Republican Party roll back any portion of the Leftist agenda so successfully implemented during the Obama years. Nothing quite like this has ever taken place in American politics before. Never has official Washington been so determined so early to ruin the lives and reputations of so many in a new administration.

The loosely-organized coalition of entrenched interests determined to destroy the new administration to preserve the corrupt status quo in Washington has been dubbed the “Deep State.” Although the term “Deep State” is not a coinage of the Trump era, acknowledgement of it by the Establishment news media dates to about the time when carefully-timed intelligence leaks designed to damage President Trump and thwart his agenda first appeared late last fall. Hinting at sinister collusion between Russian officials and members of the Trump transition team, including the president-elect himself, the leaks, which involved the release of classified information, constituted serious felonies. Unsurprisingly, the persons responsible for these lawless attacks on President Trump have not been identified.

For his part, President Trump has fought back with tweeted allegations, ridiculed by most of official Washington, that Trump Tower was wiretapped during the campaign.

The mainstream media, predictably, pooh-poohed the president’s claims. But thanks to the work of the House Intelligence Committee led by Congressman Devin Nunes, it now appears that, at very minimum, members of the post-election Trump transition team were indeed surveilled incidentally by the Obama administration. In other words, certain foreign officials under surveillance interacted with member of the Trump team — a perfectly natural state of affairs for an incoming administration wanting foreign policy continuity with its predecessor — and the names of the Trump officials were recorded and disseminated widely among government officials along with whatever statements they may have made.

This contrasts starkly with normal, lawful procedure with FISA warrants, in which the names of American citizens who are picked up by surveillance of foreigners are redacted from the record. Americans, after all, have constitutional protection against warrantless searches. But in this case, official Washington decided that sabotaging the Trump administration was more important than any constitutional bagatelles.

If there is any benefit to be gleaned from this sorry spectacle, it is that the Deep State has, because of its desperate drive to preserve its power, been forced into the open by Donald Trump. No dispassionate observer can possibly doubt the reality of a Washington network of insider elites —in government and in the media — working in concert to protect what they regard as their right to remain in power, regardless of what the people they are supposed to serve might want. They profit from the enlargement of the federal government and the constant expansion of its powers. They have little regard for constitutional limits on government power, since those, if enforced, would lead to a speedy dissolution of the century-long Game of Thrones that has been official Washington.

Not that President Trump is a principled constitutionalist or consistent foe of Big Government. He is neither. But he has shown no disposition to kowtow to the Powers That Be, and aspects of his agenda — the appointment of constitutionalist Supreme Court justices and the rolling back of many socialist controls on the U.S. economy, to mention only two — will negate many of the victories won by the radical Left over the past few decades.

Trump’s election has forced the enemies of our republic into the open. Now we must dismantle and defund all of their programs. Only thus will the Deep State be defanged and destroyed.

Photo of CIA emblem: AP Images