Presenting: The New Deep State

Same as the old deep state, but different. Just in time for Halloween, its former members came out en masse.

The “deep state” has unmasked itself en masse. And just in time for Halloween. 

Last Sunday night a coven of deep state characters stepped forward en masse and revealed themselves to be … ordinary, just like the nice kids who show up on your porch in scary Halloween outfits and doff their masks for some candy. Most of them were not the high profile former CIA and FBI officials who’ve been on TV, some for years now, denouncing President Donald Trump’s bashing of them and their spy agencies. 

These were people like Chuck Park, one of about a dozen former national security officials whom CNN anchor Jake Tapper and his producers rounded up for a marvelous, and too much overlooked, Sunday night special. “The Insiders: A Warning From Former Trump Officials” featured career government employees who quit in dismay over President Donald Trump’s behavior and policies. Given the competition for eyeballs at 9pm, relatively few Americans saw it, and almost certainly not those who needed to.

Park was a State Department foreign service officer who served three tours abroad, including in the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. His job was to project core American values of fairness and decency abroad. Trump’s cruel immigration policies drove him to give up on a promising career 10 years in. 

It was “impossible to represent, to defend this president and his policies overseas,” Park said.

“There were tapes of children crying in detention centers. There was an image of a man and his daughter face down in the muddy banks of the Rio Grande. So…I could no longer faithfully follow orders amid the chaos and amid the true absence of any kind of moral consideration of our foreign policy. So the right thing for me to do was resign.”

Kyle Murphy, a former senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was part of the national security transition team briefing Trump during his first months in office. He came away unnerved.

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