221 As late as 2013, as Donald Trump began to ruminate publically that he might run for president, the concept of an American Deep State was still largely seen as a paranoid conspiracy theory, and certainly not one to be given a serious hearing by conservatives. Few would have guessed that it would be right-wing pundits and White House offcials raising charges that an American Deep State was conspiring against a president. As with so many other things, Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the norm. Long dismissed by mainstream political scientists and journalists as just another crazy conspiracy theory, the existence of an American Deep State can no longer be discarded cavalierly as paranoia. Many pundits and jour- nalists still do, but the idea has gotten some traction in the mainstream press. In 2013, Mike Lofgren a long-time Capitol Hill staffer and author of the widely read and respected The Party’s Over, entitled a follow-up book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. 1 In the same year, two mainstream journalists co-authored Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. 2 Suspicion about a Deep State has begun also to take root more broadly in American polit- ical culture. In response to a question defning the Deep State as the “existence of a group of unelected government and military of fcials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy,” a Monmouth University poll in March 2018 found that about a quarter of respondents thought that a Deep State defnitely exists, and a little less than half thought it probably exists. 3 And this was before Donald Trump himself explicitly endorsed the idea of its existence in May 2018. CHAPTER 7 The Deep State, Hegemony, and Democracy © The Author(s) 2019 D. C. Hellinger, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories in the Age of Trump, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98158-1_7