Daily Times

In one of the most jaw-dropping developments in US political history, President-elect Donald Trump, who recently won a crushing electoral victory, is now at war with the most powerful bureaucracies in the United States. That the war is unfolding blow by blow one month away from his being sworn in as President is a portent of his next four years, which promise to be more exciting than the most thrilling of rollercoaster rides.

But first, let’s rewind to the last two lines of an article “What is the cause of Trump’s popularity?” I published in China Daily, China’s leading newspaper, on 8th August 2016, three months before Donald Trump won. The article concluded “The US establishment’s isolationist perception of Trump’s views on foreign policy could eventually cause serious problems for him. What is clear, though, is that Democrat Hillary Clinton will need all her strengths and his foibles to beat the feisty Trump in the forthcoming presidential elections.” Now that “David” Trump has won the elections, he is face to face with more than one Goliath.

The most conspicuous Establishment Goliath is the media. With the exception of President Nixon, I do not recall any other US President (much less President-elect) who has locked horns with the media with such nonchalance and even disdain so early on. And the reaction of the media giants has been equally unrelenting, scathing and wrathful. In a most recent confrontation with RNC’s Sean Spicer on CNN, seasoned anchor Michael Smerconish was so enraged that when the camera cut to a new story, he was out of breath and unable to continue, forcing the camera to cut back to him so that he could regain his composure.

CNN is not the only media channel ripping into Trump. The most perniciously sustained attacks have come from the venerable Washington Post in a series of stories excoriating the President-elect for his statements on Russia, for not respecting the intelligence agencies and for a host of other actual or imagined insults to various vested interests. It has quoted anonymous intelligence sources as saying that Russia is responsible for hacking into the DNC and then castigating Trump for refusing to believe this.

It is however the CIA Goliath that seems to be smarting over Trump the most. Washington Post’s Miller was spot-on in the aftermath of the elections when he wrote “A palpable sense of dread settled on the intelligence community.” Some reasons are understandable. Trump has publicly confirmed he has been skipping regular intelligence briefings. Adding insult to injury, he stated “I am a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.” Can there be greater shame for a bureaucracy than to be told it is producing useless information?

Well, there can be. When informed that the US intelligence community believed Russia had engaged in covert activities to interfere with the US elections, Trump’s transition team noted with epic sarcasm “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Not to be outdone, Trump tweeted that in case the election results were the opposite and had he tried to play the Russia/CIA card “It would be called conspiracy theory”.

While the CIA cannot officially reply to these insults (other than leaking information through the Washington Post and the New York Times) “former intelligence officials” are having a field day. “It’s unprecedented that a president-elect should be denigrating the CIA” said former White House cyber security official Richard Clarke. A group of 50 former national security officials had foreseen this in August, stating in an open letter that if elected, Trump “would be the most reckless President in American history.” Trump duly annihilated them by calling them “nothing more than the failed Washington elite.”

Of course, the two Goliaths are collaborating. Washington Post called Trump’s refusal to regularly listen to the CIA as “a slap in the face” of the CIA and claimed “the acrimonious relationship between Trump and the intelligence agencies spilled out into the public”. CNN called the same as “slamming” of the CIA by Trump. ABC News quoted a senior US official as saying that Trump was “disparaging and insulting every analyst currently working in the intelligence community.”

The third Goliath is the Republican Party itself. Ironically, the winning party is still unsure if it should wax lyrical on the stunning victory or shed tears over the fact that in the face of one of the stiffest oppositions by the Party’s elite mounted against the carpetbagger Trump, the latter snatched a victory from their jaws. It is no wonder some of the most prominent names are siding with the CIA on Russia.

The fourth Goliath, the Pentagon, is silent for now. It is not that the Pentagon is not getting in a tizzy over Trump. There are serious issues over which friction can arise – Trump’s future policies on Afghanistan, Iran, South Korea, ISIS, NATO and especially Russia. But the Pentagon is also keenly watching Trump’s calls for an increase in the defense budget and the associated rise in military-related stocks on the Dow Jones.

But what are these four Goliaths alarmed about? One, the same existential fear that all bureaucracies genetically possess, that they will not live their guaranteed infinite life but will be bypassed, sidelined, and even forced to relinquish power. Trump’s tweets are not a simple matter: They have thrown down the gauntlet both to the media and the intelligence bureaucracies. Two, his views on Russia must seem metaphorically terrifying: If these are extended to other theatres of war, what will the intelligence community, and its parasite the CNN, do?

The Goliaths need not fear. Trump’s victory may prove to be Pyrrhic. In an uncharacteristically insightful remark, a proverbial “senior US official” told the Washington Post recently that “Bureaucracies chug along. There is an institutional ability to survive. Presidents and administrations come and go but we’re still there. The Foreign Service and generals at the Department of Defense have that belief. There’s an institutional stability built into the system that can withstand spasms.”

I have always believed that Weber was more right than Marx. It is not class that moves history. It is bureaucracy that controls the narrative. Trump is now face to face with the ultimate force in the universe and we are all watching whether he will cut a deal or perish.

Dr. Aamir Khan is a former Rhodes Scholar. He has worked as a diplomat in China.