Donald Trump has promised to do many things once he reoccupies the White House. Among the most famous, and most desired by his biggest fans, is his vow to “drain the swamp” and “ demolish the deep state.”
The first and arguably most important challenge for such a project is definitional. What is the deep state? And what is the swamp? Are they different? How so?
Trump doesn’t have a clear answer. He often uses the terms interchangeably. And he’s not alone. Many in the media do the same.
That’s understandable if you try to put yourself inside Trump’s head (something I don’t necessarily recommend). During his first administration, he was repeatedly undermined by leaks and other schemes from within the federal bureaucracy, including his own Cabinet. Whether this was the work of the deep state or the swamp is something of a tomayto-tomahto distinction for someone who divides the world into friends and enemies. But any serious effort to get rid of either one requires making distinctions.
As the metaphor implies, the swamp is a hot, humid, malarial ecosystem teeming with all manner of critters, each with its own self-interested agenda. (And if you’ve spent a summer in D.C., you know the term has more than figurative verisimilitude.) The idea of the nation’s capital being a pestilent redoubt where politicians go native once they contract “ Potomac fever ” has been around for generations. George W. Bush’s administration even issued a handy memo to his staff on how to spot signs of infection.
The term “deep state,” on the other hand, conjures a colder, more sterile image of disciplined, professional, secretive operators networked across government and united around a single, nefarious agenda.
The biggest difference between these two concepts is the most important one: The swamp exists; the deep state doesn’t.
My Dispatch colleague Kevin D. Williamson has likened the deep state to the term “Vikings,” a catchall for a disparate “collection of pirates, traders, slavers, settlers, squabbling potentates” and others. Vikings fought Vikings all the time because the Vikings were not a monolithic or unified group.
And neither are the warring factions and fiefdoms that make up Washington. For instance, the Wall Street Journal recently reported intense infighting among and within various intelligence agencies over the origins of COVID-19. The FBI — deep state HQ, according to many in Trump World — was fairly convinced that the pandemic started with a lab leak, the newspaper reported, but competing agencies conspired to keep that verdict from reaching the president’s ears.
The whole idea that the deep state is an evil organization, like Hydra in the Marvel comics or SPECTRE in the James Bond movies, is little more than a conspiracy theory. It’s based on the bizarre assumption that government bureaucrats and political operatives are incredibly competent and disciplined at doing super-secret stuff but fairly incompetent and lazy in their day jobs.
Then there’s the swamp. This catchall term describes something real: Washington’s vast, cacophonous conglomeration of favor-dealing, rent-seeking, back-scratching, self-dealing, special-pleading interests. The founders called them “factions.”
What makes the swamp so hard to drain is the collusion between the state and these factions. Real savings won’t come from purging the federal bureaucracy, a workforce that hasn’t grown appreciably since the 1960s. As the political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. recently noted, a huge share of the bureaucracy consists of contract managers for private-sector firms. Businesses and nonprofits — including defense contractors and healthcare systems — employ more than three times as many people who ultimately get paid by taxpayers as the federal government does.
Those factions are also political constituencies. And that’s why I suspect we will hear a lot more about fighting the deep state in 2025 than we will about draining the swamp. The nice thing about conspiracy theories is that they can’t be disproved. Blaming failures on shadowy forces is standard fare for politicians because angering their constituencies is hard.
Besides, there’s little evidence that Trump has any desire to drain the swamp so much as to reward those swamp creatures he likes. Industrial policy and protectionism, two of his top priorities, are among the oldest forms of swampiness because they create vast new markets for exemptions, subsidies and anti-competitive lobbying. Indeed, the proliferation of Big Tech moguls and cryptocurrency speculators around Trump makes it seem as if Mar-a-Lago is subsiding into the Everglades before our eyes.
The ‘deep state’ and ‘the swamp’ are both favorite Trump targets. Here’s the difference was first published by the Tribune Content Agency, and was republished with permission.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.