How the Deep State Went to War Against Donald Trump, From the Escalator to Now
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump rode the escalator at Trump Tower and did something the political class never forgave him for: he said what tens of millions of Americans were already thinking. "Sadly, the American dream is dead," he told the room, "but if I get elected president, I will bring it back, bigger and better and stronger than ever before." He promised a wall on the southern border and said Mexico would pay for it. Within a year, the man the press had treated as a punchline was the Republican nominee, and the machinery of the permanent state began moving against him in earnest. What follows is the full record of that machinery: a media apparatus that abandoned neutrality from the first week, an FBI and intelligence community that ran an investigation on evidence they knew was garbage, prosecutors who campaigned on getting him before they ever opened a file, and a decade-long legal war that produced ninety-one felony counts and, in the end, not one that survived contact with an appellate court or an honest jury charge.
The Press Chose a Side and Never Looked Back
The numbers are not subtle. The Media Research Center's evaluative coverage counts on ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news found Trump coverage in the 2016 race running 91 percent negative, against 79 percent negative for Hillary Clinton, a supposedly scandal-plagued candidate in her own right. In 2020, the same method found 92 percent negative coverage of Trump and 66 percent positive coverage of Joe Biden. In 2024, from the day Biden left the race through late October, Kamala Harris received 78 percent positive evaluative coverage while Trump received 85 percent negative, a 63-point gap MRC called the largest in the period it has tracked. In the first hundred days of his second term, the same three broadcasts ran 92 percent negative coverage of his administration; Biden, at the same point in his term, had received 59 percent positive coverage. A press corps that performs identically across four consecutive elections is not covering the news. It is running interference for one side of it.
Crossfire Hurricane: Built on a Document the FBI Knew Was Garbage
On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane, a counterintelligence investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia. The official trigger was a bar conversation between a minor, unpaid Trump adviser and an Australian diplomat. The real fuel was something else entirely.
In April 2016, Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, counsel to Hillary for America and the DNC, hired Fusion GPS to continue digging up dirt on Trump. Fusion hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy, and paid his firm roughly $168,000. The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press confirmed in October 2017 that the Clinton campaign and the DNC funded the research that became the Steele dossier: opposition research, bought and paid for by the opposing campaign, laundered into a supposed intelligence product. The FBI used it anyway.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz found in December 2019 that the first Carter Page FISA application contained seven significant inaccuracies and omissions; by the final renewal, seventeen. Horowitz wrote that "members of the Crossfire Hurricane team failed to meet the basic obligation to ensure that the Carter Page FISA applications were 'scrupulously accurate,'" and that the applications "made it appear as though the evidence supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case." The Bureau relied on Steele's unverified claim that Page was coordinating with the Kremlin while hiding from the court that Page had served as an operational contact for another U.S. agency.
Special Counsel John Durham's May 2023 report is the document that should have ended this story for good. Durham found that "neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation," that the FBI opened a full investigation on "raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence," and that investigators "did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting." The Bureau reportedly dangled a payment of a million dollars or more to Steele for corroboration. He never produced it, because there was none to produce.
Agents on the inside knew it. Within days of the case opening, Peter Strzok told a colleague there was nothing to it. Early internal messages called the case "thin" and, in one instance, said flatly "it sucks." James Comey did not treat it as thin. He personally pressed Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on the status of the Page FISA warrant. Durham also found that the Bureau had received "Clinton Plan" intelligence describing an alleged Clinton campaign scheme to tie Trump to Russia as a distraction from her own email troubles, and sat on it rather than scrutinize the dossier it was feeding.
A 2025 CIA tradecraft review, ordered by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, examined the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and found the process rushed and atypical, with Brennan, Clapper, and Comey "excessively involved," and Brennan personally pushing a Steele dossier summary into the assessment over the objections of the agency's own Russia analysts. Ratcliffe's public verdict: "This was Obama, Comey, Clapper and Brennan deciding 'We're going to screw Trump.'" Comey briefed the president-elect on the dossier's most salacious claims in January 2017, and the briefing leaked within days, giving television networks the pretext to run the material as news.
Mueller Spent Two Years and Found Nothing to Convict
Mueller's March 2019 report states it plainly: "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Adam Schiff had told the country evidence of conspiracy was "in plain sight." That sentence never got the correction the original charge earned. Several campaign-adjacent figures were charged, mostly on process crimes unrelated to the collusion theory the entire two-year operation was built to prove. Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein concluded the evidence could not sustain an obstruction charge either.
Two Impeachments Over the Same Underlying Fight
Trump became the first president impeached twice. The first, in December 2019, followed a call with Ukraine's president; Adam Schiff, the same figure who had insisted collusion evidence was in plain sight, led the charge. The Senate acquitted him in February 2020. Volodymyr Zelensky himself said he felt no pressure on the call, and the aid went out anyway. The second impeachment followed January 6, 2021; the Senate acquitted 57 to 43, short of the two-thirds required. Both fights were, at bottom, about the same thing the escalator speech had announced: a president unwilling to defer to the people who run Washington whether or not voters elect them.
Manhattan: The Case a DA Ran On Before He Had a File
Alvin Bragg did not discover Donald Trump after taking office. He ran for the job promising Democratic primary voters he already had a record against him. At a candidate forum he said, "I have investigated Trump and his children and held them accountable for their misconduct with the Trump Foundation." Of suing the Trump administration "over 100 times," he told voters, "I know how to litigate with him." Asked directly whether his office should bring criminal charges against Trump as a private citizen, Bragg answered, "I believe we have to hold him accountable." He added, unprompted, "I've seen him up front and seen the lawlessness that he could do." This is not a prosecutor discovering evidence. This is a candidate promising a target before the grand jury ever convened.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York had already worked the underlying facts and told a judge in July 2019 that their investigation into others involved in the Cohen payments had "effectively concluded." They declined to charge Trump. Bragg's predecessor's own team reportedly nicknamed it the "zombie case" because it kept coming back from the dead. Mark Pomerantz, a prosecutor who wanted the indictment badly enough to work for free, later wrote that the hush-money theory "was too risky under New York law" and that no appellate court in the state had ever upheld the reading it depended on.
Bragg himself, once in office, initially declined to bring it. Pomerantz wrote that Bragg "could not see a world" in which he would indict Trump and put Cohen on the stand. Pomerantz and fellow prosecutor Carey Dunne resigned in protest in February 2022, and the New York Times reported the investigation was "dead in the water" by early 2023. Then Trump announced another presidential run. In December 2022, Bragg hired Matthew Colangelo out of the number-three job at the Biden Justice Department. An employee in Letitia James's office emailed Colangelo at the time: "Sounds like you and Mr. Trump's paths will continue to intersect." Within months, the case was alive again.
On March 30, 2023, a grand jury returned 34 felony counts. The underlying misdemeanor's own statute of limitations had run; Bragg's office elevated it to a felony using an uncharged federal theory the FEC itself had never pursued, plus an obscure state election statute, Election Law § 17-152, that a Democratic election-law veteran of 53 years told Business Insider he had "never heard of it actually being used."
The trial judge, Juan Merchan, had donated $15 to Biden's campaign in 2020; his daughter worked for a Democratic digital firm whose clients included the Biden and Harris campaigns and Adam Schiff himself. Trump's lawyers moved for recusal three times. Merchan refused three times.
A jury convicted on all 34 counts on May 30, 2024. On January 10, 2025, days before Trump's second inauguration, Merchan handed down an unconditional discharge: no jail, no fine, no probation, a sentence the New York Times found no other Manhattan defendant on that charge had received since 2014. The court kept the conviction on the books and imposed nothing. Trump's appeal brief states that Bragg "concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory." The conviction remains on appeal.
Smith: A Raid, a Broken Privilege, and a Comparison That Says Everything
Jack Smith's case against Trump over documents at Mar-a-Lago is the clearest example of a justice system applying one rule to a former president and a different rule to everyone else who kept the same kind of material.
On August 8, 2022, FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago itself, the first search of a former president's residence in American history, recovering documents marked "top secret." Contemporaneous coverage called it "an unprecedented escalation of law enforcement scrutiny." In March 2023, a federal judge invoked the rarely used "crime-fraud exception" to break Trump's attorney-client privilege, forcing his own lawyer, Evan Corcoran, to testify before the grand jury and hand over his private notes. The resulting indictment and its later obstruction add-ons carried a combined maximum sentence exceeding 400 years, a number no defendant in this saga was ever asked to actually answer for at trial.
Compare that to how the same category of conduct was handled everywhere else. When classified documents turned up at the Penn Biden Center and at Joe Biden's own Wilmington home, the FBI conducted, in a federal prosecutor's own words, "planned" and "consensual" searches, arranged in advance with Biden's lawyers present, no warrant needed or sought. Special Counsel Robert Hur still found in February 2024 that Biden had "willfully retained" classified material and that his conduct "risked serious damage to America's national security," then declined to recommend charges, writing that jurors would see "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." No indictment followed.
Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's national security adviser, stole and destroyed classified terrorism documents straight out of the National Archives and walked away with a misdemeanor, a $50,000 fine, and probation. David Petraeus handed his mistress and biographer classified notebooks describing covert officers and war plans, then lied to the FBI about it when confronted, and still received a single misdemeanor, two years of probation, and a $100,000 fine.
The case Smith built against Trump alone never reached a jury. Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed it on July 15, 2024, ruling that Smith's own appointment violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause, a structural challenge that had never been applied to a comparable special counsel before. The Justice Department dropped its appeal after the 2024 election. Attorney General Merrick Garland had appointed Smith three days after Trump announced his 2024 campaign, saying it was "in the public interest" given "the former president's announcement that he is a candidate." The timing speaks for itself.
Smith's second case, over January 6, ended the same way it should have been recognized from the start: as a prosecution that could not survive Trump simply winning the next election. Following the Supreme Court's 2024 immunity ruling, Smith's own filing conceded: "The Department's position is that the Constitution requires that this case be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated." Judge Chutkan dismissed it on November 25, 2024.
Willis: A Prosecutor Who Paid Her Boyfriend More Than Anyone Else on the Team
Fani Willis indicted Trump and more than a dozen allies in Fulton County in August 2023 under Georgia's racketeering statute. She hired Nathan Wade, a man she was personally involved with, as special prosecutor, and paid his firm roughly $653,880 between 2022 and 2023, more than $560,000 above what she paid the other special prosecutors doing comparable work on the same case. Willis's own defense was that she paid everyone "the same hourly rate," an explanation the payment gap does not support.
A trial judge ruled in March 2024 that Willis could remain only if Wade resigned; he resigned the same day. It was not enough. In December 2024, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis entirely, citing a "significant appearance of impropriety." The Georgia Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal. No other prosecutor's office would take the file until Pete Skandalakis stepped in, moved to dismiss it, and Judge Scott McAfee granted the dismissal on November 26, 2025, more than two years after the indictment and a full case built on a personal relationship the district attorney tried to hide.
Willis made the personal stakes explicit herself. Defending the prosecution publicly in March 2024, she told reporters, "There's one district attorney in the state, and really around the country, that has had the courage to do this, and she continues to do it." That is not a description of a prosecutor following the evidence. That is a description of a prosecutor describing her own mission.
James: She Promised to Sue Him Before She Had the Office to Do It With
No case in this entire saga shows the premeditation more clearly than Letitia James's. Running for New York Attorney General in 2018, before she had ever opened a file on Trump, James told the Bronx Democratic Party on July 19, 2018: "I look forward to going into the office of attorney general every day, suing him." On September 12, 2018, she said on camera, "I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate president." In a campaign video recorded just before the November 2018 election, she said, "Oh, we're going to definitely sue him. We're going to be a real pain in the ass." She took office in January 2019. The Trump Organization investigation opened two months later. This was not a prosecutor discovering fraud. This was a campaign promise being fulfilled on schedule.
The civil fraud case that followed produced a $454 million penalty from trial judge Arthur Engoron in February 2024. On August 21, 2025, a five-judge appellate panel unanimously threw that number out. The panel's own language: "while harm certainly occurred, it was not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion-dollar award to the State." Even the court that agreed Trump had done something wrong could not defend the price tag James's office had put on it. James has appealed that reversal, unwilling to let even a unanimous panel have the last word.
The Hunter Biden Laptop: A True Story Called a Lie by People Who Knew Better
Three weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published emails from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. Twitter blocked the story and locked the Post's account. Facebook throttled it. Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter calling it Russian disinformation. The laptop was real. Hunter Biden's own lawyers later treated it as his. The FBI had held the device since late 2019. The Twitter Files later showed months of FBI contact with Twitter executives priming the platform to expect a Russian "hack and dump," conditioning it to suppress exactly the kind of story that then ran. A true story was buried by people with the standing to know it was true, at the exact moment it could have changed an election.
Public Safety Was the Real Battlefield the Whole Time
None of this was abstract. Trump's first-term border policies, Remain in Mexico, Title 42, a partial wall, tighter vetting, were dismantled by the incoming administration on its first day in office, and southwest border encounters ran at historic highs for years afterward. After George Floyd's death, a political class that spent four years calling Trump an authoritarian embraced "defund the police" as serious policy, and homicide rates spiked in major cities as a direct result.
Two assassination attempts in the summer of 2024 made the stakes unmistakable. On July 13, Thomas Crooks shot Trump in the ear at a Pennsylvania rally, killing a rallygoer. On September 15, Ryan Wesley Routh was found waiting outside Trump's own golf club with a rifle before a Secret Service agent spotted and stopped him. A major-party nominee should not have been reachable that easily, twice, in two months, after a decade in which the same establishment had spent every available legal and media weapon trying to end his political career by other means.
As of mid-September 2026, Ballotpedia had logged 86 multistate lawsuits against the second Trump administration. The opposition did not accept the results of the election Trump won. It simply moved the fight back into the courts it still controlled.
The Reversal
In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi took a historic and long-overdue step to dismantle the two-tiered justice system by establishing the Justice Department's Weaponization Working Group. This essential task force was designed to expose and review the egregious, politicized lawfare waged against Donald Trump and his supporters by partisan actors like Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, and Letitia James, as well as the severe overreach of the January 6 prosecutions. To lead this critical mission, the DOJ appointed Ed Martin, a dedicated patriot and staunch defender of justice who had previously fought for the constitutional rights of January 6 defendants.
Under Bondi's leadership, the DOJ finally began holding entrenched establishment figures accountable. Federal prosecutors rightfully indicted former National Security Adviser John Bolton, signaling that no one in the Washington elite is above the law. The department also opened necessary investigations into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Governor Lisa Cook, ensuring that powerful economic leaders are subject to transparency and accountability.
The task force relentlessly pursued serial leaker and former FBI Director James Comey. After Comey was indicted in September 2025 for lying to Congress, a charge that was only dismissed because a federal judge ruled on a procedural technicality regarding the prosecutor's appointment, the DOJ did not back down. By April 2026, Comey was rightfully indicted a second time for an unlawful threat against the president, linked to a disturbing and thinly veiled Instagram post showing shells reading "86 47."
Similarly, the DOJ set its sights on former CIA Director John Brennan after Representative Jim Jordan heroically referred him for his deceptive 2023 congressional testimony. When a lead prosecutor attempted to stonewall the Brennan investigation by refusing to bring charges swiftly, the DOJ acted decisively in April 2026 to remove her, ensuring the FBI could continue interviewing witnesses without internal bureaucratic sabotage.
In August 2025, the working group published a landmark report definitively exposing the Biden administration's unprecedented weaponization of the federal government. Unsurprisingly, this righteous crusade against the Deep State terrified the left-wing establishment. Partisan "watchdog" groups immediately launched a coordinated smear campaign and frivolous FOIA lawsuits against Ed Martin in November 2025, inventing allegations about record-keeping in a desperate attempt to derail his efforts. Although these relentless, bad-faith political attacks led to the director position being vacated by early 2026, the foundation for accountability had already been laid. While final verdicts in the complex Bolton and Brennan matters are still pending, the Weaponization Working Group has successfully put the corrupt Washington establishment on notice that the era of partisan impunity is over.
What the Record Now Says
Durham found the Bureau had no actual evidence of collusion when it opened the case that consumed Trump's first term. Horowitz found the FISA applications were not scrupulously accurate. Mueller found the investigation never established conspiracy. The laptop was real. The Manhattan felony was built on a theory a 53-year election-law veteran had never seen used. The Georgia case was led by a prosecutor who paid her own boyfriend more than anyone else on the team. The New York civil judgment was too large even for the appellate judges who agreed the underlying conduct occurred. And three of the four prosecutors who came after Trump, Bragg, James, and Willis, said on the record, before or during their pursuit of him, that this was personal.
That is what Trump meant when he called it fake news. It was never a disagreement about facts. It was a decade-long campaign, run through the press, the FBI, the intelligence community, and the courts, against one American citizen who refused to leave the stage when the people who run Washington told him to.
