Revised, expanded, 12-22-25. I did not understand what people meant by "the Deep State." What follow are explanations I have found online and share here because I doubt I am the only one who didn't get it. I hope others can provide links to further explanations (or examples).
• Deconstructing the Deep State (Charles S. Clark, in Government Executive)
Donald Trump isn’t the first president to be deeply skeptical of the institutions and people he now leads.
“When Democrats come to Washington, they arrive as an army of liberation. They turn to the civil service and say, `We love you, go forth and let 1,000 flowers bloom.’ Then comes the madness, and the Democrats wake up,” Turk said.
“Then the Republicans arrive as a conquering army and put their heels on the neck of the civil service. But after about a year or 18 months, they realize that they actually need them to run the place. So they take their heels off the necks, and things are fine.”
The label deep state “assumes there’s some kind of planned conspiracy going on,” said Donald Devine, who headed the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan administration, who still bemoans the obstacles to firing federal employees. “It is irrational to allow people to run around government doing anything they want, simply following the parochial interests of their agencies. Federal employees need and legally require political supervision, which was the essence of the Carter reforms, a lesson that the Trump administration Office of Management and Budget needs to explain to the White House rather than promoting a naïve version of the permanent bureaucracy.”
“To refer to career civil servants in the U.S. government as some form of deep state is a clear attempt to delegitimize voices of disagreement," says Nancy McEldowney, former director of the Foreign Service Institute. “Even worse, it carries with it the potential for fear-baiting and rumor-mongering, and is really a dark conspiratorial term that does not correspond to reality.”
• Trump and the “deep state” (Robert Horowitz, Policy Studies, Nov. 2021)
"Donald Trump and his loyalists invoked the concept of the deep state when confronted with resistance to the president’s agenda. The hazy concept of the deep state was tied to the long-standing conservative critique of the administrative state and the growth of the federal bureaucracy. Together, they conveyed reproach that Trump was subverted by a shadowy network of unelected bureaucrats that illegitimately holds the levers of real power in the United States.
"But there is no deep state. The conflict between the bureaucracy and Trump underscores a conflict between liberal and populist conceptions of democracy; between, utilizing Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of conviction. The bureaucracy’s commitment to liberalism and instrumental rationality butts up against the Caesarist authority claimed by a leader on the basis of his presumed plebiscitary electoral mandate. Trump’s rhetorical accusation of a deep state undermined confidence in government and the legitimacy of the state."
• Accountability in the Deep State (Heidi Kitrosser, U.C.L.A. Law Review, 9-19)
'In October of 2017, Joel Clement—a federal civil servant who had headed the U.S. Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis since 2011—wrote a stinging resignation letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. In it, Clement accused Zinke and President Trump of having “waged an all-out assault on the civil service by muzzling scientists and policy experts like myself.”
'The story behind Joel Clement’s resignation—a story still unfolding as of this Article’s writing in 2018—provides a window into the relationship between the political leadership and the civil service at the Interior Department in the first year of the Trump administration.
'It also serves as a jumping-off point to revisit the value in having a civil service with some independence from politics, and to consider mechanisms to protect that independence. This article explores those questions through the lens of Clement’s resignation.
• Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and The Unitary Executive by Stephen Skowronek (Yale University Department of Political Science, 2021).
"A powerful dissection of one of the fundamental problems in American governance today: the clash between presidents determined to redirect the nation through ever-tighter control of administration and an executive branch still organized to promote shared interests in steady hands, due deliberation, and expertise.
As the nation’s chief executive, Donald Trump pitted himself repeatedly against the institutions and personnel of the executive branch. In the process, two once-obscure concepts came center stage in an eerie faceoff.
On one side was the specter of a “Deep State” conspiracy—administrators threatening to thwart the will of the people and undercut the constitutional authority of the president they elected to lead them. On the other side was a raw personalization of presidential power, one that a theory of “the unitary executive” gussied up and allowed to run roughshod over reason and the rule of law.
The Deep State and the unitary executive framed every major contest of the Trump presidency. Like phantom twins, they drew each other out and wrestled to light basic issues of governance long suppressed.
Though this conflict reached a fever pitch during the Trump presidency, it is not new. Stephen Skowronek, John A. Dearborn, and Desmond King trace the tensions between presidential power and the depth of the American state back through the decades and forward through the various settlements arrived at in previous eras.
Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic by Stephen Skowronek, John A. Dearborn, and Desmond King (published in 2021) "is about the breakdown of settlements and the abiding vulnerabilities of a Constitution that gave scant attention to administrative power. Rather than simply dump on Trump, the authors provide a richly historical perspective on the conflicts that rocked his [first] presidency, and they explain why, if left untamed, the phantom twins will continue to pull the American government apart."
If you have anything to add (in particular, a link to another reliable article or explanation or quote), please provide the URL (link) and quote below (or information about where the resource may be found). Civil comments and explanations please; clarification, not hostility.