Former Trump advisers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie are releasing a book on Tuesday that promotes far-right conspiracy theories about “embedded enemies of President Trump” in the “deep state.” The book names specific Trump appointees they describe as part of a “resistance” within the government. The Washington Post got an early look at the book—“Trump’s Enemies”—and began reporting on it over the weekend. Bossie and Lewandowski previously co-authored “Let Trump be Trump,” a memoir of their time on the campaign.
According to the Post’s Philip Rucker, the new book “paints a dark and at times conspiratorial portrait of Trump’s Washington.” Rucker says the book “reads in part like Trump’s Twitter grievances in book form.” It portrays FBI and Justice Department officials as wanting to “nullify the election and bring down the president.”
Lewandowski and Bossie write that these officials “attack the administration with a thousand cuts. They do this in complete disregard to the millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump. They do it only for their own ends. There are far too many people in the deep reaches of the federal government who harbor as deep a hatred of Trump as does anyone from the Clinton/Obama cabal. The thing is, they get away with it when no one is looking.”
Bossie and Lewandowski’s book, and its demonization of law enforcement and intelligence officials, fits into an aggressive strategy by Trump and his supporters to delegitimize Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign—and justify whatever kind of firings or other forms of obstruction Trump and his supporters marshal in response to Mueller’s probe or investigations likely to begin when Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives in January.
Bossie and Lewandowski appeared on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday to promote the book. Bossie insisted, “There’s a vast left-wing conspiracy going on that has been going on since the president won this election.” Lewandowski said that their book outlines “how the intelligence community went after the president” because they “disagreed with his political philosophy.” Lewandowski promoted the book earlier this month on Breitbart News Daily, where he complimented Breitbart for reminding people that “the deep state is very real.”
“Trump’s Enemies” seems designed to give credence to far-right conspiracy theories about the “deep state” trying to overturn Trump’s election and carry out a slow-moving “coup d’etat.” Regarding the Russia investigation, the book says, “The upper echelons of the intelligence community and federal law enforcement have waged a full on war against the president.”
Right-wing Trump supporters like Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton have been banging this drum for a long time. Conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, author of “Killing the Deep State: The Right to Save President Trump,” has promoted the need to “destroy this dangerous shadow government for good.”
Religious Right leaders have been key to this strategy, promoting conspiracy theories about the “deep state” setting out to undermine the current administration—with many Religious Right figures describing the deep state as a satanic and demonic movement engaged in spiritual warfare against the God-anointed Trump. This summer, for example, Gary Bauer called for the firing of Rod Rosenstein and breaking deep state resistance. Rick Joyner said that “To try to overthrow a duly elected president is treason.” Today, Jerry Falwell, Jr. tweeted a link to a recent Emma Greene article in the Atlantic quoting Falwell describing Jeff Sessions as “part of the deep state” and noting that Falwell had once said that Sessions, Hillary Clinton, Rosenstein, and former FBI Director James Comey should all “rot in the same jail.”
Earlier this year, a group of pro-Trump “apostles” and “prophets” gathered 1,300 supporters at Trump International Hotel in D.C. where they prayed for God to send his angel armies to destroy Trump’s deep state enemies in the FBI and Justice Department. In September, Intercessors for America released an “Intercessory Intel Report” on the deep state that urged people:
Pray that any plan to undermine, harm, derail and subvert elected officials would be uncovered. Pray that any conspiracy plans would be revealed and any illegal acts prosecuted. Ask God to clean house in our government!
As RWW’s Jared Holt noted in April, Fox News personalities are also playing their part:
Last December, Hannity told former White House strategist and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon that he feared that he “may end up in jail” for defending Trump against a deep-state effort to remove Trump from office. “By the way, people like us may end up in jail,” he told Bannon. “Let me tell you. They will stop at nothing. This is what I’m trying to get across to people. This is serious. This is the rule of law in this country now.”
Since then, conspiracy theorists like Hannity have ramped up the rhetoric they’ve used to discuss what they believed to be direct opposition from the deep state. Conservatives across right-wing media have been repeatedly warning voters that government agencies, technology companies, and satanic forces have been working in tandem to undo people who support Trump.
Bossie is president of Citizens United, the group behind the legal case that led to the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in which the court’s conservatives dismantled campaign finance regulations and opened the floodgates to secret unlimited spending to influence elections. The case grew out of an anti-Hillary Clinton film that Citizens United wanted to run before the 2008 Democratic primaries.
Bossie is a practiced propagandist, having produced more than two dozen “documentaries” since 2004, many featuring right-wing figures like Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Michelle Malkin. Bossie and Steve Bannon have teamed up to make at least six films, including 2012’s “The Hope and the Change”—which was meant to prevent Barack Obama’s re-election—and 2016’s “Torchbearer,” which was screened during the Republican National Convention in 2016.
Bossie introduced Trump to Bannon in 2010. And when Bannon was ousted from the White House in the summer of 2017, Bossie went on Fox News to defend Bannon’s role in the Trump campaign and White House, and to declare that Bannon would have more weapons at his disposal in promoting the Trump agenda working outside the White House with Bossie and Lewandowski. That fall, Bossie defended Bannon declaring war on establishment Republicans when others like Newt Gingrich said it was a stupid political strategy. In October 2017, Bossie praised two right-wing candidates who will be sworn in to the U.S. Senate in January, Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn and Missouri’s Josh Hawley.
In December, Lewandowski and Bossie will be keynoting the “American Priority Conference,” which is “showcasing the political, cultural, and intellectual leaders of the America First movement.”
