Tyler O'Neill
Appearances
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
I think back in the first administration, you had some Republicans or some who identified as Republicans who would still oppose Trump from within. Thankfully, that seems to be less of the case. But the fact that anybody who works in the executive branch would decide and really gear up for not following the legal orders of the sitting president is a really shocking development.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
It's definitely more entrenched on the left-wing side. This broader phenomenon dovetails very much with my new book, which is called The Woktopus, The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
And in my book, I talk about, you know, the left's vast influence campaign that's propped up by a dark money network led by people like George Soros, who now his son Alex is heading the Open Society Foundations. So in the Biden administration, the influence of this left-wing network really exploded. And we saw what I call the woke-topus revealing itself in
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
in its true form, showing how far its tentacles had reached into the federal government when it came to staffing and advising and really brainwashing and weaponizing the government to achieve its woke purposes. But even under Biden, we saw... many bureaucrats gear up against the sitting president.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
And these were left-wing bureaucrats gearing up against a left-wing president because they didn't support his rhetorical stance on Israel. And many of us who know the issue of Israel and the Middle East and Iran in general will know that Biden was by far not the most reliable president. When it comes to standing for Israel, he loosened the sanctions on Iran that enabled
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
the rogue state to fund Hamas and likely led to the October 7th terrorist attack. But as soon as that attack happened, Biden came out and said to Israel, we will never fail to have your back. And that messaging didn't comport well with some of the activist groups.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
And so you saw this gearing deep state move against a Democratic president from the left because they wanted him to focus on securing a ceasefire deal and essentially not allowing Israel to protect itself and prevent another October 7th terrorist pogrom.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
Yeah, that's an excellent question. We know that there was a large influence in the Obama administration as well. I think the phenomenon I describe as the Woktopus
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
came into its full flower in the Biden administration, but it had been growing over years, but only recently did some of the more aggressive woke groups, I'm thinking like the Human Rights Campaign, and of course the Southern Poverty Law Center had a little bit of an advising role years and years ago, but only under Biden, their access tripled, quadrupled, expanded in this administration.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
There was this one moment where the Human Rights Campaign, you know, the Biden White House released a statement, and this was just last year, they released a statement weakening their stance supporting sex change operations for children. And they had language that suggested, oh, we're not actually going to go full bore into this.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
We think that maybe it could be a good idea sometimes, but we want to withdraw our full support. The human rights campaign created a pressure campaign on the White House. The White House changed its messaging. just a few hours later. And then the head of the human rights campaign went to her donors and said, look, this is tremendous impact and we have to keep doing this.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
So I don't have the receipts on every way that these activist groups achieved their goals in the Biden administration, but there are moments like that that really peel the curtain back and show that, yes, this vast influence campaign achieved many of its goals. and in sometimes shocking degrees.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
Yeah, I think it's a very effective, mostly symbolic move. Some of the people have already lost their security clearances and some of them have passed away. But I think it really sends the message that it will not be tolerated for current or former government officials who have these security clearances to weaponize their security clearances
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
That example was exhibit A of big tech and the deep state colluding in order to suppress a very true news story that we now know the Hunter Biden laptop was real. The New York Post was correct. All of this rhetoric about it being a Russian influence campaign was itself disinformation and of the worst sort.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
So when Trump did this, it sent the message loud and clear that the deep state should not be meddling in our elections like this. It's really important for Trump to send this message.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
And by choosing Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence, by putting Kash Patel at the FBI, by putting Ratcliffe at the CIA, Trump is sending very clear messages that he is going to bring the deep state to heel.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
Yeah, I have great confidence in them and I have great confidence in Russ Vogt over at OMB. But actually dismantling the deep state is a really difficult problem and not going to disappear. So when Trump won...
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
a lot of these activists in the Biden administration, they had gone to many of these activist groups, like they'd worked at an activist group like the Natural Resources Defense Council, and then gone to the Biden administration, and then gone back to a similar sort of activist group. So what you have is a revolving door, and the Woktopus acts as a government in exile right now.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
And so what you see is... This threat doesn't go away. These activists are not giving up. Some of them are staying inside of the administrative state. As we noted in that poll, 64% of those who voted for Kamala Harris, who are federal bureaucrats in D.C., said they would oppose a Trump order. These people are hunkering down.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
We've seen people change their job titles to hide the fact that they were hired for DEI reasons. So there's a deep state, and then there's a government in exile, and preventing them from undermining the president's agenda is a really tall order. And so I have confidence in the people that Trump has picked, but I also think you need structural reforms.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
One of the things that I constantly talk about is public sector unions, especially in the federal government. because they pit public servants against the people's elected representatives. What that does is it creates an adversarial relationship that makes government less accountable to the people.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
You have the American Federation of Government Employees that represents federal bureaucrats across the administration. And it's because the rules were changed. I think it was under the Jimmy Carter administration. But we need to have Congress re-examine these rules and say whether or not public sector unions can represent federal workers. I think the answer should be no.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
And I really hope that in the current round of reconciliation, they consider this sort of reform because if you have these public sector unions, I mean, they are part of the infrastructure that is fighting back against the people's elected president. I think Congress needs to do it. I think Trump's administration is off to a really excellent start.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
But some of these things have to be structural and they have to be long term to defang this threat.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
Hey, my pleasure. You can find The Woke To Puss on Amazon. You can also go to woketopus.com, my sub stack where I have the news about all of these important issues.
Morning Wire
Reshaping the Deep State: Trump’s Buyouts & Reforms | 2.22.25
Yeah, so this was a really shocking poll. It found that 64% of Washington, D.C.-based federal bureaucrats who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in the last election said that they would not follow a lawful order from Trump if they considered it to be bad policy.