Trump allies conveniently change their minds about the 'deep state' now that they need it to justify Suleimani killing

One of the most abiding fixtures of President Donald Trump allies' segments on TV was to blast the so-called "Deep State," their imagined secret cabal of intelligence community officials loyal to the Democratic Party, who run a shadow government policy and work to bring down Trump's presidency from within.

Now that Trump is teetering on the brink of declaring war on Iran, however, according to The Daily Beast, Trump's allies have abruptly stopped attacking the intelligence community as fomenting a conspiracy against the president — and are now begging their audience to take them seriously, in anticipation of their providing evidence that could justify Trump moving forward with military action.

"I will say the big headline is, this is a huge victory for American intelligence, a huge victory for our military, a huge victory for the State Department, and a huge victory and total leadership by the president,” said Sean Hannity on Thursday, despite the fact that he has frequently cited conspiracy theories attacking the intelligence community.

Ex-Trump adviser Christian Whiton, meanwhile, said on Friday that it is "really sad" Democrats "aren’t willing to give our president and our military the benefit of the doubt in a crisis" — even though weeks ago he referred to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a war hero and impeachment witness, as a “deep state crybaby” who “poured himself into an Army outfit to go and frankly speak contemptuous things against the commander-in-chief.”

In a sense, what is happening resembles a rerun of 2002, in which George W. Bush's administration and its champions on Fox News hyped the intelligence community to sell war in Iraq. After the war utterly fell apart and the public turned on it, administration officials tried to claim the intelligence community gave them bad information — although the CIA director during the invasion, George Tenet, has written that in fact Bush's political appointees were eager for war before and in excess of any information gathered by the intelligence community.