On Oct. 28, 2013, President Barack Obama and James Comey participate in the installation ceremony for Mr. Comey as FBI director at the bureau’s Washington headquarters. PHOTO: CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Not even New York Times columnist James B. Stewart can disagree there exists in America an anti-Trump deep state which has worked tirelessly to rid the country of this President. In fact, he’s written a book about it which is aptly titled, “Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law.”

We’ve been aware of the deep state’s existence for years, but prior to the stunning victory of Donald J. Trump in November of 2016, it had always operated quietly beneath the surface of the Washington establishment. Rocked by the reality of a President Trump, the deep state has come out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Since Trump’s election, it has labored relentlessly and unabashedly to undermine his presidency every step of the way.

Stewart admits that the deep state is alive and well and living in Washington, D.C. However, rather than viewing it as something anti-American or sinister, he believes it’s actually a positive force that’s “protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution.”

He portrays the men, women and institutions of the deep state as saviors of our fragile democratic republic. They are doing a service to the country by trying to rid us of this lawless, thuggish outsider who is destroying America. The fact that Trump won a fair election, accumulating over 300 electoral votes, is not even a consideration.

Stewart appeared on NBC’s “Today Show” last week and spoke to host Savannah Guthrie to promote his new book. The brief clip can be viewed here.

Guthrie says to Stewart, “Deep state is one of those phrases that really wasn’t in our political lexicon until a few years ago with President Trump. And his central allegation is that there are people inside these government agencies actively working against him. What did you find?”

Well, you meet these characters in my book, and the fact is, in a sense, he’s right. There is a deep state…there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law. They do not work for the President. They work for the American people. And, as Comey told me in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’ because they are protecting the Constitution and the people when individuals – we don’t have a monarch, we don’t have a dictator – they restrain them from crossing the boundaries of law. What Trump calls the deep state in the United States is protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution. It’s a positive thing in this sense.

While it sounds surreal to hear anyone voicing such a farfetched opinion, Stewart sounds as if he really believes in what he’s saying. He truly sees himself and the others fighting to “overthrow” President Trump as the “good guys.” I used to imagine that Democrats knew they were telling lies, but now I think they have all convinced themselves that their perception of events is the truth.

Next, the two discuss how the term “deep state” has become “pejorative.” Stewart explains, “Well, it’s pejorative because of how it was treated in Turkey and Egypt, with a deep state of people who were protecting their own power. What Trump calls the “deep state” in the United States,” according to Stewart, “is protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution. It’s a positive thing in this sense.”

No, actually James the people of the deep state are trying to protect their own power in the same way the Turks and the Egyptians did. It is not their job to second guess or to undermine the President’s lawful orders. Rather, it is their job to implement those orders.

Next Guthrie says, “It always was assumed, fairly or unfairly, that Republicans were the party of law enforcement. And just yesterday on “Meet the Press” you had Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, saying he doesn’t really trust the FBI, he doesn’t trust the CIA, now he named in particular, individuals, McCabe, Comey, those folks. But what do you think about this larger development that there’s questioning of these very institutions, what does that mean for those institutions?

And Stewart replies:

Well, it’s historically unprecedented and it’s very dangerous. The reason they’re being attacked is the Justice Department and the FBI are independent. For good reasons. They may be called upon to investigate, as they did, the White House. They do not answer to the President, even though he appoints them. And for them to be branded, as Trump has, as traitors, to alienate them, has struck terror into many of these people. Many of the people I have talked to, they’re terrified. They’ve been branded as traitors, the penalty for traitors is the death penalty.

Please. How many times have the Democrats and the media branded Trump as a traitor? Even after the Mueller report came out, former CIA Director John Brennan told Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that he stands by his earlier statement. He said, “I called [Trump’s] behavior treasonous, which is to betray one’s trust and aid and abet the enemy, and I stand very much by that claim.” President Rep. Eric Swalwell once said Trump was an agent “working on behalf of the Russians.” Let’s not even get started on the comments of Nancy Pelosi or Adam Schiff. It wouldn’t take long to make a list of 100 times a leftist has called Trump an agent of Russia or a traitor.

Asked by Guthrie what the current mood is inside the intelligence agencies, the FBI, now that there are whole groups of people who look at them askance and they say, “Wait a minute, whose side are you on here?,” Stewart responded:

Well, morale has been devastated. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve been inside there, it is terrible. These are people who don’t make a whole lot of money but they dedicated themselves to public service, and they were treated like local heroes. Now, there’s a huge faction of the population that thinks they’re the enemy of the people, that they’re traitors, that they’re doing something sinister, that they’re conspiring against the White House. That is unfair, it’s untrue, but it has had a terrible toll on the people there…There’s a lot of damage, it’s gonna be lasting for many years. But it’s something I hope the American people will take into consideration when they decide who to support. How important the and who is going to be able to restore the integrity of these institutions.

Is it really unfair or untrue? Where were the whistleblowers inside of these organizations when the FBI was submitting unlawful applications to the FISA Court based on a bogus, unverified dossier, which the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid a foreign spy to produce? And that foreign spy paid other foreigners to provide material they hoped would end Donald Trump’s candidacy or else provide cause to remove him from office in the remote event he might win. All of those with knowledge of this activity who remained silent are guilty.

How important is the rule of law to this country? It sure wasn’t important to James Comey when he told President-elect Trump in January of 2017 that there was a “salacious and unverified” dossier out there about him, which was the same “Verified” document he presented to the FISA Court just two and a half months earlier as evidence that the FBI needed a warrant to surveil Carter Page.

Nor was it important to Comey when he gave copies of his memos to his law professor friend to leak to the New York Times after he’d been fired in the hopes it would trigger the appointment of a special counsel.

Or when Rod Rosenstein, angry that Trump had made Comey’s firing seem like his idea (because of the memo Trump had insisted Rosenstein write in which he’d outlined the case for Comey’s firing), made the game-changing decision to appoint a special counsel. And not just any special counsel, but the highly partisan, conflicted Robert Mueller.

Once Democrats began to see him as a threat to a Hillary Clinton victory, the creatures of the deep state banded together and homed in on Trump like maggots to a corpse. And they have maintained maximum pressure on Trump and his administration on a daily basis ever since.