But experts on Turkey are not so quick to follow suit. They see a couple of problems with the analogy. First, it’s not a precise application of the term; it portrays any sort of resistance to the regime as a “deep state,” failing to isolate what truly makes the shadowy structures in places like Turkey different. Second, a review of Turkish politics over the last decade shows the dangers in allowing a deep state to become a real menace in the mind of the public.

“Be careful playing with the deep-state idea, because it can so easily get out of control that it becomes a monster that helps whoever’s in charge curb freedom and intimidate dissidents, because it’s such a nebulous concept,” said Soner Cagaptay, who directs the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “You don't have to prove that it exists. Once [the notion is] out there, and the public starts to believe it, anybody can be attached to it.”

It’s all well and good to argue that there are similarities between the Turkish deep state and American resistance to Trump. There are even some shared elements, like the presence of a corps of career government employees who see themselves as the last line of defense for longstanding national values against an insurgent president seeking to tear them down. It’s also interesting that members of the military have seemed wary of Trump, warning of the importance of NATO and pushing back on reported plans to bring back torture—just as the military is the bastion of secularism in Turkey. As Cagaptay puts it, Turkey has historically had three checks on government power, two democratic (the courts and the media) and a third undemocratic: the military.

These superficial similarities threaten to overshadow some of the deeper differences, though. Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish sociologist and writer at the University of North Carolina, tweeted a string of criticisms about the analogy Friday morning. “Permanent bureaucracy and/or non-electoral institutions diverging with the electoral branch [is] not that uncommon even in liberal democracies,” she wrote. “In the Turkey case, that's not what it means. There was a shadowy, cross-institution occasionally *armed* network conducting killings, etc. So, if people are going to call non electoral institutions stepping up leaking stuff, fine. But it is not ‘deep state’ like in Turkey.”

Omer Taspinar, who teaches at the National Defense University, took a similar position. “The Deep State was a kind of criminal organization,” he said. “It was not the judiciary, the civil society, the media, or the bureaucrats trying to engage in checks and balances against a legitimately elected government. What we’re witnessing in the U.S., it’s basically the institutional channels.”

The Turkish deep state, historically, was willing to use violence to achieve its ends, and held close ties to organized crime. The resistance against Trump has involved leaking of government information—something that is sometimes criminal, and occasionally prosecuted, but is meaningfully different from killing or beating opponents.