Four weeks into the Trump Administration, the intense polarization of the election has migrated to the federal bureaucracy. There have been scenes of visible dissent from federal workers alarmed by the new President’s intentions: E.P.A. officials lobbying their senators to oppose Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to run the agency; a thousand State Department diplomats signing a formal document objecting to Trump’s broad travel ban. More opaquely, current and former government officials have leaked details of intercepted communications between Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., forcing Trump to drop Flynn, his longtime ally and national-security adviser, just twenty-four days after the Inauguration. This pattern of dissent, and its early successes, has brought about a vogue for the theory of the deep state, usually used in analyzing authoritarian regimes, in which networks of people within the bureaucracy are said to be able to exercise a hidden will of their own. In pop culture, the clearest expression of the deep state is Dar Adal, the ruthless spymaster played by F. Murray Abraham on “Homeland,” a character so unfamiliar to American audiences that the producers gave him a Middle Eastern-sounding name.

The federal government employs two million people; its sympathies move in more than one direction. While many federal employees may want to oppose the White House, others (especially border-patrol and immigration agents, whose support Trump often cited on the campaign trail) have already been taking some alarming liberties to advance the President’s politics. During the weekend when Trump’s travel ban was in effect, Customs and Border Patrol agents at airports across the country denied families and lawyers, and even members of Congress, access to people who were being detained under the order’s authority. They also exercised broad discretion in whom they detained. At the Vermont border, a Canadian citizen was turned around from a shopping trip after an agent confiscated her phone and found Arabic prayers on it. She was among many would-be border crossers who have been asked about their personal feelings toward Donald Trump.

These incidents have continued even after federal judges blocked the government from implementing the travel ban. In Atlanta, an immigration lawyer reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were going door to door in Hispanic neighborhoods, asking for documentation. In Los Angeles, agents were said to be at immigration court, asking the relatives of petitioners about their own status. In Alexandria, Virginia, agents showed up early Wednesday morning at a church’s hypothermia shelter, lined Hispanic men up against a brick wall, and scanned their fingerprints to find out if they had criminal backgrounds. In El Paso, agents detained a domestic-violence victim in a courthouse, where she had gone to seek a protective order. In Seattle, attorneys for a legal immigrant who’d been detained have claimed that I.C.E. agents used white-out to alter a form on which their client had denied being a gang member, to make it seem that he’d instead confessed to membership. If Trump’s opponents in the bureaucracy have been weaponized, then so have his supporters.

The situation is unstable, and it may not quickly abate. The President seems to trust only a tiny circle of his advisers. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House this week, CBS reported that “not a single State Department official was included” in meetings with him—not the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, nor any of Tillerson’s deputies. The discussions about peace in the Middle East were instead led by Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law. Rear Admiral Robert Harward, Trump’s first choice to replace Flynn as national-security adviser, reportedly declined the position because he viewed it as a “shit sandwich,” in which his influence would be subject to mediation by the President’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, from above, and the deputy national-security adviser, Trump loyalist K. T. MacFarland, from below.

Young Administrations often struggle to introduce new ideologies to federal agencies. Trump’s scheme seems to be to bypass much of the federal government entirely. One worry is that this will lead to resignations and a depleted bureaucracy that is less able to manage the country—but this is a longer-term concern. The more immediate one is the widespread breakdown of authority. The Dar Adal fantasy is that the bureaucracy can be as coördinated and willful as a fist. The early evidence from the Trump Administration is of a stranger and more diffuse situation, in which a new President has emboldened all sides to freelance.