Top Democrat says ‘conspiracy theory’ long pushed by Trump is true | 4 April 2025 | New York City Mayor Eric Adams, fresh off his corruption case being dismissed by a federal judge, appeared on a podcast and said he believes the “deep state” is real. President Donald Trump and his closest allies have spent the last eight years talking about how to dismantle this so-called shadowy group of unelected bureaucrats hellbent on sabotaging Trump’s policies. Those who believe in the deep-state “conspiracy theory” generally posit that unelected officials embedded in agencies like the CIA and FBI are the ones really pulling the strings of the US government — not the president or Congress. Adams now counts himself as a believer, crediting FBI director Kash Patel’s 2023 book on the subject as the thing that swayed him.