Yes, I do, on two levels. On one level, I know what conspiracy theorists mean by the "deep state", and that's mostly a delusion. Really, it represents resentment that, now that they've got one of their own into office, they don't get to have their way everywhere on everything. But, it's true that the state has a depth to it. That's inherent in the design, as encoded into law by the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The government doesn't, generally, turn over completely because of any one election. Elections matter, and they help to set the direction the government is moving, but the vast military, intelligence, and civil service of the United States does not, while the Congress moves on its own timetable and according to its own mandates, and the courts move excruciatingly slowly. This institutional depth is a guard against tyranny, and a moderating force.
When a President enters office, his or her institutional influence is at its nadir, since they haven't appointed anyone to anything. And it grows from there as they put their mark on office. But their power at the outset flows from their electoral mandate. One of the reasons that Trump is so weak, as a President, is that he has a negative mandate (which is why he's forced to talk about the Electoral College that he once advocated abolishing), and he is very unpopular, and he's made no effort to reach out and govern the whole country, going back time and again to the people who affirm him instead of challenge him, narrowing his appeal to an ever-smaller point.
Trump has declared a sort of war against his own administration. That's part of the reason he finds it hard to govern. Another is that some of the things he wants to do are flatly illegal, and he's bumped up against the boundaries set by the courts, which Republicans have been perfectly happy to deploy against Barack Obama a handful of months ago. He may want to run a government with no services, no diplomacy, and a huge military, where the legal system responds directly to his whims and can be deployed to fight his personal vendettas, but that's not the law, and Trump can't change the law on his own. And I think that if you think about it, you wouldn't want it to be the law, particularly when Democrats win the Presidency. I never trust presidents who try to maximize their personal power, and I would suggest that you shouldn't either.
Trump has left vast swathes of the government unstaffed, and in a lot of cases, put staff in place with the explicit agenda that they would fight against their own agencies as the law constructs them. That's where the work gets done, and he's largely shooting himself in the foot by doing so. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a government that's internally at war with itself isn't real productive. That is 100% on Trump. And if you're glaring a members of Congress, each one of them from both parties have their own separate mandates from their voters, and you shouldn't expect them to be onboard with an unpopular person like Donald Trump just because he got himself elected to an office he is unsuited for and that he doesn't want or like.
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