Agree about Doug Saunders  - he rarely has anything useful to say about anything .  Cannot understand why he still gets published.  Is he related to someone high up in the Globe ownership structure? 
Anyway, the deep state talk in the U.S., as I understand it, refers to the fairly obvious (and successful) campaign by U.S. intelligence agencies and various other "public servants" to prevent the U.S. president trying to improve U.S. -Russia relations.  Anti-Russian sentiment is in the DNA of these people and also lucrative for the military and defense contractors so that will not be changing.