Trump and the Arab Spring
I think so too (although maybe not so directly connected t the Arab Spring), but what, exactly, do you have in mind?
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I'm not so sure about the connection to the Arab Spring because I don't think the Middle Eastern countries had the kind of independently powerful mass media that the West has. I think Trump has neutralized the media simply by treating them as the enemy, which also means as an independent power center. He simply refused to accept the cloak of objectivity which protected them. So, he tricked them into treating him openly as the enemy; everyone now knows that everything the media says that might hurt Trump is being said only to hurt him. So, that taints even true things they might say about him. Unless you agree Trump is bad, and the media are just objectively recognizing his badness. But if you're in a circular logic like that you render yourself irrelevant anyway. But Trump could only do that because of the emergence of social media, which had already fingered the media as an independent and self-interested site of power. And, of course, his own use of Twitter leveraged a weapon that no President ever had before--he could reach audiences unfiltered. His rallies can be shown on youtube--nobody has to dependent on snippets shown in the nightly news. But these might certainly be strategies and tactics Trump picked up from watching the Arab Spring. The opposition to Trump is in a double bind, because the first inclination of leftists on twitter or Facebook is to ask that right-wingers be deplatformed, so they immediately "uncloak" themselves of any claims to disinterestedness--they're obviously just power players themselves.
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What is interesting now is that if the Republicans expand their power in next week's elections, we will have a situation in which almost the entire government is in the hands of the Republicans, while almost all of the non-governmental sources of power (including much--it's hard to know how much--of the permanent state) are in the hands of the left. So I would expect to see novel forms of asymmetrical political warfare. Trump has taken away the weapon that I think paralyzed previous presidents (and almost all politicians)--the use of leaks by actors within the state colluding with the media. He's been plugging leaks and feeding the media false leaks, so it's now the media that is ineffective. I don't know what the media does now other than organize more hoaxes, which keep getting more ridiculous, but maybe they'll surprise me. (One very simple thing that I think Trump was, amazingly, the first to realize, is that you can say whatever you want to the media, because they're not a transparent conduit of information but a self-interested actor. Other presidents have lied to the media, of course, but they suffered if they got caught because they accepted that doing so was wrong--Trump realizes that nobody who doesn't already hate him cares if he BSes and gaslights the media--the media is one of the most hated institutions in the country.)
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It is hard to know, and varies across institutions. The State Department is totally leftist/globalist. The intelligence agencies are probably much more mixed. I would guess that the specifically liberal agencies--EPA, Labor, Education, Civil rights, etc.--are mostly staffed by leftists. They help with framing lawsuits against the government.