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Raise your hand if you remember Hot Johnny McEntee?
Well, there’s no reason that you should — there were so many filthy characters in the Trump administration, it’s hard to keep them all straight. But he was that college football player who became Trump’s body man until he got derp walked out of the White House because of his gambling debts and had to go work for the campaign for a while. But after Trump fired John Kelly as chief of staff, McEntee came back and soon found himself in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office.
“People have been telling me I should do that for a long time,” McEntee said at the time. “I didn’t feel ready before, but I am 29 now and I’m ready.”
“I’m the only person around here that’s just here for the president,” he added, before staffing up the office with what a source told ABC’s Jonathan Karl were “the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find, and guys who would be absolutely no threat to Johnny in going after those girls.”
Then he embarked on a loyalty purge, parking minders at the various agencies, scouring social media accounts of government employees for lack of devotion to the Dear Leader, and forcing every senior executive branch official to sit down and re-interview for their own jobs, answering questions like “Do you support the policies of the Trump administration and, if so, which ones?”
He was responsible for getting Defense Secretary Mark Esper fired for such sins as: “bars the display of the Confederate flag” on military bases; “opposed the President’s direction to utilize American forces to put down riots”; “focused the Department on Russia”; and “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion’.”
McEntee also got deeply involved in the effort to overturn the results of the election after Trump lost, even going so far as to generate an Eastman-style memo on the Electoral College. When that failed, he pitched Peter Thiel and got funding for the rightwing dating app “The Right Stuff,” which provided us all with a much-needed belly laugh before landing with a thud, so don’t you liberals say he never gave you anything!
Naturally, McEntee found himself subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith to testify before the grand jury about the events of January 6. And of course he showed up, but claimed executive privilege over all the good parts. But Jack Smith is (maybe?) who we all convinced ourself Bob Mueller was, so he promptly marched into the US District Court in DC and got a court order overriding that privilege claim as to McEntee, as well as Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Robert O’Brien, Ken Cuccinelli, and a bunch of other horrible dudes who would like very much not to have to talk about that whole coup thing. And when Trump appealed, the DC Circuit said, “Nope, spill it boys,” or words to that effect. The order is sealed, so we’ll just have to take our best guess how they phrased it.
Anyway! That was the first week of April. And now it is the first week of May and oh, lookie here John Boy has a new job at the Heritage Foundation staffing up a government in waiting for the next Trump administration. He’ll be heading up “Project 2025,” a “broad coalition of more than 50 conservative organizations” which are aiming to assemble a roster of 20,000 lackeys to plug into the federal bureaucracy on day one. Obviously Johnny Good Hair was a natural choice to lead this fight — he’ll be 33 next week!
This is hair-raising for a couple of reasons. To start with, this isn’t the first time that Trump World found a way to do a solid for someone with the power to do the former president serious damage. About five seconds after Mark Meadows quit cooperating with the January 6 Committee, Trump’s PAC donated $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute, the vote suppression org that pays Meadows’s salary. So let’s just note that the timing here for McEntee’s new gig is … interesting.
Second, Trump has made it very clear that he intends to blow up what he calls “the Deep State.” And by that he means the apolitical federal bureaucracy, staffed by career civil servants who can’t be fired based on their political beliefs. In 2020, he issued an executive order abolishing civil service protections for tens of thousands of government employees.
“We need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy or, at a minimum, just want to keep their jobs,” he said at the time. “They want to hold onto their jobs. Congress should pass historic reforms empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent or unnecessary for the job can be told — did you ever hear this — ‘You’re fired, get out, you’re fired.’ [You] have to do it. Deep state. Washington will be an entirely different place.”
President Joe Biden immediately rescinded that order. But it’s very clear that if a Republican comes back to the White House, they’re going to gut the civil service and turn the entire government into a patronage system of people utterly beholden to the president. It’s a disaster in the making — try to imagine the chaos if Republicans were allowed to come in and fire every IRS agent, financial regulator, transportation inspector, and HUD staffer, and replace them with donors’ kids?
TL, DR? This whole thing reeks to high heaven, and it’s scary AF to boot.
Catch Liz Dye on Opening Arguments podcast.
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