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Remember Johnny McEntee, the poster boy for the Trump administration’s vast wasteland of unqualified morons nudging President Brainworms to tear himself away from “Fox & Friends” long enough to sign orders with insane goals like “Executive Directive Banning All Democrats From Pooping in Toilets” or whatever? The twentysomething body man for Trump who got perp-walked out of the White House because he turned out to be a degenerate gambler, then got hired back to oversee a political purge of the executive branch?
ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl two years ago published a bugfuck insane book about the bugfuck insane last few weeks of the Trump administration. McEntee was a major character, and Karl portrayed him as a sociopathic student with a raging case of senioritis who decides to spend the end of his high school career pulling hilarious pranks like murdering the principal and setting the school on fire.
Now Karl has returned with yet another bugfuck insane book chronicling those weeks, with the proviso that McEntee’s role “was even greater than I had realized.” Really? What could be greater than a 29-year-old former college football quarterback with zero legal training or experience in foreign policy getting the secretary of Defense fired and writing legal memos assuring the actual lawyers on Mike Pence’s staff that contrary to what literally all the case law and common sense suggested, the vice president did indeed have the power to unilaterally overturn the election?
Axios had previously reported that it was McEntee who gave Douglas Macgregor, a right-wing loon McEntee hired to be the chief adviser to Defense Sec Esper’s replacement Christopher Miller, four bullet points to accomplish in the last few weeks before Trump left office:
· Pull American forces out of Afghanistan.
· Pull American forces out of Iraq and Syria.
· Complete the withdrawal of American forces from Germany (!).
· Pull American forces out of Africa.
Sure, nothing major, just re-orient American foreign policy in two months with no input from anyone else in government. Great idea.
In his new book (Wonkette cut link!), Karl gives the heretofore-unpublished account of what happened next:
Three days after Macgregor arrived at the Pentagon, he called McEntee and told him he couldn’t accomplish any of the items on their handwritten to-do list without a signed order from the president.
“Hey, they’re not going to do anything we want, or the president wants, without a directive,” Macgregor told him, emphasizing the need for an official White House order signed by Trump. The Pentagon’s stonewalling made sense, of course: You don’t make major changes to America’s global defense posture based on a glorified Post-it note from the president’s body guy.
Douglas Macgregor hates America, obviously.
Macgregor told McEntee to write up an order focusing on just the first bullet point — withdrawal from Afghanistan — but of course any order more high-level than “bring Donald Trump 187 Diet Cokes a day” was more than McEntee was qualified to write:
“I was called on the phone by one of McEntee’s staffers who was having trouble formatting the order and getting the language straight,” Macgregor recalled. The retired colonel told the thirty-year-old staffer to open a cabinet, find an old presidential decision memorandum, and copy it.
Easy enough. The duo wrote up the order, had the president sign it, and sent it over to Kash Patel, the new acting defense secretary’s chief of staff.
What followed was various high-level officials — Miller, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, low-level functionaries of that nature — getting together to ask each other, basically, What the fuck? They even briefly entertained the possibility that McEntee had forged Trump’s signature on the order using an autopen.
So the officials went looking for Trump and found him where he was spending all his time after the election: his private dining room, watching Fox and throwing ketchup against the walls. After explaining that an order abandoning Afghanistan could not be executed without a lot more input and legal advice from across the government, Trump rescinded the order, presumably because doing all that legalistic voodoo sounded like work and “Outnumbered” was about to come on.
No, really:
[T]he episode demonstrated once again that the president of the United States couldn’t get the people he appointed to carry out his policies because he couldn’t be bothered to learn how to implement them. As soon as he realized an Afghanistan withdrawal would require more work than having McEntee scribble up a note, he dropped it entirely.
Johnny McEntee has since landed at Project 2025, the organization dedicated to staffing the next Trump administration with thousands upon thousands of Johnny McEntees who will carry out Trump’s orders without questioning minor details like their legality.
We apologize for writing something earnest, but, you know, Jesus hopped-up Christ.
We don’t know who funds Project 2025, but Project Wonkette Writes Vulgar Words About Project 2025 is funded by your generous donations!
