Make America Jurassic Again

Stealing from David Frum: It's a real worry if Trump gets back in office because this time, the velociraptors have learned how to turn the doorknobs.

All Presidents face a standard governing problem: how to balance expertise with political control. [John] McEntee’s story exemplifies the price of Trump’s obsession with loyalty, a price that the rest of us paid in the form of poor government performance during a catastrophic pandemic.

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[McEntee] started with Trump during his presidential campaign as his body man. In other words, the guy who carted around Trump’s stuff.

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McEntee’s role offers insights into what a second Trump administration would look like, showing us the type of people Trump would empower when he felt no compulsion to hide his desire to assert absolute political control. A new profile of McEntee in the Atlantic by Jonathan Karl, plus prior work by Jonathan Swann, Dan Diamond and others describe McEntee’s rise to power and his use of that power.

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McEntee was fired from his body man gig during John Kelly’s doomed effort to restore some sense of normalcy to Trump’s White House. A background check revealed that McEntee had failed to disclose income, which turned out to be from gambling winnings. Trump recalled him in January 2020, first to retake his old position, and then to lead the Presidential Personnel Office.

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[A] key aspect of the job is also hiring people with the skills needed to advance the President’s agenda. That implies not just sharing the President’s goals, but also having the expertise to implement them. Hire too many unqualified loyalists and the performance of the government, and the ability to achieve the President’s goals, suffers.

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We don’t expect newly minted college graduates with little relevant experience to take over key roles in important organizations, but this became the norm in Trump’s last year, facilitated by McEntee.

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McEntee was a young unqualified appointee who promoted even younger and less qualified loyalists. Trump, who obsessed over physical appearance of staff, might have approved of another criterion in hiring. According to a former Trump staffer, McEntee picked “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…It was the Rockettes and the Dungeons & Dragons group.”

  Don Moynihan

 Looks like it made Dumpy happy, though.

McEntee told existing appointees across government – that is, people who had stuck with Trump throughout his chaotic reign or chosen to join him at the end of his term – that they would need to sit down for a job interview for a a job they already held. The questions they faced centered on loyalty to Trump, and even aspects of Trump’s agenda that was irrelevant to their actual job. EPA officials found themselves answering questions about their featly to Trump’s Afghanistan withdrawal policy.

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McEntee’s enforcers tracked Trump appointees social media. As part of their interviews, appointees were asked to list all of their present and past social media posts, and warned “it is better not to go through your accounts and delete posts prior to the vetting process as the offending posts are often recoverable.”

 What a chilling effect that must have had. Stalin would have approved.

A surreal example of the social media obsession came when Mark Meadows, the President’s Chief of Staff, was pulled out of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing so one of McEntee’s staff could reveal that a low-level assistant and Taylor Swift fan at HUD had liked a Taylor Swift post that seemed to endorse Biden.

I'm speechless.

(Yes, John McEntee is on the Jan 6 Commission's subpoena list.) 

McEntee installed Trump loyalists as liaisons between agencies and the White House across government. They frequently combined youth, inexperience, pettiness, and radical views. Some examples:

Continue reading.

As a 20-year old that McEntee hired put it: “Only in Trump’s America could I go from working in a gym to working in the White House, because that’s the American dream.”

Be afraid.  Be very afraid. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.