The Donald Youth
This Jonathan Karl story, based on interviews with numerous senior Trump administration officials, about what was going on in the White House between the first Trump impeachment trial (the phrase “the first Trump impeachment trial” should be enough to indicate that something may be a bit wrong with our political system at the moment) and the January 6 coup attempt, is just completely bonkers.
I can’t really summarize it because it’s too bizarre and disturbing for any summation. Here are a few quotes:
The office was run by Johnny McEntee. Just 29 when he got the job, he’d come up as Trump’s body guy—the kid who carried the candidate’s bags. One of Trump’s most high-profile Cabinet secretaries described him to me as “a fucking idiot.” But in 2020, his power was undeniable. Trump knew he was the one person willing to do anything Trump wanted. As another senior official told me, “He became the deputy president.”
McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible. They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Thanks to them, in the end, the elusive “adults in the room”—those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies—were silenced or gone. But McEntee was there—bossing around Cabinet secretaries, decapitating the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and forcing officials high and low to state their allegiance to Trump.
When Trump wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, McEntee set up a rogue legal team. This back-channel operation played a previously unknown role in the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the vote. Just days before January 6, McEntee sent Pence’s office an absurd memo making the case that Pence would be following Thomas Jefferson’s example if he used his power to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election.
More than anyone else in the White House, McEntee was Trump’s man through and through—a man who rose to power at precisely the moment when American democracy was falling apart.
Johnny McEntee was literally the 20-something kid who carried Trump’s bags. John Kelly fired him after finding out that the suspiciously large deposits going into his bank account were gambling winnings. Then Kelly was fired, and Trump decided to put McEntee , who had never hired or fired anyone in his life, in charge of re-vetting — and recommending who in this group should be fired for insufficient cult-like loyalty — the entire cadre of 4,000 executive branch political appointments:
McEntee began scouring federal agencies for people who didn’t support all things Trump. Beginning in June 2020—in the middle of both the pandemic and the presidential campaign—the personnel office informed virtually every senior official across the federal government, regardless of how long they had worked in the administration, that they would need to sit down for a job interview.
A president has a right to expect that his political appointees support his policies and will work to carry them out. These are, after all, political appointees. But most of the people McEntee’s team questioned were already devoted to Trump; they were still putting their reputations on the line to work for him three and a half years into his administration. But that wasn’t enough for the loyalty enforcers.
McEntee’s underlings were, for the most part, comically inexperienced. He had staffed his office with very young Trump activists. He had hired his friends, and he had hired young women—as one senior official in the West Wing put it to me, “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,” the official said.
In fact, one McEntee hire was literally a Rockette; she had performed with Radio City Music Hall’s finest in the 2019 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The only work experience listed on her résumé besides a White House internship was a stint as a dance instructor. McEntee also hired Instagram influencers. Camryn Kinsey, for example, was 20 and still in college when McEntee gave her the title of external-relations director. In an interview with the online publication The Conservateur, she said, “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.” (Kinsey went on to work at the pro-Trump One American News Network.)
The interviews with McEntee’s team usually lasted about an hour. They included questions such as “Do you support the policies of the Trump administration and, if so, which ones?” That question was asked of Makan Delrahim, the head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. As the person carrying out the president’s antitrust policies, he found the question strange.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and HUD were asked, “Do you support the president’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan?” It was a bizarre question, given that neither official had anything remotely to do with Afghanistan policy.
And so on.
The culmination of all this is that this ex-college quarterback who’s sole qualification to be doing any government job was his total devotion and loyalty to Trump ended up playing a crucial role in engineering the January coup attempt.
In early November 2020, he installed a conservative activist named Heidi Stirrup as liaison at the DOJ. Stirrup was primarily known as an anti-abortion activist who had worked as a mid-level staffer for Republicans in Congress. She had no legal experience, but she was intensely loyal to Trump—and to McEntee. Her car was easy to spot in the DOJ parking lot; it was covered with Trump bumper stickers—unusual at a department where even the most political of political appointees try to appear to be above the fray.
A few days after the election, in her first full day in the office, she went in to meet a senior official on Attorney General Bill Barr’s team. It didn’t go well. “You need to wake up to the fact this election is being stolen!” she screamed. “It needs to be stopped!” (The Atlantic was not able to reach Stirrup for comment.) . . .
The next time Stirrup came around to berate the senior official, he asked her if she would like to deliver her message directly to the attorney general, and with that he brought her in to see Barr. Most people find Barr intimidating, but not Heidi Stirrup. “The election is being stolen,” she lectured him. “You need better people doing these investigations.” And she told him she had a list of people, presumably provided by McEntee, whom he needed to hire.
Barr later told me he’d never seen this kind of behavior. By the end of the week, he had ordered her banned from the DOJ building. Her pass was deactivated, and security was instructed not to let her in.
This guy will probably be the Chief of Staff in the second Trump administration.