![]() It was January 2020, and he wouldn’t be just a body guy for long. After Kelly himself was fired, McEntee returned to his old spot outside the Oval. It turned out that the money was from gambling winnings. He was fired by then–Chief of Staff John Kelly after a long-delayed FBI background check revealed that he had deposited suspiciously large sums of money into his bank account. In March 2018, it looked for a moment like his Washington career was over. During the first 14 months of the Trump presidency, McEntee did what he had done during the campaign: He carried Trump’s bags.Īdam Serwer: If you didn’t vote for Trump, your vote is fraudulent A former quarterback for the University of Connecticut, he was good-looking and tall-but not too tall, about an inch shorter than Trump. ![]() When Trump became president, McEntee had a workspace outside the Oval Office-right against the curved wall. ![]() McEntee was one of the first full-time staffers on the campaign, and he went everywhere Trump went. He identified himself as Trump’s “trip director” and gave me a tour of the campaign headquarters. McEntee was polite, earnest, and eager to please. I first met Johnny McEntee when I visited Trump Tower in 2015, not long after Trump announced he was running for president. 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. 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. This back-channel operation played a previously unknown role in the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the vote. When Trump wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, McEntee set up a rogue legal team. 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. 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. They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible. As another senior official told me, “He became the deputy president.” ![]() Trump knew he was the one person willing to do anything Trump wanted. One of Trump’s most high-profile Cabinet secretaries described him to me as “a fucking idiot.” But in 2020, his power was undeniable. Just 29 when he got the job, he’d come up as Trump’s body guy-the kid who carried the candidate’s bags. (Many sources for this story asked to remain anonymous so they could talk about sensitive personnel issues.) Some Trump aides privately compared the PPO to the East German Stasi or even the Gestapo-always on the lookout for traitors within. During the final year of the Trump administration, that office was transformed into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence. Those enforcers-including the eagle-eyed official who had first spotted the offending “like”-worked for the Presidential Personnel Office, a normally under-the-radar group responsible for the hiring and firing of the roughly 4,000 political appointees in the executive branch. To the enforcers of Trumpian loyalty, this was a sign of treachery in the ranks. Never mind that nearly 3 million other people had liked the post or that the young woman was a Taylor Swift fan who liked just about everything Swift had ever posted. This post is adapted from Karl’s forthcoming book. ![]()
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