Donald Trump’s deep state purge has gone completely off the rails
Whatever your practical definition of a “Never Trumper” is these days it needs to include anyone who is unwilling to lie or break the law for Donald Trump. Apolitical (or non-political) entities like Marie Yovanovich, Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman were, in the parlance of Trump and his drooling, low-information base of cretins, Never Trumpers. They became Never Trumpers when they told the truth, when they did their jobs.
It makes no difference if you are a Republican who was appointed by Trump either. You are a Never Trumper — even then — if you are unwilling to lie or break the law or both in the service of Trump. There are, therefore, a plethora of men and women in the State Department, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department and the other eleven or so secretariats that compose the United States cabinet who are Never Trumpers. And they need to be rooted out. That’s where Johnny McEntee comes in.
Johnny McEntee’s job is a simple one. Identify the Never Trumpers, get rid of them and replace them with Trump loyalists. The point to this exercise is part of an overall plan for Trump and his pirate ship to take over the United States government by attrition, to make it one big happy Trumper camp. Imagine the Department of State, for example, populated by attendees of one of Trump’s Nuremberg-style rallies. Sickening, is it not?
McEntee, 29, started life in Trump World as a body man, resigned (or was fired) under John Kelly because of a security clearance issue. Security clearances used to be shockingly easy to come by. I got one when I was 26. Even in the post-9/11 world it’s still not that hard. All you have to do is tell the truth and do a lot of paperwork, a big ask for a Trump man. Apparently telling the truth for Johnny McEntee included having to talk about gambling debts. An understandable embarrassment, but in the criminal world of Trump and his usual thugs hardly worth talking about. Now he’s back, and his job is to meet with liaisons from various departments and find out who’s loyal and who isn’t. It’s an alarmingly Orwellian job, but then it’s an alarmingly Orwellian world.
The United States Civil Service used to be completely apolitical. I was a civil servant in the Reagan years and I cannot recall a single time when my or anyone’s political affiliation made the smallest difference to anyone. A lot of people in the government hated Reagan. Few cared, and if they did, there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it.
Johnny McEntee’s job is to change all that. He is the new commissar of Trumpian orthodoxy. It is a horrible development, one that cannot be overstressed. The aim is to transfer allegiance of the governmental rank and file from the United States to Trump. It is the ultimate rape of democracy in the reign of a child-raping monster.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.