This Vanity Faire article “You’re Telling Me That Thing Is Forged?”: The Inside Story of How Trump’s “Body Guy” Tried and Failed to Order a Massive Military Withdrawal lays out the insane plan to withdraw troops from around the world in the last lame duck days of the Trump administration spearheaded by Johnny McEntee whose main job at the White House was “vetting, hiring, and firing of the four thousand political appointees who serve in the executive branch” and his main criteria was fidelity to Trump.
The lame duck period of the Trump administration they used the vacuum following the firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other top officials to push an insanely dangerous agenda.
Before leaving for the Pentagon, Macgregor sat down in McEntee’s office to go over the acting defense secretary’s sweeping agenda for the final seventy-three days of the lame-duck period before Joe Biden would be sworn into office. As first reported by Axios, on a piece of paper, McEntee jotted down four quick bullet points that, if carried out, would represent a dramatic shift in the global order:
- Get us out of Afghanistan.
- Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
- Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
- Get us out of Africa.
The January 6 Committee’s investigation unearthed the extraordinary story of what happened next—but the information didn’t make it into any of the committee’s hearings or its final report.
McEntee ended up drafting a Directive for the President to sign that included withdrawal from Afghanistan by January 15 — 5 days before Trump left office — and Somalia by December 31, 2020.
Fortunately when this Directive actually reached the military command instead of following it they demanded to know who had advised this and found that no one in the usual chain of military or civilian command and advised or reviewed it.
O’Brien and Cipollone explained to [the President] that such an order should go through some sort of process, and that an abrupt movement of so many US troops would be dangerous and unwise without proper planning. At the very least, they told him, such an order should be reviewed by White House lawyers.
“I said this would be very bad,” O’Brien recalled telling Trump. “Our position is that because it didn’t go through any proper process—the lawyers hadn’t cleared it, the staff [secretary] hadn’t cleared it, NSC [National Security Council] hadn’t cleared it—that it’s our position that the order is null and void.”
According to O’Brien, the president didn’t object.
But McEntee is in prison for this right? Right? Of course not he’s working to prep a staff list for Trump’s next term.
McEntee will play a vital role supporting the personnel pillar of Project 2025. Embracing the motto that “personnel is policy,” Project 2025 is launching the database to collect résumés and vet thousands of potential applicants in advance of Jan. 20, 2025, when the next president takes office.
Organized by Heritage, Project 2025 is more than 50 of the nation’s leading conservative groups joining forces to make sure the next conservative president is ready on Day One.
It should be clear to everyone that as much damage as Trump caused internally and externally to the United States it was mostly by accident and chaos caused by ignorance and stupidity. But there are people with plans or active and aggressive evil for his next term after seeing his first term as a wasted opportunity.
The potential damage is unthinkable and America cannot allow this to happen.