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The only successful coup d’etat to unfold on American soil marks its 123rd anniversary Wednesday, and with this somber memory of the Wilmington Massacre—where an estimated 300 Black Americans were murdered by white supremacists—a poignant reminder is offered: White nationalism remains a deadly scourge that directly undermines democracy, decency, and liberty in the U.S.

In North Carolina in 1898, the political strategy for Democrats of the era was to “redeem North Carolina from Negro domination,” a racist belief widely upheld by party officials and spread by the men they chose to deliver their propaganda.

One of those men was Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate colonel and avowed white supremacist who once served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina.

Waddell was a renowned orator and thus possessed a tool much coveted by Southern Democrats of the day who wished to disseminate their vitriol in hopes of regaining control of North Carolina’s body politic from the reigning Fusionist government.

The Fusion coalition in the state was comprised of Populists and North Carolina Republicans who, unlike their political adversaries, were willing to abide in biracialism.

To disrupt that reign, Waddell and others mobilized whites, held rallies, and led militias of “Red Shirts,” who, as the Zinn Education Project points out, were “basically ruffians on horseback” echoing the Ku Klux Klan.

As the election neared in Wilmington that November, Waddell made open threats in his speeches.

“We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the nearby Cape Fear river with carcasses,” he said in his intimidation campaign aimed at keeping Black Americans from the polls.

During his speech, Red Shirts had taken off on horseback through the region, disrupting Black church services and instilling terror.

“The White Supremacists used an editorial by Alex Manly, the editor of Wilmington’s Black newspaper the Daily Record to stir a firestorm at the time of the elections,” the Zinn Education Project critically points out in its recounting of the day.

Indeed, the editorial by Manly was a scathing response to remarks delivered by a white woman in Georgia at a local Agricultural Society. The woman, identified as Mrs. Felton, advocated for lynching—something the U.S. Senate has still refused to make a federal hate crime—as a means to protect women from Black men.

Manly, outraged, wrote: “Every Negro lynched is called a ‘big burly, black brute,’ when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only ‘black’ and ‘burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is very well known to all.”

“Mrs. Felton must begin at the fountain head if she wishes to purify the stream,” he added. “Teach your men purity. Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture helpless people. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman than for the white man to be intimate with a colored woman.”

After armed Red Shirts stalked Black neighborhoods, the Nov. 8 election ultimately resulted in Democrats returning to power at the state legislative level. But the success of the fusionists at the municipal level persisted and Wilmington’s white mayor, Silas Wright, remained seated.

Waddell had other plans. Joined by 800 whites, he went to the local courthouse just one day after the election to declare Wilmington would “no longer be ruled, and will never be ruled again by men of African origin.”

Then, on this day, 123 years ago, Waddell and his armed mob executed a white supremacist coup in earnest. By morning, Waddell and some 2,000 men assembled at the Black-run Daily Record. For Manly’s editorial, they busted up the establishment, vandalized Manly’s presses, and burned the whole building to the ground.  

It was, as Adrienne LaFrance and Vann Newkirk II wrote for The Atlantic in 2017, “just the beginning of an assault” which by evening, led to the murder of dozens upon dozens of Black people. The attack destroyed lives and livelihoods, upended a thriving community, forced Black Americans to flee or be banished, and only ended with a gun held to Mayor Wright’s head by Waddell.

The aging Confederate colonel installed himself as mayor and by brute force, had ejected White from his post.

This past weekend, The New York Times reported that finally, two Black men killed by the white mob in 1898, Joshua Halsey and Samuel McFarland, finally received proper funerals.

As noted by the Times, the insurrection of 1898 “laid the foundation for the Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement that followed in North Carolina.” For years, Black residents of Wilmington were wrongly portrayed as “gun toting instigators” and much work has been done to see the record corrected.  

The great grandson of one of the Wilmington Massacre’s victims, Joshua Halsey, perhaps summed it up best as he reflected on the need for reconciliation of an ugly past that, incidentally, still has ties to the present.

“The town needs closure,” Hesketh Brown Jr. told The New York Times. “And the truth helps bring closure if we accept the truth.”

In an email to Daily Kos Wednesday night, Rep. Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, reflected on the import of the anniversary and its through-line to today. 

“History that only tells the good stories isn’t history, it’s fantasy. Studying and acknowledging events like the Wilmington Massacre, which was a white supremacist overthrow of a democratically elected government, helps us recognize the insidiousness of the Jim Crow South and how it disenfranchised Black Americans for most of the decades between emancipation and the Civil Rights movement,” Adams said. “In light of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, it’s even more important that we recognize the white supremacist agenda includes the overthrow of democracy itself.”

This post was originally published on this site

The only successful coup d’etat to unfold on American soil marks its 123rd anniversary Wednesday, and with this somber memory of the Wilmington Massacre—where an estimated 300 Black Americans were murdered by white supremacists—a poignant reminder is offered: White nationalism remains a deadly scourge that directly undermines democracy, decency, and liberty in the U.S.

In North Carolina in 1898, the political strategy for Democrats of the era was to “redeem North Carolina from Negro domination,” a racist belief widely upheld by party officials and spread by the men they chose to deliver their propaganda.

One of those men was Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate colonel and avowed white supremacist who once served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina.

Waddell was a renowned orator and thus possessed a tool much coveted by Southern Democrats of the day who wished to disseminate their vitriol in hopes of regaining control of North Carolina’s body politic from the reigning Fusionist government.

The Fusion coalition in the state was comprised of Populists and North Carolina Republicans who, unlike their political adversaries, were willing to abide in biracialism.

To disrupt that reign, Waddell and others mobilized whites, held rallies, and led militias of “Red Shirts,” who, as the Zinn Education Project points out, were “basically ruffians on horseback” echoing the Ku Klux Klan.

As the election neared in Wilmington that November, Waddell made open threats in his speeches.

“We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the nearby Cape Fear river with carcasses,” he said in his intimidation campaign aimed at keeping Black Americans from the polls.

During his speech, Red Shirts had taken off on horseback through the region, disrupting Black church services and instilling terror.

“The White Supremacists used an editorial by Alex Manly, the editor of Wilmington’s Black newspaper the Daily Record to stir a firestorm at the time of the elections,” the Zinn Education Project critically points out in its recounting of the day.

Indeed, the editorial by Manly was a scathing response to remarks delivered by a white woman in Georgia at a local Agricultural Society. The woman, identified as Mrs. Felton, advocated for lynching—something the U.S. Senate has still refused to make a federal hate crime—as a means to protect women from Black men.

Manly, outraged, wrote: “Every Negro lynched is called a ‘big burly, black brute,’ when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only ‘black’ and ‘burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is very well known to all.”

“Mrs. Felton must begin at the fountain head if she wishes to purify the stream,” he added. “Teach your men purity. Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture helpless people. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman than for the white man to be intimate with a colored woman.”

After armed Red Shirts stalked Black neighborhoods, the Nov. 8 election ultimately resulted in Democrats returning to power at the state legislative level. But the success of the fusionists at the municipal level persisted and Wilmington’s white mayor, Silas Wright, remained seated.

Waddell had other plans. Joined by 800 whites, he went to the local courthouse just one day after the election to declare Wilmington would “no longer be ruled, and will never be ruled again by men of African origin.”

Then, on this day, 123 years ago, Waddell and his armed mob executed a white supremacist coup in earnest. By morning, Waddell and some 2,000 men assembled at the Black-run Daily Record. For Manly’s editorial, they busted up the establishment, vandalized Manly’s presses, and burned the whole building to the ground.  

It was, as Adrienne LaFrance and Vann Newkirk II wrote for The Atlantic in 2017, “just the beginning of an assault” which by evening, led to the murder of dozens upon dozens of Black people. The attack destroyed lives and livelihoods, upended a thriving community, forced Black Americans to flee or be banished, and only ended with a gun held to Mayor Wright’s head by Waddell.

The aging Confederate colonel installed himself as mayor and by brute force, had ejected White from his post.

This past weekend, The New York Times reported that finally, two Black men killed by the white mob in 1898, Joshua Halsey and Samuel McFarland, finally received proper funerals.

As noted by the Times, the insurrection of 1898 “laid the foundation for the Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement that followed in North Carolina.” For years, Black residents of Wilmington were wrongly portrayed as “gun toting instigators” and much work has been done to see the record corrected.  

The great grandson of one of the Wilmington Massacre’s victims, Joshua Halsey, perhaps summed it up best as he reflected on the need for reconciliation of an ugly past that, incidentally, still has ties to the present.

“The town needs closure,” Hesketh Brown Jr. told The New York Times. “And the truth helps bring closure if we accept the truth.”

In an email to Daily Kos Wednesday night, Rep. Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, reflected on the import of the anniversary and its through-line to today. 

“History that only tells the good stories isn’t history, it’s fantasy. Studying and acknowledging events like the Wilmington Massacre, which was a white supremacist overthrow of a democratically elected government, helps us recognize the insidiousness of the Jim Crow South and how it disenfranchised Black Americans for most of the decades between emancipation and the Civil Rights movement,” Adams said. “In light of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, it’s even more important that we recognize the white supremacist agenda includes the overthrow of democracy itself.”

This post was originally published on this site

Maine Senator Susan Collins in June 2018 called the previous administration’s family separation policy “traumatizing,” saying children are “innocent victims” and stating that separating them from their families “is contrary to our values in this country.” 

Today, she’s among the dozens of Senate Republicans despicably seeking to block reported settlements from traumatized families who have filed legal action against the federal government. 

Roll Call’s Caroline Simon reports that more than half of the GOP Senate caucus is supporting an amendment to the “must-pass” 2022 defense spending bill that would block the Justice Department from reported settlements. Nearly 30 members support the amendment, including Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Tom Cotton, John Kennedy, Chuck Grassley, and Mitch McConnell. Naturally, the caucus’ press release is filled lies.

“Giving out potentially billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to people who broke federal law to enter the country is outrageous and an insult to the American people,” McConnell said, adding he was “proud” to back the amendment. Cotton claimed the administration wants to “reward” people “who illegally entered our country,” a lie echoed by Kennedy, Mike Lee, and Rick Scott. “Democrats want to give nearly half-a-million dollars to individuals who broke our nation’s laws,” the latter said.

Like I’ve said this week, last week, and for several years now, seeking asylum at a border is legal immigration. They followed the law. Our government at the time did not. “What was illegal was denying these families due process under our asylum laws,” Al Otro Lado Managing Attorney Carol Anne Donohoe tweeted at McConnell on Tuesday. “Asylum seeking is not illegal entry. But you already know that. Gotta drum up that racist base, amirite?” 

Yup. But it’s only the latest GOP-led effort grossly seeking to block any semblance of justice from these families. Early last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican members wrote to President Biden asking him to oppose reported settlements (that letter was similarly filled with lies about “aliens who broke our laws”). To be clear, the president—who during the 2020 campaign called the separations “criminal”—has said on the record that he’s “perfectly comfortable” with settlements (though the amount remains unclear).

“If it saves taxpayer dollars and puts the disastrous history of the previous administration’s use of zero tolerance and family separation behind us, the president is perfectly comfortable with the Department of Justice settling with the individuals and families who are currently in litigation with the U.S. government,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in additional remarks.

Let’s also be clear about why Republicans like Collins said anything critical about the family separation in the first place. It wasn’t because she was very concerned about the abuses happening at the border; it was because of the outraged public response to abuses happening at the border. While Collins might’ve called stealing children from their families “traumatizing,” she refused to support Democrats’ legislation blocking further separations. “In fact, constituents that contact Collins about the policy receive a reply from her office in which she explains her tacit support for the Trump policy,” Daily Kos’ Hunter noted in 2018.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio, who is up for reelection in 2022, once tried to pin the previous president’s policy on former President Obama. “Bible-quoting Marco Rubio defends Trump’s inhumane child-separation policy,” Miami New Times declared at the time. When it comes to Collins, Hunter wrote that “her sternly worded objections mean nothing; she is one of the few hundred people in America able to put an immediate end to it, and she continues to refuse to do so. That is who she really is.” Now Collins is objecting to compensation for the abuses she tolerated. Shame.

This post was originally published on this site

Maine Senator Susan Collins in June 2018 called the previous administration’s family separation policy “traumatizing,” saying children are “innocent victims” and stating that separating them from their families “is contrary to our values in this country.” 

Today, she’s among the dozens of Senate Republicans despicably seeking to block reported settlements from traumatized families who have filed legal action against the federal government. 

Roll Call’s Caroline Simon reports that more than half of the GOP Senate caucus is supporting an amendment to the “must-pass” 2022 defense spending bill that would block the Justice Department from reported settlements. Nearly 30 members support the amendment, including Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Tom Cotton, John Kennedy, Chuck Grassley, and Mitch McConnell. Naturally, the caucus’ press release is filled lies.

“Giving out potentially billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to people who broke federal law to enter the country is outrageous and an insult to the American people,” McConnell said, adding he was “proud” to back the amendment. Cotton claimed the administration wants to “reward” people “who illegally entered our country,” a lie echoed by Kennedy, Mike Lee, and Rick Scott. “Democrats want to give nearly half-a-million dollars to individuals who broke our nation’s laws,” the latter said.

Like I’ve said this week, last week, and for several years now, seeking asylum at a border is legal immigration. They followed the law. Our government at the time did not. “What was illegal was denying these families due process under our asylum laws,” Al Otro Lado Managing Attorney Carol Anne Donohoe tweeted at McConnell on Tuesday. “Asylum seeking is not illegal entry. But you already know that. Gotta drum up that racist base, amirite?” 

Yup. But it’s only the latest GOP-led effort grossly seeking to block any semblance of justice from these families. Early last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican members wrote to President Biden asking him to oppose reported settlements (that letter was similarly filled with lies about “aliens who broke our laws”). To be clear, the president—who during the 2020 campaign called the separations “criminal”—has said on the record that he’s “perfectly comfortable” with settlements (though the amount remains unclear).

“If it saves taxpayer dollars and puts the disastrous history of the previous administration’s use of zero tolerance and family separation behind us, the president is perfectly comfortable with the Department of Justice settling with the individuals and families who are currently in litigation with the U.S. government,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in additional remarks.

Let’s also be clear about why Republicans like Collins said anything critical about the family separation in the first place. It wasn’t because she was very concerned about the abuses happening at the border; it was because of the outraged public response to abuses happening at the border. While Collins might’ve called stealing children from their families “traumatizing,” she refused to support Democrats’ legislation blocking further separations. “In fact, constituents that contact Collins about the policy receive a reply from her office in which she explains her tacit support for the Trump policy,” Daily Kos’ Hunter noted in 2018.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio, who is up for reelection in 2022, once tried to pin the previous president’s policy on former President Obama. “Bible-quoting Marco Rubio defends Trump’s inhumane child-separation policy,” Miami New Times declared at the time. When it comes to Collins, Hunter wrote that “her sternly worded objections mean nothing; she is one of the few hundred people in America able to put an immediate end to it, and she continues to refuse to do so. That is who she really is.” Now Collins is objecting to compensation for the abuses she tolerated. Shame.

This post was originally published on this site

New polling from Monmouth University shows that President Joe Biden’s agenda continues to be popular with Americans despite the wild cries of “socialism” springing up from the Republican Party.

Monmouth writes:

“Support for the Bipartisan Infrastructure deal (BIF), which passed Congress last week and awaits the president’s signature, stands at 65%, down just a few points from prior polls. Support for the still-pending Build Back Better (BBB) plan to expand access to health care, college, paid leave and other services remains steady at 62%. Furthermore, 60% of Americans support the climate change funding part of the BBB bill.”

Since last spring, Biden’s legislative proposals ranging from pandemic relief to the infrastructure and family and climate bills have polled extremely well, typically at 60% or higher.

But given Democrats’ electoral losses last week, the Monmouth polling shows that Biden’s sagging approval ratings haven’t cut into support for his overall agenda. That’s good news, particularly now that Democrats have the infrastructure win in their pocket as they push forward to finalize the Build Back Better bill.

Last week’s elections suggested that, among other things, Democrats must have accomplishments to run on—along with something to show for their unified control of the federal government.

Given some of the takeaways, Democrats already had little choice but to press forward on the bills they have been debating for months. After all, failure to enact an agenda is about the worst possible outcome for a political party in power—even if that agenda fails to garner strong public support. Republicans’ disapprovals during Trump’s tenure peaked at their highest levels in 2017 after they twice failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Although Biden’s approval rating in the poll was eight points underwater at just 42%, the popularity of his agenda remains strong. That suggests Republican attacks (which are all over the place) on both pieces of legislation have failed to get traction. It also suggests Democratic inaction on a popular agenda was likely a bigger drag on Democratic candidates last week than the Democratic agenda itself.

In short, enacting both bills only stands to help Democrats in next year’s midterms.  

This post was originally published on this site

New polling from Monmouth University shows that President Joe Biden’s agenda continues to be popular with Americans despite the wild cries of “socialism” springing up from the Republican Party.

Monmouth writes:

“Support for the Bipartisan Infrastructure deal (BIF), which passed Congress last week and awaits the president’s signature, stands at 65%, down just a few points from prior polls. Support for the still-pending Build Back Better (BBB) plan to expand access to health care, college, paid leave and other services remains steady at 62%. Furthermore, 60% of Americans support the climate change funding part of the BBB bill.”

Since last spring, Biden’s legislative proposals ranging from pandemic relief to the infrastructure and family and climate bills have polled extremely well, typically at 60% or higher.

But given Democrats’ electoral losses last week, the Monmouth polling shows that Biden’s sagging approval ratings haven’t cut into support for his overall agenda. That’s good news, particularly now that Democrats have the infrastructure win in their pocket as they push forward to finalize the Build Back Better bill.

Last week’s elections suggested that, among other things, Democrats must have accomplishments to run on—along with something to show for their unified control of the federal government.

Given some of the takeaways, Democrats already had little choice but to press forward on the bills they have been debating for months. After all, failure to enact an agenda is about the worst possible outcome for a political party in power—even if that agenda fails to garner strong public support. Republicans’ disapprovals during Trump’s tenure peaked at their highest levels in 2017 after they twice failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Although Biden’s approval rating in the poll was eight points underwater at just 42%, the popularity of his agenda remains strong. That suggests Republican attacks (which are all over the place) on both pieces of legislation have failed to get traction. It also suggests Democratic inaction on a popular agenda was likely a bigger drag on Democratic candidates last week than the Democratic agenda itself.

In short, enacting both bills only stands to help Democrats in next year’s midterms.  

This post was originally published on this site

Children can get vaccinated, and hopefully one day babies will too!

This post was originally published on this site

Children can get vaccinated, and hopefully one day babies will too!

This post was originally published on this site

One of the nation’s top officials, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, was fired by former President Donald Trump because internally, he dared to challenge administration policies rife with prejudice and in public, Trump loyalists saw him as a saboteur in their midst, according to a newly released memo.

The memo was released Wednesday by Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, and comes after Karl published an excerpt on Tuesday from his upcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show in The Atlantic.

The memo, like the excerpt, illuminates the fragile teetering of Trump’s presidency into a full-blown paranoid authoritarian state.

Esper was fired, according to the memo, because he (among a dozen or so other reasons) barred the display of a Confederate flag on a military installation and because he “publicly opposed” Trump’s call for troops to clear out protesters outside of the White House.

Esper “consumed” too much of the Defense Department’s time on Russia and was “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion’” at the department while expressing “disinterest” in supporting Trump’s inhumane military transgender ban.

Even now, a year removed from the 2020 election, when one starts to pull at the threads barely holding together the moldering moth-eaten sweater that was Donald Trump’s single-term, impeachment-marred presidency, the discoveries are deeply unsettling.

Trump’s disdain for even a hint of opposition in his ranks is no surprise. But part of what makes the Esper memo so disturbing is its inception and origin.

The memo, and therefore the decision to fire Esper, was authored and engineered, as Karl reports, by John McEntee, a man most Americans might not have known by name during the Trump years and even up until Tuesday, when the select congressional committee investigating the Capitol insurrection subpoenaed McEntee.

So who is John McEntee?

Karl gives McEntee great scrutiny in the excerpt published Tuesday, exposing how he ascended to power, as Karl wrote, just as “American democracy was falling apart.”

McEntee started out as Trump’s body man, following the president around to carry bags or provide other assistance, but he quickly ascended the ranks to become director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, a tremendously powerful and integral position for an otherwise political and professional neophyte.

In the role, the director of that department both vets and hires personnel “including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries and top intelligence officials,” Karl points out. Beyond hiring, the director also has a say in firing.  

The power of the position was so great and McEntee such an unconventionalchoice that even Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff at the time, had his own deputy hauled into a meeting with the president to tell Trump he might be making a mistake.

Trump, true to form, was adamant that he wanted McEntee. And as it so often goes with both aspiring and experienced ‘yes men,’ McEntee, at 29 years old, found himself quickly ushered into the directorship.

What followed, according to Karl, was a swift pursuit by McEntee to root out anyone emitting even so much as a whiff of disloyalty to or independence from Trump. He committed to this mission with assistance from a team largely comprised of inexperienced, young, and attractive women—along with men McEntee deemed unthreatening to his pursuit of those women.

As time marched on, McEntee’s influence inside the administration flourished and so began the sequence of events that would lead to Esper’s termination.

McEntee eventually tapped Josh Whitehouse, a 25-year-old who once served as a coalition coordinator for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Whitehouse was elevated, despite a dearth of experience, from the campaign to an assistant role inside of the Department of Agriculture in 2017. But that stint lasted just nine months and as the election loomed in 2020, McEntee called him up to serve as the administration’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

As a liaison, Whitehouse could not fire anyone directly, but he could do McEntee’s bidding—and that bidding he did as he helped the personnel office last October compose “a series of memos identifying nearly two dozen Pentagon officials they thought should be fired, each outlining transgressions allegedly made against Trump,” Karl wrote.

What followed was the Esper memo and with that advice to Trump, the former defense secretary was abruptly removed and replaced with Christopher Miller.

Miller’s senior adviser, Douglas Macgregor, was also selected by McEntee.

McEntee started his professional career as a production assistant for Fox News. He volunteered on Trump’s first presidential campaign and became the president’s body man. That was the extent of his governmental experience. And to boot, he only lasted a short while during that first go-round in the administration because he was fired. Investigators found his rampant gambling debts were a security threat.

But in January 2020, Trump’s reelection campaign scooped their yes man up.

And within a year (and just five days before the insurrection), it was McEntee who sent a text message to then-Vice President Mike Pence offering him bullet points—dripping in falsities and against White House counsel advice—on how Pence could “use his position” to help Trump win and effectively overturn the electoral results.

Karl reports that McEntee still “remains in close contact with Trump” and spent the summer at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, club volunteering with the former president’s political operations.

McEntee, if he complies, may find himself back in Washington soon. The January 6th Committee subpoenaed McEntee Tuesday, seeking records plus a deposition about what he knows of or heard when he stood in the Oval Office with Trump, Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, and campaign counsel Justin Clark as they gamed out an audit of the count in Georgia.

McEntee is scheduled to go before the committee by Dec. 15 and lawmakers have set Nov. 23 as a deadline for McEntee to respond to the subpoena.

This post was originally published on this site

One of the nation’s top officials, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, was fired by former President Donald Trump because internally, he dared to challenge administration policies rife with prejudice and in public, Trump loyalists saw him as a saboteur in their midst, according to a newly released memo.

The memo was released Wednesday by Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, and comes after Karl published an excerpt on Tuesday from his upcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show in The Atlantic.

The memo, like the excerpt, illuminates the fragile teetering of Trump’s presidency into a full-blown paranoid authoritarian state.

Esper was fired, according to the memo, because he (among a dozen or so other reasons) barred the display of a Confederate flag on a military installation and because he “publicly opposed” Trump’s call for troops to clear out protesters outside of the White House.

Esper “consumed” too much of the Defense Department’s time on Russia and was “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion’” at the department while expressing “disinterest” in supporting Trump’s inhumane military transgender ban.

Even now, a year removed from the 2020 election, when one starts to pull at the threads barely holding together the moldering moth-eaten sweater that was Donald Trump’s single-term, impeachment-marred presidency, the discoveries are deeply unsettling.

Trump’s disdain for even a hint of opposition in his ranks is no surprise. But part of what makes the Esper memo so disturbing is its inception and origin.

The memo, and therefore the decision to fire Esper, was authored and engineered, as Karl reports, by John McEntee, a man most Americans might not have known by name during the Trump years and even up until Tuesday, when the select congressional committee investigating the Capitol insurrection subpoenaed McEntee.

So who is John McEntee?

Karl gives McEntee great scrutiny in the excerpt published Tuesday, exposing how he ascended to power, as Karl wrote, just as “American democracy was falling apart.”

McEntee started out as Trump’s body man, following the president around to carry bags or provide other assistance, but he quickly ascended the ranks to become director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, a tremendously powerful and integral position for an otherwise political and professional neophyte.

In the role, the director of that department both vets and hires personnel “including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries and top intelligence officials,” Karl points out. Beyond hiring, the director also has a say in firing.  

The power of the position was so great and McEntee such an unconventionalchoice that even Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff at the time, had his own deputy hauled into a meeting with the president to tell Trump he might be making a mistake.

Trump, true to form, was adamant that he wanted McEntee. And as it so often goes with both aspiring and experienced ‘yes men,’ McEntee, at 29 years old, found himself quickly ushered into the directorship.

What followed, according to Karl, was a swift pursuit by McEntee to root out anyone emitting even so much as a whiff of disloyalty to or independence from Trump. He committed to this mission with assistance from a team largely comprised of inexperienced, young, and attractive women—along with men McEntee deemed unthreatening to his pursuit of those women.

As time marched on, McEntee’s influence inside the administration flourished and so began the sequence of events that would lead to Esper’s termination.

McEntee eventually tapped Josh Whitehouse, a 25-year-old who once served as a coalition coordinator for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Whitehouse was elevated, despite a dearth of experience, from the campaign to an assistant role inside of the Department of Agriculture in 2017. But that stint lasted just nine months and as the election loomed in 2020, McEntee called him up to serve as the administration’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

As a liaison, Whitehouse could not fire anyone directly, but he could do McEntee’s bidding—and that bidding he did as he helped the personnel office last October compose “a series of memos identifying nearly two dozen Pentagon officials they thought should be fired, each outlining transgressions allegedly made against Trump,” Karl wrote.

What followed was the Esper memo and with that advice to Trump, the former defense secretary was abruptly removed and replaced with Christopher Miller.

Miller’s senior adviser, Douglas Macgregor, was also selected by McEntee.

McEntee started his professional career as a production assistant for Fox News. He volunteered on Trump’s first presidential campaign and became the president’s body man. That was the extent of his governmental experience. And to boot, he only lasted a short while during that first go-round in the administration because he was fired. Investigators found his rampant gambling debts were a security threat.

But in January 2020, Trump’s reelection campaign scooped their yes man up.

And within a year (and just five days before the insurrection), it was McEntee who sent a text message to then-Vice President Mike Pence offering him bullet points—dripping in falsities and against White House counsel advice—on how Pence could “use his position” to help Trump win and effectively overturn the electoral results.

Karl reports that McEntee still “remains in close contact with Trump” and spent the summer at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, club volunteering with the former president’s political operations.

McEntee, if he complies, may find himself back in Washington soon. The January 6th Committee subpoenaed McEntee Tuesday, seeking records plus a deposition about what he knows of or heard when he stood in the Oval Office with Trump, Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, and campaign counsel Justin Clark as they gamed out an audit of the count in Georgia.

McEntee is scheduled to go before the committee by Dec. 15 and lawmakers have set Nov. 23 as a deadline for McEntee to respond to the subpoena.