Trump Starts Purge with Midnight Truth Social Firing of Chef José Andrés and General Mark Milley
Former President Joe Biden greeted President Donald Trump at the White House in advance of Monday’s inauguration with a conciliatory gesture, telling him and first lady Melania Trump: “Welcome home.”
Trump ended his first day back in that home by posting a sneering message boasting of how his team was hunting down hundreds of Biden appointees to throw out of office.
“Our first day in the White House is not over yet!” Trump wrote, in a Truth Social post shortly after midnight. “My Presidential Personnel Office is actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.”
Trump reserved particular scorn for four appointees who he called out by name: José Andrés, the revered Spanish-American chef who founded the World Central Kitchen and who Biden appointed to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition; Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who sat on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council; Brian Hook, a diplomat and professor who served as a trustee of the Wilson Center for Scholars; and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor who served on the President’s export council.
“YOU’RE FIRED!” Trump told the four, using his reality show catchphrase from The Apprentice.
He wrote that his social media post sufficiently amounted to an “Official Notice of Dismissal.”
What Trump left out was that Hook, a key foreign policy operative during Trump’s first term, was not a Biden appointee.
It was Trump who elevated him to the Wilson Center role after he served as the president’s U.S. special representative for Iran during his first term.
Hook also worked for Trump’s former Secretaries of State Mike Pompeo and Rex Tillerson at Foggy Bottom.
By all appearances, he had remained on good terms with Trump’s team, too, as CNN and Politico reported after the election that he was helping out with transition efforts.
Then there’s the matter of Milley, the retired general who was the presiding officer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the final year and change of Trump’s first term.
His falling out with the president is well documented: Trump said he should be executed for making a phone call—authorized by Trump administration officials—to Chinese military leaders to assure them that the United States remained stable in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riots.
Biden issued a preemptive pardon of Milley shortly before leaving office in order to guard against the most severe forms of retaliation.
Speaking to lawmakers at a Capitol Hill luncheon on Monday, Trump responded to the pardon with indignity, claiming Milley is “very, very guilty of very bad crimes.”
“Why are we trying to help a guy like Milley?” he asked.
Later in the day, Trump ordered Milley’s portrait removed from the Pentagon.
