gracchusdixit

Little more than a month ago, Congressman Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois criticized Donald Trump’s chief of staff, former Marine Corps general John Kelly, for refusing to lift a finger to stop the deportation of nearly a million undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children.  In a moment of disappointed anguish, Gutiérrez remarked that Kelly was “a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear”.  An avalanche of outrage and repudiation immediately came crashing down around the congressman’s head from those on both right and left, many proclaiming Kelly to be a “hero,” whose behavior should and could not responsibly be questioned.

Now, however, it appears that Congressman Gutiérrez was right after all.

Two days ago, John Kelly strode to the podium in the briefing room of the White House to defend Donald Trump’s phone call to the family of a soldier killed two weeks ago in the African nation of Niger.  That call was made, after much delay and public pressure, all the while the soldier’s wife and parents were on the way to take possession of his remains.  In the car was their congresswoman, a Florida Democrat named Frederica Wilson, who heard the conversation while it was conducted by speakerphone.  Appalled by what she heard, she later described the president’s remarks to the family as sarcastic and callous.  It scarcely needs saying that Trump immediately accused her of lying, and did so both in person and on Twitter.  Nevertheless, the congresswoman refused to back down, and just hours after Trump’s denials, her version of events was confirmed by the family.

When John Kelly addressed the White House press corps, he did not even try to deny that Trump had said what he said.  Instead, he tried to explain it away.  He began by recounting gratuitous and grizzly details of how the bodies of dead soldiers are packed in ice and brought home and then went on to describe how he learned of his own son’s death in Iraq.  Many have praised this part of Kelly’s comments as being deeply heartfelt.  This is a misreading of what he was really up to.  John Kelly was trying to distract us from the facts, using the oldest rhetorical trick in the world—the substitution of an emotional argument for a rational one.

The cynicism behind his sanctimony became instantly apparent when he took an oblique swipe at Barack Obama for writing, rather than calling, to console him for the loss of his son.  Even worse, he insinuated that the “gold star” Khan family had violated something “sacred” by appearing at the Democratic convention to assail Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants.  This led him to muse nostalgically for the loss of other things that were “sacred” when he was growing up, including “the dignity of life,” the “honor of women,” and “religion”.  In this walk down memory lane, Kelly revealed himself to be as retrograde and backward looking as the man he serves.

The worst part of Kelly’s performance came at the end, when he attacked Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, all the while refusing to mention her name:  “It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation.  Absolutely stuns me.”  He then called Wilson an “empty barrel” in a “long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise”.

Never for a moment did John Kelly pause to ask himself why Congresswoman Wilson was in the car in the first place or why the family might have wanted her to hear the call.  She was there, not as an “empty barrel,” but as a friend, who had known the fallen soldier since the time he was a child.  Nor did Kelly ever consider the possibility that it is up to the grieving family, to the wife and parents who suffered the loss, to decide whether such a conversation is “sacred”.  It is not John Kelly’s business to make such a determination, and it certainly isn’t Donald Trump’s.

It got even worse.  Kelly told a derogatory tale about Frederica Wilson’s appearance at the dedication of an FBI building in Miami, the impropriety of which he also judged to be “stunning”.  Unfortunately for Kelly, his story of what actually occurred at that dedication turned out to be completely false.

More troubling still is that Kelly’s assault on Frederica Wilson is part of a pattern.  When he was criticized by Luis Gutiérrez a month ago, he said:  “As far as the congressman and other irresponsible members of Congress are concerned, they have the luxury of saying what they want, as they do nothing and have almost no responsibility.”  Put aside the fact that Gutiérrez, far from “doing nothing,” is one of the most stalwart and effective defenders of minority rights in the country.  It would seem that, to John Kelly, members of Congress, particularly when they are women or people of color, deserve nothing but contempt.

Nor does his contempt end there.  When he finished his attack  on Frederica Wilson, Kelly refused to take questions from any member of the press who did not personally know a “gold star” family.  Thus, Kelly placed himself on a pedestal of moral superiority, immune to questions or criticism.  This stance was reinforced the next day, when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared that it would be “highly inappropriate” for the press to challenge a four-star Marine Corps general.

We have been told for months that John Kelly is one of the “adults in the room,” whose presence in the Trump administration may save us from the president’s worst and most impetuous impulses.  We have also been told that he is a man of uncommon honor and decency, who has decided to grit his teeth and serve this president to protect the country.  This narrative was never entirely plausible.  Its plausibility is now entirely gone.

We can, and should, respect John Kelly for his military service.  We can, and should, honor and lament the loss of his son.  But that does not give John Kelly a lifetime pass; it does not immunize him against honest questions and fair criticism.

John Kelly did not have to go before the cameras to defend Donald Trump.  There is nothing in his job description that required it.  Either he was ordered to do so and acquiesced, or he made the choice willingly.  Either he is not the man of courageous principle that he is so often made out to be, or he is as unprincipled as the man he serves.

It has frequently been observed that those who enter Donald Trump’s orbit are eventually dragged down to his level, only to find their reputations in tatters.  It now appears that John Kelly may have been there from the start.   This week, we learned that Luis Gutiérrez was right.  John Kelly’s decision to serve Donald Trump is “a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear”.