Goodbye, John Kelly.

John Kelly Was a Bully, Bigot, and Liar for Trump. Goodbye and Good Riddance.
https://theintercept.com/2018/12/09/john-kelly-was-a-bully-bigot-and-liar-for-trump-goodbye-and-good-riddance/

Goodbye, John Kelly.

<<snip>>

That was a period in which political pundits and correspondents also believed the retired four-star general to be a “great guy.” Remember how his appointment, as replacement for the hapless Republican operative Reince Preibus, was greeted by the liberal press? Kelly, we were told, would be the “adult in the room”; he would rein in a brash and belligerent commander-in-chief.

The New York Times called the former Marine commander a “beacon of discipline” who would be “unafraid to challenge” the president. The Washington Post said he would “bring some plain-spoken discipline to an often chaotic West Wing.” Axios listed him as a key member of the “Committee to Save America.” Then there was my favorite headline, from Bloomberg News, on August 6, 2017: “New Chief of Staff Kelly Moves Quickly to Tame Trump’s Tweets.” (How did that work out?)

It was all a bunch of nonsense from lazy reporters and commentators who should have known better. Kelly, lest we forget, arrived at the White House from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where he had quickly and proudly built a reputation “as one of the most aggressive enforcers of immigration law in recent American history,” to quote from a scathing evaluation of his six-month tenure in charge of DHS by the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer. On Kelly’s watch, wrote Blitzer, “immigration arrests in the U.S. increased by forty per cent and DHS became one of the few branches of the federal government that has been both willing and able to execute Trump’s policy priorities.”

In March 2017, while defending Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’, Kelly had threatened to walk out of a meeting with Arab-American and Latino groups in Michigan. In April 2017, in a speech in Washington D.C., the DHS Secretary had told members of Congress to either change the country’s immigration laws or “shut up and support the men and women on the front lines.” In May 2017, at a Coast Guard ceremony, the retired general was caught on a hot mic telling Trump, who was holding a ceremonial sword, that he should “use that on the press, sir.”

So why did anyone with functioning eyes or ears assume he would do anything different at the White House? Why did political and media elites pretend he would be a sober and moderate figure, a check or restraint on the president, rather than Trump’s nasty and brutish mini-me?

<<snip>>