When Donald Trump heard the words he spoke this week to a grieving pregnant widow repeated back to him, even he seemed to grasp how horrific they were.
“Didn't say what that congresswoman said—didn't say it at all," Trump charged Wednesday, his arms crossed defiantly at a White House meeting. "She knows it and she now is not saying it."
She, otherwise known as Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida, was indeed still saying it—that Trump had called the family of fallen soldier Sgt. La David Johnson to say, "he knew what he signed up for ... but when it happens, it hurts anyway." And in Trump’s days-long campaign to discredit the congresswoman’s account, he even claimed he had "proof" that she was wrong.
Since White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later told reporters there was no recording of the call, the only "proof" left would have to come from the other people listening on both ends of the phone line—Trump's aides on one side and friends and family of the widow, Myeshia Johnson, on the other.
Guess what? They both confirmed Wilson's account. When the White House sent chief of staff John Kelly into the briefing room on Thursday to quell the fury Trump had stoked over the last several days, he didn't refute Wilson's story. Instead, Kelly gave an explanation for why Trump had delivered the words Wilson said he did, an apparent attempt by Trump to parrot what Gen. Joe Dunford had told Kelly in 2010 when Dunford informed Kelly that his son had been killed in action in Afghanistan.
"He said, Kel, he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were, because we're at war," Kelly said, recalling that day in 2010 when one of his closest friends showed up on his doorstep in his dress blues to relay the news. "When he died he was surrounded by the best men on this Earth: his friends. That's what the president tried to say to four families the other day."
Kelly's poignant explanation, along with his assertion that such a moment between a president and the family of a fallen soldier, however clumsy, should be "sacred," might have been a moment of national reprieve—an invitation to ponder our common humanity and check our jabs at one another. Might have been. Except that Kelly entirely shattered that opportunity by launching a broadside attack on Rep. Wilson that not only proved to be riddled with lies, but also undercut his entire premise that we as a nation needed to restore a lost sense of decency. In one breath, Kelly yearned for a return to certain sacred ideals while in the next breath he slandered a congresswoman in service of providing cover to his commander in chief—the originator of this entire race to the bottom on Gold Star families. In other words: Do as we say, not as we do.
If Kelly had really wanted to model a moral code, he would have refrained at the outset from his character assassination of Rep. Wilson as a credit-seeking “empty barrel.” The next day, after video surfaced that absolutely destroyed his version of events, he had a chance to apologize or at the very least, correct the record. Instead, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared that Kelly, based on his military service, was beyond reproach.
"If you want to go after General Kelly, that's up to you," she said, rebuffing reporters' inquiries. "If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general I think that's highly inappropriate."
Like everyone who brushes elbows with Trump, John Kelly has become a person of lesser stature in his presence and, in turn, he is serving as a drag on our democratic ideals. Instead of insulating us from the maniac in the White House, he is now a tool of Trump's autocratic tendencies, using his rank and military service as a club to shut down First Amendment inquiry.
Kelly's conduct this week stands in sharp contrast to that of another military veteran, who showed us what it's like to fight for our democracy even in the twilight of his years.
At a speech in Philadelphia Monday, Sen. John McCain warned of the "half-baked, spurious nationalism" of those "who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems."
"We live in a land of ideals, not blood and soil," he declared, decrying a Nazi slogan that was employed by the very same white supremacists Trump designated “very fine people” after they marched in Charlottesville in August.
McCain has his flaws, to be sure, but if Kelly's message this week was chilling, McCain induced chills with his rousing call for us to build upon the foundational principles of this country rather than allowing them to be decimated by unworthy miscreants.
As George W. Bush noted in his own return to the public stage this week, “Bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed."
Bush, speaking Thursday at a New York conference on democracy, was even more pointed than McCain.
“We know that when we lose sight of our ideals," he said, "it is not democracy that has failed; it is the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy.”
Whatever we might think of Bush's presidency, his remarks this week were a welcome rejoinder to the politics of personal attacks, insults, and race baiting that now dominate our White House.
And far from being part of the solution, John Kelly is part of the problem. He is an enabler of the “deranged animal” in the Oval Office—perhaps the most appropriate description yet of the nation’s commander in chief.