It’s
Time for the Former General John Kelly to Speak Out About Trump’s Views on the
Military
By John Cassidy
September 5, 2020
John Kelly appears to be in a unique position to
confirm whether the President called U.S service members who died in combat
“losers” and “suckers.”
It’s been two days
since The Atlantic published an article claiming
that Donald Trump had called U.S. service
members who died in combat “losers” and “suckers,” and the uproar over the
story hasn’t relented. Other news outlets, including Fox News, have confirmed
various parts of the story, while some current and former members of the Trump
Administration have called parts of it false. The best way to resolve the
controversy would be for John Kelly, the highly decorated military
veteran who served as Trump’s chief of staff, from 2017 to 2019, to say
publicly what he knows. He ought to do this without hesitation.
So
far, Kelly hasn’t commented on The Atlantic’s story, even
though he features in it so prominently that Trump suggested on Friday
that Kelly might have been one of its sources, who weren’t named. The former
four-star general was with the President in Paris, in November, 2018, when
Trump abruptly cancelled a visit to
the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial, in Belleau, blaming poor
weather. After Trump decided not to go to the cemetery, Kelly stood in for him
as a representative of the Administration.
On
the face of things, Kelly would be in a unique position to vouch for, or knock
down, a key passage of The Atlantic’s story, which reads, “In
a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit,
Trump said, ‘Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.’ ”
In a separate conversation on the same trip to France, The Atlantic’s story
reports, Trump referred to some of the U.S. marines who are buried at the
French cemetery “as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.”
Kelly
hasn’t denied The Atlantic’s story, but neither has he
publicly confirmed it. According to a report by Annie
Karni, a White House correspondent for the Times, he “has told
associates that a retired four-star general should not come out against a
sitting president in the heat of a political campaign.” Karni also reported
that a close associate of Kelly’s, Anthony C. Zinni, a retired four-star Marine
Corps general, said, “He wants to avoid taking a position that might be
perceived as political. I also think he takes to heart the commitment to
confidentiality in matters related to their interaction with the president.”
Keeping
the military out of politics and following through on a commitment of
confidentiality are both commendable goals, and, in normal times, they might be
enough to warrant Kelly’s silence. But these aren’t normal times, and this
isn’t a normal President. Since entering the White House, Trump has repeatedly flouted
the Constitution by defying congressional subpoenas, obstructing
special-counsel investigations, and claiming that he has the power to deploy
troops in American cities without the approval of governors. Like all members
of the military and government officials, Kelly swore to defend the
Constitution against all enemies, “foreign and domestic,” when he joined the
U.S. Marine Corps, in 1970. In addition to creating virtually unprecedented
political strife, Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, now stands accused of scorning
the roughly 1.3 million active-duty members of the U.S. military, plus the more
than eight hundred thousand people who serve in the reserves, and the roughly
eighteen million veterans.
If
Kelly can confirm key elements of The Atlantic’s story, he
surely owes it to these current and former service members, and to the rest of
the country, to stand up and do so. If he can’t confirm some of the
allegations, he should still come forward and speak about Trump’s attitude
toward the military. He could follow the example of John Bolton, Trump’s former
national-security adviser, who was also on the 2018 trip to Paris. Referring to
the offensive comments about the American war dead that Trump allegedly made,
Bolton told the Times,
“I didn’t hear that. I’m not saying he didn’t say them later in the day or
another time, but I was there for that discussion.” In an interview with
Bloomberg News, Bolton said, “I have not heard anybody say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t
sound like the Donald Trump I know.’ ” Bolton also said, “I don’t think he
really holds anybody in high regard except his family.”
As
Kelly has maintained his silence, Trump and his associates have been pushing
back aggressively against the story. On Friday, Kayleigh McEnany, the White House
press secretary, accused The
Atlantic of “peddling conspiracy-laden propaganda.” On Twitter, one of
McEnany’s predecessors, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who flew to Paris with Trump in
2018, called the story “BS”
and added, “I was actually there and one of the people part of the
discussion—this never happened.” Another former Trump aide, Jordan Karem, said that the story
was “not even close to being factually accurate.”
Meanwhile,
a number of other media organizations said they had independently confirmed
various elements of The Atlantic’s story, including the
remarks about “losers” that Trump was reported to have made in Paris. Citing a
“senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a
senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments,” James
LaPorta, of the Associated Press, wrote, “The defense officials said Trump made
the comments as he begged off visiting the cemetery outside Paris during a
meeting following his presidential daily briefing on the morning of Nov. 10,
2018.” The A.P. story goes on: “Staffers from the National Security Council and
the Secret Service told Trump that rainy weather made helicopter travel to the
cemetery risky, but they could drive there. Trump responded by saying he didn’t
want to visit the cemetery because it was ‘filled with losers,’ the official
said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not
authorized to discuss it publicly.”
Jennifer
Griffin, a national-security correspondent for Fox News, cited in her report a former
Administration official who was on the trip to Paris with Trump. This person
said that Trump cancelled the trip to the French cemetery because he was mad at
Emmanuel Macron, the French President. Reporting on other sets of conversations
between the President and his aides, but quoting the same official, Griffin
said that Trump remarked, of the Vietnam War, “It was a stupid war. Anyone who
went was a sucker,” and said of American veterans generally, “What’s in it for
them? They don’t make any money.”
According
to The Atlantic, “What was in it for them?” was the question Trump
asked Kelly on Memorial Day, in 2017, during a visit to Arlington Cemetery, the
final resting place of Kelly’s son, Robert, a first lieutenant in the Marine
Corps, who was killed in Afghanistan, in 2010. Citing sources close to
Kelly, The Atlantic said that Kelly initially believed Trump
was “making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer
force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand
non-transactional life choices.”
Kelly
clearly does. He retired from the military in January, 2016, after a
forty-five-year career that included three tours of duty in Iraq and culminated
in him serving as head of the U.S. Southern Command. That amounts to a great
deal of service to the United States, but Kelly can do for the country one more
vital act. He should speak out.