The president is a hard man to serve:
President Trump was in an especially ornery mood after staff members gently suggested he refrain from injecting politics into day-to-day issues of governing after last month’s raucous rally in Arizona, and he responded by lashing out at the most senior aide in his presence.
It happened to be his new chief of staff, John F. Kelly.
Mr. Kelly, the former Marine general brought in five weeks ago as the successor to Reince Priebus, reacted calmly, but he later told other White House staff members that he had never been spoken to like that during 35 years of serving his country. In the future, he said, he would not abide such treatment, according to three people familiar with the exchange.
I will be mildly surprised if Kelly lasts to the end of the month. I don’t see the point in what he is trying to do, and I doubt he’ll be able to see any point in it for much longer. He can’t save this administration or even keep it afloat. And I don’t think Trump will stop disrespecting him in front of the staff, so unless he enjoys being treated like Reince Priebus he’s going to take a walk or get himself fired before too much longer.
Things might be different if the administration were not taking on water faster than Kelly can bail it out, or if September were not set up as a crucible custom-designed to destroy the illusions of Republicans and Trump supporters everywhere. But playtime is over and the grim waiter has brought the check. Failure will begin to roll down like waters, and haplessness like a mighty stream. Brother shall deliver up brother, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause their political death.
Through it all, for as long as he lasts, Kelly will vainly try to steer the ship away from the shoals, and he’ll take the blame for errors not of his making and decisions made against his advice.
If he’s a patriot and doing this because the situation is so dangerous, he should focus on only two things: protecting the country’s credit rating and keeping us out of a shooting war with North Korea or anyone else. But, really, when he leaves he should explain to the whole country what peril we are in and how urgently necessary it is to remove the president from power.
That’s the best and only way he can really serve his country now.
“But playtime is over and the grim waiter has brought the check. Failure will begin to roll down like waters, and haplessness like a mighty stream. Brother shall deliver up brother, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause their political death.”
Wow. Lyrical, biblical, beautiful writing!
I was about to write a congratulatory note on “grim waiter,” but you got there first. If that’s original, it’s nice. Nice either way, really, but nice work especially.
. . . .And then the beast shall arise out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads, and on each head the name of blasphemy, eh Martin?
I have a hard time buying the line about Kelly serving only out of a sense of duty. If the guy was sincerely noble, it’s hard to believe he’d shill for the Trump/Republican agenda.
Reports are that he took the position with great reluctance.
Trump began to court him for the job in May, he didn’t accept until the end of July.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/will-john-kelly-save-trumps-soul
For all that I think Kelly is still a Neocon, there are still people (Even Neocons. Hell, specially Neocons who are high on their own supply.) who do believe that if the President asks you to serve your country, you serve your country.
Working for Trump is by definition an unrewarding, degrading assignment.
On the other hand working for the American people to minimize the risk and outright harm that Trump will take on can be heroic.
I suspect Kelly sees his role as the latter, rather than the former.
Further, I think Kelly purged the neo-Nazis and will finish the job because the only way to retain his sanity while providing this public service is to have everyone understand what he is really doing without tipping off Trump.
Kelly’s staff meetings and his leadership will be more credible if everyone is on the same team, Kelly’s, and they understand the real goal is to fence in Trump, not indulge his fantasies. Even though appearing to cater to Trump’s fantasies and indulging him on his unserious approach may be what it takes, ultimately the staff/cabinet know that’s just for show, the price to pay for neutralizing the dunce.
James Baker ran Ronald Reagan, Kelly has a tougher job running Trump, but that’s the clear goal here.
Nothing can change, nothing can ameliorate the problem created by having a bad king. The bad king’s impulse is always towards the worst. He gravitates towards corrupt companions who urge on the king in every manner of depravity, including pea-hookers, and bad advisers who flatter his worst excesses, tendencies and cruelties.
He begins to indulge himself more and more. Why should he not? Who’s to tell him no? He has risen to the throne through superior power, judgement and skill has he not? Everyone doubted and mocked him, but he triumphed over a legion of enemies. He’s the big man! The biggest!
Like Hitler before him Trump has begun to believe in his own invincibility. And that delusion shields and comforts him and he attracts to himself every possible authoritarian loving closet monarchist.
And he would far rather that the world should end than that he should be stripped of the robes of office, and hurled back down into the pack of losers, including all his most adoring fans, from which he rose by superior manliness and virtue.
Floating in water swirling around inside a goldfish bowl.
With the pea-hookers gathered around it, hooks tied on short lengths of monofilament dangling from pencils as fishing rods, trying to get a hookup with one of those swirling peas as they whirl by.
Thanks for that!
Oh, yeah, and the rest is good stuff, too.
Josh Marshall at TPM says Trump creates “Dignity Wraiths” out of his aides, but a better monster metaphor might be that Trump is a Dignity Vampire. He has no Dignity of his own, and must suck it from others to feel sustenance.
The important thing is that Kelly is in a position to intercept the football.
Trump, the spoiled child, responds to authority…for a while. Kelly came in and cleared debris and clutter from an undisciplined group of know-nothings and everyone was grateful. Kelly stemmed the overwhelming flow of input from news sources and funneled the most important items through to other handlers, and then to Trump. Kelly is a firewall.
But he’s military to the core. He must chafe at taking orders from an idiot like Trump, and he is surely disgusted with the sycophants surrounding him. My dad was a Marine, and hs suffered no fools. Kelly must be biting his tongue every day.
So after being chastened more and more, Trump is building resentment against Kelly. Trump doesn’t like to be managed; kings don’t want to be told what to do. And the spoiled child inside will find a way to push Kelly out of the way. I’m not a cheerleader for Kelly, but he will probably want to put this job behind him and try to erase the stain from his career. Good luck with that.
Given Trump’s track record in appointments so far, if/when Kelly resigns, I think the next man (and it will be a man, a white man) in his position, having studied what went before, will pander to our god-emperor, allow him free rein* for all his most heinous impulses, and leave us amidst the smoking wreckage looking back with gratitude at Kelly for having staved off the worst for so long.
* Please note: “rein”, not “reign”. /pedant
Allow free rein to reign perhaps?
That would work!
Pretty sure that no matter what happens in the WH or Congress, the media will enable all the talking points that lead to blaming the Democrats (and probably Obama) for all their failures. The GOP hasn’t accepted responsibility for their own bad behavior since the hearing on 9/11.
Kelly might want to remember that as the dust settled over the Third Reich in 1945 and the rats came out of hiding, the plea that those serving the infallible Fuhrer were “really” German patriots trying to save the country fell on deaf ears…
In our (now) profoundly militarist culture, we are naturally always looking to grant our heroic generals the best possible intentions. The outright lies, moral corruption and abject failures of the Vietnam era are long forgotten, and the cascade of military failures since the turn into the horrible 21st century are placed firmly on the shoulders of civilian boobs like von Rumsfeld and Prez Cheney. Our military now injects itself into every national event, from Independence Day to the Super Bowl. They seem to have left only Halloween alone, haha.
With the current cavalcade of generals running our government (or attempting to), one has to look to the situation in Germany as the Great War rolled on. By 1915, the Kaiser’s government had inevitably turned into a Generals’ government, with von Falkenhayn and then Hindenburg and Ludendorff of the Great General Staff openly running every aspect of the country. The Kaiser simply made appearances at soldiers’ hospitals, holding up “morale”.
The problem here is that, unlike the Kaiser, Trumper doesn’t (and won’t) accept that his authority is to be illusory. So Kelly’s Mutiny is going to have to get quite a bit more determined if our generals hope to “save” the country–and can they really save the country from itself?
Kelly won’t mutiny in any sense of the word. It’s not in the genes. He walks first.
Kelly was (most probably) talked into this by Mattis and the R’s then ruling consortium. Like almost all Republicans, Kelly probably believed that Trump could be presidential (or controlled, failing that) if you could get rid of the pesky assholes around him. Like most Democrats (now) Kelly has probably come to the realization that Trump is the head asshole. One of the many vulgar aphorisms I learned in the Marines was “There is some shit I will not eat”. I think Kelly has gotten to that point.
We’ll see.
The enlistees’ oath requires obedience to orders of their superiors and of the President. The officers’ oath requires defense of the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic; says nothing about obeying the President’s orders.
My suspicion is Kelly’s still weighing whether eating Trump’s shit is something he can go on doing to be faithful to his oath.
Exactly my though…or hope, rather….namely, that in respect to the oath he swore to, Kelly is attending to exactly the portion you quote. I also am hopeful that Kelly has been in touch with his peers in the active military about what he’s seeing in the White House. I have no way of knowing how many in the officer corps regard Trump seriously as a domestic enemy to the Constitution, though–I’d like to think many serving military are wary of him…but as I’d be the first to admit, hope is doing an awful lot of work in this comment, isn’t it?
Not quite, Janicket. THe enlistees oath requires defense of the constitution and all LEGAL orders from higher officers.
While it doesn’t happen often, and it is defensible even less often, telling an officers to fuck off is allowable in the case of illegal orders.
Think My Lai.
The current text of the enlistee’s oath is this:
No mention of “legal” or “lawful”, and there’s a discussion of whether that has ever been explicitly part of the enlistment oath in the comments here: http://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/swearing-in-for-military-service.html
I agree that the “lawful” aspect, express or implied, is part of the obedience equation, but the illegality would have to be egregious, yes, My Lai level — and how many of the grunts at that slaughter obeyed those orders? Almost all of them. How many refused? Only three, and they were subsequently shunned and called traitors. The enlisted ranks as you know from your own experience have obedience relentlessly drilled into them.
I’d much rather have a Kelly-level bulwark against the madness of Trump; he’s accustomed to making command decisions with all due consideration of their implications.
“…federal law (5 U.S.C. §2302(b)(9)(D), if you’re curious) makes it illegal to remove a civil servant “for refusing to obey an order that would require the individual to violate a law.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/02/legal_protections_for_civil_servant
s_who_refuse_to_carry_out_illegal_orders.html
Does that apply to members of the armed forces, or only to civilians?
” … support and defend the CONSTITUTION of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic … true faith and allegiance to THE SAME .. [note: NOT to the president as such, but to the Constitution] and [obedience to the orders of the president and my chain of command] ACCORDING TO regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice … “
All implying the priority of the law above men …
For Marines, in boot camp you are told, explicitly, that you not only do not obey unlawful orders but that you cannot use the “following orders” defense if you DO follow orders, get caught and end up in front of a judge. Then you are told what constitutes an “unlawful” order. This is not just once, but several times. For enlisted, I am perfectly willing to agree that it is a rare day when that happens … but it DOES happen.
For officers it is more stringent. They are not “told” they actually go to classes during training at Quantico and their respective educational institutions on what constitutes a lawful order. And the penalties associated with giving an unlawful order. God help the Marine officer who has a sergeant correctly refuse an order in combat because it is unlawful. That officer will be lucky if the only thing that happens is he gets a dishonorable.
I’m very happy to learn this. How far back in time does this education go, do you know? Is it a consequence of My Lai?
The “lawful order” bit comes in UCMJ Article 92, not in the oath.
Both of you are on the mark. Kelly’s mutiny is a mutiny only in Trump’s mind at this point. Not strong enough to constrain Trump.
The question about anyone saving the country from itself is what is in the balance at the moment.
DerFarm is also correct about Kelly’s intentions and his likely path to where he is.
We were warned. Trump intends to keep our eyes focused on his narcissistic self wondering what he will do next. He predicted that that fixation would win him the election. He lied. The GOP finagling helped win it and the media environment and Clinton’s failure to rein in the first and win over the latter enough to avoid a pure electoral college defeat with a 3 million vote majority.
Picturing that scene brought a smile to my face. Which morphed into, if not quite LOL, at least an audible chuckle from the next few sentences of apt biblical paraphrase.
Which were welcome respite from my normal attitude in the face of the current situation, which is indeed “grim”.
Nicely done.
Job 1 for Kelly or any successor is this: Keeping the nuclear “football” out of Trump’s grubby little hands. Under the current conditions, the military will obey a launch order almost automatically.
There is a difference between playing a madman and being a madman.
Waiters tend to be grim when they’ve been treated poorly and there is doubt about the ability to pay the check, let alone a tip.
Perfect metaphor for what’s going on here.
So we seem to be divided on whether to consider Gen. Kelly a villain for associating with the Trump administration or a hero for trying to save the country from it.
The Trump needy child is searching for a father figure, which military generals (and Russian dictators) excel in simulating, but that child can never get those needs fulfilled; that option passed decades ago.
So my interest is in what strategy a retired four star Marine General had planned before entering this battlefield? He must have considered what he wanted to do, how he wanted to do it, and what to do if that didn’t work as any military officer would do in planning an upcoming campaign. Now that the first engagements are over, what can we expect? I doubt he’s willing to be driven from the field in defeat. What are his options if he refuses to resign?
By now it should be clear to everyone Trump is not going to “pivot” and there isn’t anything any one person can do to make him change.
The best thing a “patriot” can do, if they truly are one and care about their country, especially since for such people mutiny is not in their DNA and thus not an option, is to resign, and in so doing highlight the threat to the nation the President is. And put pressure on the GOP to stop acting like accessories after the fact (at best) and start acting like a Congress with the constitutional authority to remove a president when he is clearly unstable and unfit.
Kelly is not the only military man fed up with Trump even the JCOS have spoke out. I wonder how long they will tolerate this whole administration?
A military coup? A scary thought.
Not to those advocating or hoping for coup to oust Trump. But since that is foreign to the US military, their work would be done after frogmarching Trump out of the WH and saluting his replacement, Pence.
anybody advocating or hoping for that is dumber than Trump or a true fascist. once the military changes the government the republic is gone and not coming back.
Right. Then we’ve got the Praetorian Guard choosing the next imperator.
The list of senior military officers that resigned based on principles appears to be waiting for its first entry.
Same with fmr senior military officers serving in an appointed executive branch position. Although both serving and former senior military officers spout a lot of words about honor, dignity, and principles. They’re all like fmr SoS Colin Powell when handed a pile of crap about Iraq WMD, he privately grumbled that it was crap but publicly sold the crap at the UN.
Not too different from all senior presidential appointees. It’s been 37 years since anyone has resigned based on principles. The country’s loss in that instance:
Couldn’t have been more correct.
My opinion of Kelly is tempered by what he did with Homeland Security.