I guess one silver lining in General John Kelly’s alliance with Donald Trump is the object lesson it provides about why it’s so very important to keep generals away from the levers of power in our democracy. Certainly beginning with his appointment as the chief of staff, Kelly’s military background has leant credibility to an unfit president; there seemed to be almost a bipartisan approval of Kelly being able to bring military precision to the running of the office. But it was his defense of President Trump around the president’s controversial call to the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson that saw Kelly inject a nasty dose of militarism into the body politic. As Talking Points Memo summarized, Kelly managed to suggest that members of the armed forces are more fully citizens than other Americans; adopted the rhetorical stance that attacks on Donald Trump are no different than attacks on American soldiers; and more generally threw his lot in with the president’s retrograde agenda of Making American Great Again through a return to a mythical past era. And this is to say nothing of marshalling his military-infused credibility to attack Representative Frederica Wilson with a series of lies, which he has refused to recant.
Now the general has amazingly done himself one better, going on Fox News to discuss Robert E. Lee as an “honorable” man and claiming that the Civil War was caused by a lack of compromise; in doing so, he’s embracing the white supremacism that’s at the heart of Trump’s rancid agenda. As Josh Marshall notes, Kelly is “an example of what we might call Total Quality Trumpism, Trumpist ideology in a more disciplined, duty-focused, professional package. The core ideology and beliefs about reclamation and rectitude are the same. It’s not an accident that he ended up in the tightest circle of Trump’s orbit.” I think another angle on this is that we are being given glaring evidence that members of the military should never be viewed as neutral protectors of the public trust. Kelly clearly has political opinions, and they are despicable ones; yet his military background obscures this in the eyes of both the media and the public at large. For him to appear on TV and promote a white supremacist take on the Civil War is, not to mince words, grotesque. That he does so with the aura of the authority of a general of the U.S. Army, and as a supposedly technocratic Chief of Staff, is something that calls for widespread public contempt and repudiation.
Thankfully there are some among us who have already risen to the challenge. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates the utility of rapid-response tweetstorms in this barrage, which weaves historical reference and a deep understanding of the issues at play into a brutal and memorable refutation of this scary general’s blatherings. No quarter for Confederacy apologists; no quarter for white supremacism: not in the White House, not in the Pentagon, not in our country.
