John Kelly

Former Trump chief of staff John Kelly says Trump “is the most flawed person” he’s ever met

/ johnfea

Here is Jake Tapper at CNN:

Former White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, has told friends that President Donald Trump “is the most flawed person” he’s ever known.”

The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” the retired Marine general has told friends, CNN has learned.

The reporting comes from a new CNN special scheduled to air Sunday night, “The Insiders: A Warning from Former Trump Officials,” in which former senior administration officials — including former national security adviser John Bolton, former Health and Human Services scientist Rick Bright and former Department of Homeland Security general counsel John Mitnick — explain why they think the President is unfit for office.

Read the rest here.

It is only a matter of time before we hear the typical court evangelical rhetoric about “we are all sinners” and how “God uses flawed people.”

Greg Thornbury, the former president of the The Kings College’s in New York City, nails it:

A Message to Irish-Catholic Trump Supporters

/ johnfea / 4 Comments

Kelly

John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, sends an important reminder to pro-Trump Catholics who think immigrants are “too lazy to get off their asses.”

Here is a taste of his piece at Commonweal:

Kelly, an Irish-American Catholic from Boston, is either oblivious to the irony of someone with his family’s background trafficking in pernicious stereotypes or knowingly tapping into the power of caricatures to dehumanize people. Irish immigrants were similarly demonized in the nineteenth century when they fled the Potato Famine. Like the parents of today’s Dreamers, they took great risks in search of a better life for their family. The Irish were viewed as so alien to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority they were not even regarded by many as “white.” The Boston Globe described the zeitgeist of the era in a 2016 article.

In the popular press, the Irish were depicted as subhuman. They were carriers of disease. They were drawn as lazy, clannish, unclean, drunken brawlers who wallowed in crime and bred like rats. Most disturbingly, the Irish were Roman Catholics coming to an overwhelmingly Protestant nation and their devotion to the pope made their allegiance to the United States suspect.

It was out of this context that a nativist movement flourished. By the 1850s, the Know-Nothing Party, originally called the American Party, included eight governors, more than one-hundred congressmen, and held power in half a dozen state legislatures. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan expanded in New England and the Midwest, targeting immigrants and Catholics. A massive KKK rally in Worcester, Mass. attracted as many as fifteen-thousand people in 1924. At the end of the rally, the Klan clashed with Catholics who came to counter protest under a Knights of Columbus banner.

The politics of nativism is not new. But there is something particularly galling about Catholic members of this administration such as Kelly, and powerful members of Congress, including Speaker Paul Ryan, leading or enabling the contemporary incarnation of anti-immigrant policies and xenophobia. Ryan posted a picture on Twitter this week showing him welcoming a member of the Irish Parliament. “Even if my Gaelic is a little rough,” Ryan tweeted, “always great to connect with my roots.”

Kelly, Ryan, and others should remember those roots included immigrants from a different place but with the same dreams. In the face of craven politicians who perpetuated fear and ugly stereotypes, those immigrants persevered and made America great.

Read the entire piece here.

Still More on John Kelly’s Civil War Comments

/ johnfea

Compromise

In addition to my analysis of Kelly’s remarks and Carole Emberton’s Washington Post op-ed, I also want to call your attention to Jennifer Schuessler’s New York Times piece on this controversy.  It is a nice overview of the various compromises that took place from the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 to the outbreak of Civil War in 1861.  She quotes David Blight, Manisha Sinha, and David Waldstreicher.

Read it here.

More on Kelly’s Civil War Remarks

/ johnfea

Kelly

I addressed Kelly’s remarks yesterday.  Today I want to point you to Binghamton University historian Carole Emberton’s piece, “The North tried compromise. The South chose war.”

A taste:

By blaming a failure of compromise for the Civil War, Kelly repeated a well-worn tenet of the Lost Cause narrative that valorizes the Confederacy and its leaders like Lee. In this narrative, the failure to compromise is laid at the feet of radical abolitionists and Northern politicians, including the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, who gave Southerners no choice but to secede.

But it was slavery, and the refusal of Southern slaveholders to compromise on slavery, that launched the Civil War. In fact, the secession crisis of 1860-61 was the culmination of a decade-long movement led by ultra-radical pro-slavery “Fire-Eaters.” After decades of compromise between the North and South, the election of Lincoln spurred an almost paranoid anxiety about slavery’s future that made compromise untenable and war virtually unavoidable.

That technically makes Kelly correct. There was a failure of compromise. But lamenting it without addressing the role of slavery at its root reflects the flawed, Southern version of Civil War history that has nourished the white nationalism currently poisoning American politics.

Read the rest at The Washington Post.

Thoughts on John Kelly’s Civil War Comments

/ johnfea / 4 Comments

DHS Secretary John F. Kelly holds and ICE Town Hall

I am teaching the Civil War this semester.  In fact, I have class tonight.  I am thinking of starting the class with John Kelly’s recent claim that the Civil War was caused by “the lack of an ability to compromise.”

I watched the video of Kelly’s interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News.  In that video he said that “Robert E. Lee was an honorable man.”  He added, “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country.  It was always loyalty to state back in those days.  Now it’s different today.”  And then came this: “But the lack of ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

A few thoughts about Kelly’s remarks:

  1. Secession, and eventually civil war, occurred because the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 threatened a Southern way of life defined by chattel slavery and white supremacy.  Not convinced?  I invite you to read Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War.  My students just finished it.
  2. Was Robert E. Lee an honorable man?  Perhaps.  I am sure that many in the South saw him as an honorable man because he was willing to join the Virginia secession movement and fight for the Southern way of life as described above.  “Loyalty to state” meant loyalty to slavery and white supremacy.  The loyalty Lee may have had to home, place, roots, family, or local community–all virtuous ideals in the abstract–was made possible by the wealth that came from slave labor.  For these reasons, Lee chose treason.
  3. Kelly is partially correct.  The Civil War did come about by a lack of compromise.  The South refused to compromise with northern Republicans like Lincoln who wanted to stop the spread of slavery.  At the start of the war Lincoln, an ardent unionist, would have gladly compromised with the Southern states where slavery already existed in order to keep the union together.  See, for example, his December 22, 1860 letter to Georgia Governor (and eventually Confederate V.P.) Alexander Stephens
  4. Kelly is also correct when he says that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.” The men and women of the south made their stand because their conscience (which was informed by their understanding of Protestant Christianity) led them to believe that slavery and white supremacy was right.  Lincoln followed his conscience as well.  He believed the Union must be preserved.  Abolitionists followed their consciences too.  They believed that slavery was an abomination.
  5.  And let’s also remember, as historian David Blight has shown us, that “compromise” was what brought the Union back together after the Civil War.  This was a compromise that the Union made with white supremacists in the South.  A compromise that led to Jim Crow and segregation.

In the end, one cannot ignore the fact that Kelly has made these statements in the wake of what happened in Charlottesville.  (He actually plays the “both sides” card again, much like his boss had done in the days following the race rioting in Charlottesville).  In this sense, his remarks are more than just historical musings.  They send a clear political message.