If you view Twitter these days?
You see people posting up Donald Trump as this Great Military Guy….
Huh?
John Kelly, who was the ex-President Trump’s longest serving Chief of Staff has had enough….
With Trump knocking outgoing Military Joint Chief of Staff General Mark Milley and saying he should be ‘hanged’ for not doing Trump’s illegal bidding?
Kelly goes public with a list of comments made AGAINST veterans and wounded military members….
And you KNOW some military and vveterans will STILL vote for Trump….
Former Trump White House chief of staff John F. Kelly delivered a blistering statement to CNN’s Jake Tapper that, for the first time, served to confirm years-old comments attributed to Trump and for which Kelly was present.
Kelly, like many former top Trump administration officials, has criticized Trump somewhat in the past, but his new statement takes things to another level and fills out the picture of some of Trump’s ugliest alleged comments.
Let’s take Kelly’s statement from CNN, piece by piece.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, calling Trump a “person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’”
Kelly’s reference to “being tortured as POWs” is an obvious reference to the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose war-hero status Trump publicly cast doubt upon during the 2016 campaign, saying: “I like people that weren’t captured.”
But “suckers” and “there is nothing in it for them” — in quotation marks — refer to Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2020 Atlantic piece. It quoted Trump using the former word to refer to the 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood in France during World War I. It also quoted him saying something similar to the latter while standing next to the grave of Kelly’s own son, who was killed in Afghanistan.
…
The part about “losers” and not wanting to visit gravesites is again confirming of the 2020 Atlantic piece, in which Trump allegedly said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
The White House at the time flatly denied this. Trump himself added: “To think that I would make statements negative to our military and fallen heroes when nobody has done what I’ve done” for the military was “a total lie. … It’s a disgrace.”
A man who was present for these key events now effectively says that it not only happened, but that it happened over and over again.
(Another recent story from Goldberg described Trump telling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, in 2019, that “no one wants to see that, the wounded” after a severely injured Army captain sang “God Bless America” at an event. Trump allegedly told Milley not to have the man appear in public again. Trump has denied the remarks.)
“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women.”
This is where the statement starts going beyond veterans and mere confirmation of things already reported. Kelly suggests Trump doesn’t just denigrate veterans, but also holds very different views than he portrays publicly about these issues and groups — and perhaps denigrates them, too….
image….White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly watches President Donald Trump during a meeting in 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)