Why John Kelly is the perfect pick for Trump's new chief of staff
Or, at least, why Trump thinks he is.
by Dara Lind at Vox
https://www.vox.com/2017/7/28/16059120/john-kelly-chief-of-staff
"SNIP...........
But with each round of criticism, Kelly’s response has gotten more forceful. In the past few months, he’s overtaken Sessions (who’s fallen out of favor with the mercurial president) as the face of the administration’s immigration policy. And he presents it with a blunt, law-and-order morality and an edge of outrage toward anyone who might dare question those who keep America safe.
He likes to say that he doesn’t deport immigrants, the law does. In a May speech, he blamed the department’s morale problem on the public trusting “criminals” over agents: “When you discourage, when you disable, when you unjustly criticize and default to believing the initial reports as opposed to defaulting to believing the stories told by my professionals, what else do you expect?”
Kelly’s rhetoric has often glossed over or contradicted the policies his department carried out, or he’s simply refused to believe accounts of officer abuses. But his simple us-versus-them tone isn’t dissimilar to Trump’s own, or to the other figure gaining more influence over the president right now: communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who called New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza Thursday to demand as an “American” that Lizza tell him who’d leaked gossip about a dinner.
It’s not clear that Kelly or anyone can actually discipline Scaramucci or the other people vying for influence with the president. It’s not clear the president wants him to — he totally rejected Priebus’s attempts to control access to the Oval Office. But as an exponent of the way Trump sees the world, and as someone who can represent the administration on television, it’s not hard to see why Trump thinks now is the time for a general who, at his worst, reacts to criticism as a national security threat.
.............SNIP"
= new reply since forum marked as read
