I think that a major component of the GOP going with Trump, was that they thought they could indeed just manipulate him as though he were an imbecile child.
And to be fair, they absolutely can.
The part they missed, is that since he has no internal requirement to be consistent, he can be convinced to take one course of action they like, and then tomorrow be convinced by someone else to reverse everything.
And this is exactly what we see happen. Someone says, “This bipartisan bill will save things, you’ll be a hero!” and he’s like, “OKAY!” Then the next day someone says, “That bill will make you look like a fool! You need to kill it!” and he’s like, “OKAY!”
I dunno if anyone here ever listens to Howard Stern, but Trump is like Wendy the Retard, where they just ask her totally insane questions and she agrees with them no matter what, because she doesn’t understand anything.
Lucky for my monitor I wasn’t drinking my favorite beverage when I read that. I haven’t listed to Stern in many years but Wendy is still alive? Beetlejuice too?
I think everyone is pretty much in agreement that Gen. Kelly was the one who attempted to script Trump’s calls to the families of the Green Berets. The short but heartfelt, honest and poignant words he claims to have given Trump to recite are the near perfect thing to say in such a situation. Had Bush or Obama delivered those words, we’d be inscribing them in a stone someplace.
But of course, Trump butchered them. Because the man is so unbelievably ignorant and brainless, so totally devoid of empathy and concern, that he can’t even be bothered to read prepared words off a piece of paper properly. I bet $100 he told the widow, on her way to see her husbands casket come off the plane, to “have a good time” at the end of the call, as that seems to be his go to in stressful situations where his mind fails him. Or in other words, every damn day.
Watching CNN the last couple of days call Gold Star families, I got the distinct feeling that even though Trump started the politizing of calls to Gold star families, the media is actually the bigger villain in this very unseemly spectacle.
Reading Gen Kelly’s press briefing, I’m sure Trump wasn’t the perfect consoler-in-chief. After watching him with the Khan family, I was terrified how he’d react if grieving parent yelled at him. I now know that my worst fears would occur. So yes, fuck Trump for deflecting blame as alway and bring up President Obama. The Sgt. Johnson widow complained that Trump didn’t know his name. I’m sure that’s true but my guess it’s because Trump has dementia and that’s one of the signs of early dementia.
But also fuck Congresswoman Wilson it wasn’t her place to bring up this painful call and politizing it is awful. She is as Gen Kelly calls her an empty barrel. Also, screw CNN and the rest of the media for dragging other gold star families into this mess. You can report that Trump lied about calling the Gold star families without showing their interviews on the air.
Finally, thanks to Gen. Kelly for doing this thankless job, and I’m sorry his son was dragged into this.
Why is it that all the people who call Trump out on his bullshit are supposed to be above calling him out on his bullshit? Please explain that to me. This man has ruined reasonable political discourse for the next fifty years. I just want to know why everyone else has to play by different rules than he does? Why can’t we hit back harder too?!
Attacking Trump for saying something insensitive or crass when he calls gold star families seems okay to me.
My fear is that attacking Trump for not calling all gold star families is going to bite Democrats on the ass eventually. Maybe President Obama did personally call all 2,500 gold star families that were created in the 8 years he was in office, but I’m thinking that all it takes is one disgruntled gold star mom or dad to go to Fox and say the opposite and we’ll have Trumpsters crowing in the aisles.
Kelly is attacking her for politicizing it while it was Trump who politicized this whole thing with “Obama didn’t call people but I do.”
Boy does Kelly creep me out. “When I was kid growing up, a lot things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor.” Yeah that golden era of the 50s and 60s when women were SO respected. And of course he stands there representing Trump.
She is a lifetime family friend of the family of the GI who was killed. She has known him since he was a child. That’s why she was in the limo at the time, in fact.
I agree with this. Quit calling these people and pushing their grief into the limelight.
But this is BS. Trump says and/or does terrible things, there’s no blame on the people who call him on it. She got the issue out there, that’s fine. The media at large should have reported on it and then moved on the next insane thing he does, not continued to push at it.
To be clear, his son was dragged into this by Trump, directly, who said folks should go ask Kelly if Obama ever called him.
While I find the whole situation disgusting, I cannot in good conscience place the blame at the feet of the media for reporting on the despicable thoughtless lack of empathy expressed by Trump.
Trump acted poorly. This is not isolated, but merely the expression of a continuing pattern of behavior.
The fact that our president acts like this makes us feel bad. We we deserve to feel bad. But the answer isn’t to pretend like it didn’t happen.
This entire fucking thing started when heir fuckface was asked a question about the four special forces soldiers killed in Niger. There are 1001 ways to answer that question but dear leader chose the exactly wrong response. That started this whole ordeal. A friend and mentor to one of the fallen then reported that the psychopath, to no ones surprise, totally mangled his call to one of them.
Even then it could have ended. Everyone knows its difficult to find words when talking to people about their grief, trump could have reached out to the widow and said he meant no disrespect or harm by his words BUT NO he had to deny saying something he actually said.
And then Kelly comes out and blames Rep. Wilson. It was trump all along who started the shitshow and trump who continued the shitsow and Kelly’s press conference just turns him into another Dignity Wraith.
Given the history with the family that triggercut mentioned above, Congresswoman Wilson certainly had the right to be personally offended by Trump’s conduct.
I too am sorry that Kelly’s son was dragged into this. But Kelly himself is dishonestly covering for Trump so that the general in his role of chief minder can continue to run the country. That is, in it’s own way, despicable.
We’ll have reports on specifics shortly. But Chief of Staff John Kelly just spoke during the White House press briefing about the entire military bereavement phone call controversy. It was volcanic. He mercilessly attacked Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, both for her comments a couple days ago and for an earlier incident (which frankly seemed like a cheap shot). Kelly took basically complete responsibility for everything President Trump had done, what he had said, how he handled the phone calls to the families of the four who died in Niger.
The tenor was emotional, focused and intense. The upshot, though, was basically to turn everything that has happened over the last three days into a press and public attack on the sacredness of military sacrifice. Kelly has walked the walk and suffered it. He rose to the highest ranks of the Marine corps and lost a son in Afghanistan. He speaks with great credibility and experience. But I must say that the fusillade he delivered turned things almost entirely upside down.
I’ve seen very little evidence of anyone disrespecting military sacrifice. I’ve seen a lot of evidence of people thinking President Trump has done just that and being aghast at seeing it. We can’t know Trump’s exact feelings. We don’t know all his actions. But he’s given people lots of reasons to think and feel that way in recent days. It’s hardly surprising that people were outraged by the way he shifted toward baseless attacks on his predecessors to deflect criticism of himself. It was shameful.
Kelly also said, in addition to his other criticisms of Rep. Wilson that he was stunned she had ‘listened in’ on a call from the President to a bereaved widow. It seems quite clear from everything we know that the family took President Trump’s call on speaker phone with Rep. Wilson there with them. My understanding is she had a personal relationship with the family. He made it sound like she was violating some trust, eavesdropping almost. That seems deeply misleading and dishonest. Kelly did not mention that the mother, who was there, backed up Rep. Wilson’s account. Wilson made a very direct and damaging attack on the President. But this is a member of Congress, caring for and being with a bereaved family. Invited by them, sharing their pain. ‘Listening in’ is just an attack that turns everything on its head.
Kelly even seemed to suggest that the Khan Family, who then-candidate Trump mercilessly attacked, had dishonored gold star families. Among the things he said are now now longer sacred, he listed “Gold Star Families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.” It’s hard to imagine he was criticizing President Trump’s subsequent, widely criticized and vicious attacks on the Khan family. He seemed to be attacking the Khans themselves. They’re the ones who violated the sacredness of military sacrifice.
There was so much in his remarks that I want to take a bit to think it over, absorb it. There’s a lot there about this moment and the Trump presidency, a lot about John Kelly. Kelly has a lot of credibility he has earned. I don’t want to question his motives simply because his description and comments seem so at odds with what I have seen over recent days. But the entirety of his comments seemed exploitative, an effort to turn people’s certainly reasonable (and I believe accurate) sense of being appalled at the President into an attack on military service and military sacrifice. That’s not right. That’s not true. It’s a more emotion-packed version of Trump’s effort to turn the anthem/police brutality protests into dishonoring military sacrifice. He ended up by refusing to take questions from reporters who couldn’t say they personally knew a Gold Star Family.
Freedom of speech and the press is also sacred. It is one of the values American military personnel strive to defend. I understand that he said this in a moment of peaked emotion. But we individuals or reporters don’t earn our spurs of civic freedom by being proximate to military service. That’s ugly and wrong. I am going to leave aside Kelly’s motives. But this spectacle seemed ugly and exploitative, ignoring much of what has happened over the last three days, falsifying other things. President Trump is a blowhard and a phony and a liar. Kelly isn’t. He brings prestige and a lifetime of military service to every remark. But at the end of the day this seemed like putting that wrapper of dignity around the most Trumpian of traits: never apologize, always attack, let the truth defend itself.
I think Marshall is giving Kelly way too much credit. Kelly is proving himself as craven as anyone else in Trump’s orbit, and his dudgeon is remarkably politically convenient.
Remember, Kelly is in the administration because he was only too happy to implement the most racist of Trump’s policies as Secretary of Homeland Security.
I wondered why she was so close to this until I heard she was a friend of the family and had known the deceased since childhood. If that is true then I can understand her reasoning. Also, she was in a car and the call was on speakerphone, kinda hard for everyone in the car not to hear.
Kelly told Trump not to call because there was nothing he could say. When Trump found out that Obama didn’t call Kelly when his son died, he unilaterally decided to call the families, against advice, solely because Obama had not done so. At least, that’s how the story was told on NPR.
