Some Schmo wrote:Drumpf is the personification of the GOP attitude. I'll give him this much: he represents the spirit of his party perfectly. Selfish, hypocritical, and antagonistic toward reality.
No wonder [deleted] love him... and it's a good thing, because without [deleted] and morons, who would love Drumpf?
And this only becomes ever more obvious day by day. I become ever more astounded and dismayed at how people like subgenius, Bach and Majax somehow manage to remain oblivious to that glaringly and increasingly obvious reality. As I have said before, Trump and his cohorts scarcely even try to hide the fact of their self-serving corruption. Some of his past and present supporters (most notably, Sean Spicer) even seem to cite as a point in his favor that Trump is so openly, in-your-face corrupt and self serving. It's like they are saying or implying that at least he is honest about the fact that he is corrupt and mendacious, as if this is somehow a virtue!
Then there is the undeniable and well documented fact of Trump's pathological lying.
In the Trump Administration, Everyone Becomes a Liar.
Eventually everyone, including John Kelly, must sink to lying for the president.
Of all President Trump's multitudinous character flaws, it's the relentless dishonesty that does the most damage to anyone who works for him in the effort they must make to retain some shred of dignity as they labor in his service. You might to be able to spin or rationalize some of what Trump does—Sure, the Twitter stuff is nuts, but he's just speaking directly to the voters! Sure, he knows nothing about policy, but that's OK because his instincts are so sound! But you can't explain away all the lying, day after day after day—especially when you may eventually be called upon to step before the cameras and explain it, echo it, or even add lies of your own to the ever-growing pile.
There's a cycle that repeats itself in some variation again and again: Trump lies about something, then when it gets pointed out he doubles down, insisting that he didn't lie, then someone gets sent out to defend him and usually ends up telling more lies, then the White House insists that not only did no one tell any lies, but the media should just shut up about it. And before you know it, the cycle will begin all over again.
So let's quickly review what happened in the latest iteration of this miserable pattern, last week. At a press conference, Trump was asked why he hadn't said anything publicly about the killing of four American soldiers in Niger, nearly two weeks after it happened. He replied by lying about his predecessors, claiming that they (especially Barack Obama) never called the families of fallen service members, while he did. The next morning in a radio interview, he claimed, "I have called, I believe, everybody—but certainly I'll use the word virtually everybody." This too was false. Then Representative Frederica Wilson told told reporters that when Trump called the widow of Sergeant La David Johnson, he said the slain soldier "must have known what he signed up for," which came off sounding insensitive. Then Trump lied again, claiming that he never said that, despite the fact that the family confirmed it. He also said "I have proof" that Wilson wasn't telling the truth, yet another lie.
Then to make matters worse, Kelly tried to discredit Wilson in ways both absurd and dishonest. He said, "It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation," as though Wilson were eavesdropping, when in fact she heard it because she's a friend of the family—she was in a limousine with them when the call came in, and Mrs. Johnson put the president on speaker. Then Kelly lamented the lack of what used to be sacred in America, including that "women were sacred, looked upon with great honor." This was said with no apparent irony by a man who works for Trump, who not only has a decades-long history of demeaning women but is on tape bragging about his ability to sexually assault them with impunity, something he has been credibly accused of by a dozen different women.
If you were tempted to feel sorry for John Kelly because his job babysitting Donald Trump is such an impossible one, that press conference would surely have cured you of the impulse.
It may have been inevitable that he'd be called upon to do it eventually; how many times have we watched as someone working for Trump comes (often grudgingly) before the cameras to either repeat things that aren't true or attest to their boss's magnificence? For some, like the surpassingly shameless Sarah Huckabee Sanders or her predecessor Sean Spicer, it's almost the entirety of the job. For others, like Kelly or Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, it happens at a moment of political peril for Trump, when they're sent out to do damage control.
But in every case, the aide winds up looking worse for it. Watching them defend Trump only reminds us of how they sold a piece of their soul when they took the job, because to work for Trump is to acquiesce to all that he is. John Kelly might once have argued that he's there to restrain Trump from inflicting too much damage, but that's a claim he can no longer make. Like everyone else in this administration, he's been stained forever.
