Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse by John Nichols

Author:John Nichols
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

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THE SECRETARY OF TRUMP IS ALWAYS RIGHT

John Kelly

Secretary of Homeland Security

Homeland Security secretary John Kelly is loyal to a fault. “I work for one man. His name is Donald Trump,” says Kelly, when he is asked by congressional committees about the messes made by Trump and the West Wing cabal that has turned governing into chaos.

Translation: Even if Kelly disagrees with a policy, even if he has doubts about whether Trump is doing the right thing, he’s not going to share those anxieties with the members of Congress who are charged with providing oversight of Kelly and one of the most powerful departments in the federal government. And the fifth secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is certainly not going to share with the American people any concerns about the unsettling and bizarre behaviors of the president who made him part of the cabinet.

That’s a far cry from the image of Kelly that was perpetuated by his advocates, and by the retired Marine Corps general himself, during the assessment of his nomination to join Trump’s team. Kelly got high marks when he told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee: “I have never had a problem speaking truth to power, and I firmly believe that those in power deserve full candor and my honest assessment and recommendations.”

That blunt talk fit with his image as a marine who had, during forty-five years of service in war zones from Vietnam to Iraq, earned a reputation for speaking his mind. This was the guy who, when he was asked in 2003 about how hard taking the capital of Iraq might be, answered: “Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t shit.” As it happened, Iraq proved to be a heavier lift than Kelly anticipated; a decade after the invasion, he was saying: “If you think this war against our way of life is over because some of the self-appointed opinion-makers and chattering class grow ‘war weary,’ because they want to be out of Iraq or Afghanistan, you are mistaken. This enemy is dedicated to our destruction. He will fight us for generations, and the conflict will move through various phases as it has since 9/11.”

It was Kelly’s linking of border security issues with the “war on terror” that reportedly got Trump and his transition team excited about the general in the first place. While serving as head of the U.S. Southern Command, the general told a 2015 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that “terrorist organizations could seek to leverage those same smuggling routes [in Central America and Mexico] to move operatives with intent to cause grave harm to our citizens or even bring weapons of mass destruction into the United States.”

That bold language was “a little over the top” in the view of Frank Sharry, the executive director of the immigration reform group America’s Voice. But members of the Senate comforted themselves with the expectation that Kelly’s experience with national security

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