February 13, 2020

John Kelly Finally Speaks Out Against Trump

He also attempted to politely distance himself from the administration’s immigration policies.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Presidential tweet update, 11:10 am EST: As predicted, Trump is not pleased.

The president responded on Twitter by declaring that he couldn’t have fired Kelly “fast enough.” But that’s questionable, at best. Kelly served as White House chief of staff for nearly 18 months, making him Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff to date.

It took more than a year after his removal as the White House chief of staff, but John Kelly appears to have finally found some courage to speak out against Donald Trump.

In wide-ranging remarks at Drew University in New Jersey on Wednesday night, the Atlantic reports that the former Marine Corps general condemned Trump’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the country into opening investigations into Joe Biden. Kelly also praised Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council official Trump effectively admitted to firing last week because Vindman had testified in the House’s impeachment inquiry. From the Atlantic‘s Peter Nicholas:

“[Vindman] did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” Kelly told the audience at the Mayo Performing Arts Center. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

Although Trump has long insisted that his call to Zelensky was “perfect,” Kelly made clear that Trump indeed conditioned military aid on Zelensky’s help digging up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

As for the Trump administration’s immigration policy, which as the former Department of Homeland Security head Kelly had been in charge of enforcing, he once again pushed back on the president, saying that a border wall “from sea to shining sea” was unnecessary. Immigrants are “overwhelmingly good people,” he continued. “They’re not all rapists and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way.”

This isn’t the first time Kelly has politely distanced himself from the administration’s hardline immigration stance. But as my colleague Ari Berman noted when Kelly spoke to the Los Angeles Times shortly before his departure from the White House in 2018, much of that effort appeared defensive, rather than some brave takedown of his former boss:

Kelly’s remarks at the end of his tenure appear to be self-serving, blaming others for policies that he supported. He aggressively defended the administration’s Muslim ban as homeland security secretary, saying “The thinking was to get it out quick so that potentially people that might be coming here to harm us would not take advantage of some period of time that they could jump on an airplane and get here.”

He also helped devise the policy of separating immigrant parents from their children, saying it would be “a tough deterrent” to migrants thinking of crossing the border.

So, make what you want of Kelly’s latest. But one thing’s for sure, Trump isn’t going to like it.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate