Stephen Yang
The recent media blitz led by ex-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly as he tried to tie former President Trump to Adolf Hitler has certainly gotten a good bit of attention.
I suppose that’s what media blitzes are for.
And I imagine the Kamala Harris campaign is very pleased with Kelly’s participation in their closing argument to the 2024 race.
I will leave the politics to others.
I see Kelly’s comments through a different lens — as one of only three other people in the entire world who have roughly the same perspective on the Trump White House as Gen. Kelly does.
From that perspective, I was shocked and disappointed by the course of action he has chosen to follow.
I was not, however, surprised.
His recent behavior is simply consistent with what many of us saw in the White House during Kelly’s tenure.
Kelly has always seen the role we shared, that of White House chief of staff, differently than I.
We both knew we were the only ones in the West Wing whose job it was to tell the president things he didn’t want to hear.
But the similarities ended there.
I saw the role as one that would enable the president to be as successful as possible in fulfilling the agenda that got him elected.
Kelly saw the job as that of a self-appointed overseer, charged with protecting the country against a president that those same people had elected.
I saw the role as the chief of the staff.
Kelly saw it as the chief of the president.
There are, of course, limits to what the job entails.
Faithful service never implies doing things that are illegal or immoral or in violation of our oaths to the Constitution.
But Kelly hasn’t expressed that Trump asked him to do anything like that.
His objections appear to relate to Trump’s alleged tendencies and inclinations.
Kelly’s central aim now appears to be establishing a tie between Trump and Hitler, using the former president’s alleged own words to do so.
Curiously, absolutely no one else seems to recall comments similar to what Kelly has alleged.
Donald Trump certainly never spoke favorably about Adolf Hitler to me, which seems consistent with the fact that his daughter and grandchildren are Jewish.
Indeed, he never mentioned the man — not to me, and not to any of my dozens of staff with whom I’ve communicated since Kelly went public.
True, former National Security Adviser John Bolton responded to Kelly’s charges by saying, “If John said them, I believe them implicitly.”
That is probably not surprising, given Bolton’s very public antipathy toward his former boss.
Bolton’s contribution makes one thing clear: He never heard any similar comments.
Neither did Trump ever ask me to do anything illegal or immoral.
He never gave me any reason to believe, as Kelly contends, that he was a fascist.
If he had done any of those things, I would have responded in the only acceptable manner: by trying my level best to convince him to do, or be, otherwise.
Failing that, I would have resigned my post.
Kelly, if he heard such disturbing comments, should have done the same.
But he didn’t.
He stayed on in the job, one is left to assume, for the extra-constitutional purpose of “preventing” the president from doing things of which the general did not approve.
Then, most tellingly, Kelly sat quietly for 5½ years, withholding his secrets about Trump’s alleged fascist inclinations, only to reveal them in what appears to be a coordinated media barrage a fortnight before the 2024 election.
One of Kelly’s current claims is that Trump doesn’t respect the outcome of elections.
Yet if the general thinks that the White House chief of staff’s role is to function as “protection” against the president, then it is he who is willing to ignore the wishes of the more than 60 million people who voted for Trump in 2016.
Exactly zero of whom voted for Kelly.
Gen. Kelly has been a faithful servant to the US military for more than 40 years.
More importantly than even that, perhaps, he is a Gold Star father.
He has given more to this nation than I would ever want to.
But he is proof that Trump Derangement Syndrome indeed knows no bounds.
Americans have come to expect as much from politicians, much of the media and political activists.
We deserve more from a White House chief of staff.
Mick Mulvaney, White House chief of staff under President Trump, is a contributor to NewsNation.