John Kelly, Chief of Staff to President Trump, Tells High-Level Republican Politicians That It’s OK to Criticize the President For His Behavior in Helsinki

A bizarre piece ran in “The Hill” yesterday that described the testimony of three anonymous witnesses who reported that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly gave high-level Republican politicians oral permission to criticize President Trump’s statements at his press conference with Vladimir Putin.  In fact, some Republicans like the leaders of the House and Senate obliquely rebuked the statements as being a mistake, pointedly saying, “Russia is not our friend.”  McCain, who is homebound with brain cancer, gave the most negative remarks about the president’s behavior; other retiring Republican Senators and Congressmen were also highly critical.  Only the former head of the CIA, John Brennan, went so far as to describe Trump’s behavior as “treasonous.”

The remarkable thing is that John Kelly would give permission to leading Republicans to make critical remarks– it seems that Trump has disregarded Mr. Kelly’s instructions on how to behave at the meeting with Putin, and Kelly was angry about this.  What is worse, Kelly reasons that Trump’s behavior might worsen the situation with the investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller going on right now.  In other words, embracing Russia might seem like a quid-pro-quo for whatever Putin has on Trump– whether it is kompromat, details of money-laundering schemes, secret financing, or you name it.

This suggests that John Kelly is likely to resign his post soon, probably because he can’t stand it anymore.  He probably feels that Trump doesn’t take his advice anyway so there is no way to influence  him.  Trump doesn’t respect Kelly because he’s not rich– he only listens to people who are at least multi-millionaires.

Mr. Trump’s 24-hour turnaround, from “would” to “wouldn’t” at a news conference that unfolded with an eerie blackout just after he had spoken his words of contrition makes sense if we presume that he got an earful from Mr. Kelly when he returned to the White House.  Mr. Trump’s advisors would have forcefully reminded him that all the intelligence agencies are certain that Russia is the culprit in the hacking cases and that Russia is our enemy, not the European Union.

Thus unreels the destruction of American federal government by the election of a man fundamentally unfit to be president.  Once this is over there must be a law enacted to prevent it ever happening again.

(photo of upside-down car in Helsinki courtesy of pixabay.com and leebest90)