Former leader in Trump’s inner circle coming to Fresno to talk politics
More than a year after leaving the White House, where he served as President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly said he remains concerned over whether the president has people in his inner circle who are willing to stand up to some of his impulses and instincts.
Kelly, who will be in Fresno on Wednesday to discuss the U.S. role in worldwide geopolitics at the San Joaquin Valley Town Hall lecture series, told The Bee this week that “there used to be” people within the White House who could offer frank and honest counsel to President Trump to dissuade him from policy and political missteps – without being banished for disloyalty.
It echoes what Kelly told a political conference in October, where he said he warned the president against hiring a “yes man” to succeed him as chief of staff because it could lead to his impeachment.
“The number one thing that a president, or any leader, to offer to any subordinate is the ability to speak truth to power, to say, ‘This is not a good idea,’” Kelly told The Bee in a telephone interview on Monday. “The president deserves to be served by a staff who is straightforward and honest. The number one loyalty we have as a staff is to the Constitution of the United States.”
Kelly served in the Marine Corps for more than 40 years, retiring in early 2016 as a four-star general and commander of the U.S. Southern Command. He was recruited by the Trump administration to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security, a position he held for about six months before the president named him as his chief of staff. He stepped down from the White House post at the end of 2018.
It’s one thing for a staff to examine whether the president has the Constitutional authority to take a certain action; it’s another to be able to tell him no, or address whether it’s appropriate, Kelly said. “My job as chief of staff was to make sure that the president – our president, our nation’s president – understood that, ‘Yes, you can do it, sir, but let’s talk about maybe the best way to do it, or if this is the best time to do it.”
Ideally, complex issues would involve bringing together Cabinet officials and outside experts “for a discussion as to whether (something) makes sense to do right now,” Kelly added. “That’s what I did for the better part of 19 months.”
“I look back over the past year and just wonder if that’s the way they’re doing business now,” he said of the current decision-making processes inside the White House.
A range of threats
One major and recent point of controversy for the White House was authorizing the drone airstrike that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq on Jan. 3. Soleimani’s death sparked large protests in Iran and escalated tensions in the volatile region, including retaliatory missile strikes lobbed by the Iranian military at American military bases in Iraq.
The president gave a green light to the drone attack on Soleimani because there was too great of a threat of an attack by Iran against American interests in the region, said Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On Twitter, President Trump said that Soleimani was planning “a very big attack” but offered no details on the nature of the threat.
“I’m not making any criticism here, but I know they’re having a tough time defining ‘imminent’” in terms of American risks of attack by Iran, Kelly told The Bee. “Frankly, if Mark Milley says so, I’ll take his word for it.”
The number of threats surfaced by U.S. intelligence agencies is immense, he added. “When I was there, every single day the people from the intelligence community come in and outline multiple threats against our country every day, both here in the homeland and around the world, our bases, our embassies,” Kelly said. “The threats are constant, and many of them are, in fact, of the nature of happening sooner rather than later.”
Kelly said his counsel “was always, always to go to Capitol Hill (to advise congressional leaders) on everything, except if it was something that’s going to happen right now.”
“I’ve always been a believer that the U.S. Congress, as a separate but equal part of the government, has to be involved – not in approval, but in decision making,” he said. “If we saw Iran start to go down the road of developing nuclear weapons, combined with their research and development to build an intercontinental ballistic missile that can range Europe or Israel, that’s when you tell Congress that in one or two or three years’ time they can have a missile” capable of delivering a nuclear weapon.
“The Constitution more than suggests that they (Congress) have a role in waging war against another country,” Kelly said.
In the meantime, there are plenty of other threats, said Kelly, who said he’s sworn oaths 19 times in his lifetime to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution … against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
“The only true existential threat to the U.S. are nuclear weapons that can be delivered from, say Russia,” Kelly said. “They have a considerable arsenal of weapons that can range the U.S. … in under 25 minutes.”
But the U.S., Russia and “most reasonable powers on the planet understand that nuclear weapons are almost beyond a last resort,” he added. “No one among responsible nations really talks about using them.”
But other nations with nuclear capabilities, such as Pakistan and India, aren’t as adept at managing their arsenals as mere deterrents, Kelly said. As for North Korea, “the good news is they can’t range us … but they can range most of our allies” with missiles. “And for Iran, I can only say I hope they don’t get nuclear weapons.”
Domestic divisions
Domestically, Kelly bemoaned the propensity for the degree of political vitriol that has been increasingly fueled by social media and talk radio to foment division.
“There was a time when we could have conversations and disagree, without calling names or come away believing the other person was a bad person,” he said. “They aren’t bad people, but the issue is that we cannot have a discussion without everything being viscerally personal.”
The media, he added, bears some responsibility. “I believe the media is absolutely essential to our democracy; they are not the enemy of the people,” Kelly said, using a phrase that President Trump has in the past used to discredit journalists. But, Kelly said he believes some of those divisions have been increased, in part, by journalists “who have taken sides,” whether of a liberal or conservative political stripe.
“People that I talk to across the country are pretty disgusted by Washington in general, and in particular by Congress and by the president, because he’s pretty polarizing,” Kelly said. “I hope we can get back to a point where Congress can truly debate things and not make it personal and tribal.”
If you go:
- Who: Gen. John F. Kelly, USMC (retired)
- What: San Joaquin Valley Town Hall lecture series
- When: 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 15
- Details: valleytownhall.com/speakers/2019-2020/john-kelly/
