By Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu
Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly has been reflecting on the President’s temperament, which led after four chaotic years to his incitement of a mob assault on the US Capitol. “From a distance, it’s impossible to understand who he actually is,” Kelly said in an unusually candid and disturbing interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
The respected retired general observes the military code of never speaking ill of the chain of command, and doesn’t typically badmouth his former boss in public. But he now says that if he were still in the Cabinet, he’d argue Trump was unfit for office and to invoke the 25th Amendment.
Trump’s personality deficiencies are no secret, with publicly vengeful, vain and juvenile behavior every day. So perhaps Kelly should have understood what he was in for when he went to the West Wing.
But he sought to explain why respected US officials stayed in their posts even as Trump obliterated their reputations — at least in the early years of his term. “When you begin to start working for him and understand how flawed he is, then it’s a matter of staying in the job as long as you can stand it and try to prevent some disaster,” he said. Kelly also partly blamed events like Wednesday’s riot on successors’ failure to “manage” the President. (It’s always troubling to hear the man with America’s nuclear codes characterized as a child.)
The Capitol siege has magnified long-standing concern about Trump’s temperament. Whatever you think of his politics, the final days fretting over Trump’s psychological state and his fitness for the job underscore what should have been obvious for years: His presidency is a tragic, historic mistake.
