The real reason John Kelly’s “idiot” remark about Donald Trump just leaked
Now we know that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly sees Donald Trump in pretty much the way the rest of us do. Kelly has been repeatedly calling Trump an “idiot” behind his back over the past months, and no less than eight inside sources have all blabbed about it to NBC News. The question isn’t so much why Kelly feels this way or why he said what he did, but why it’s leaking now.
The key words in the NBC News report are that John Kelly has been making these remarks “in recent months.” So why are we just hearing about it now? Why not months ago? If this were a case of Kelly having finally repeated the remark to the wrong loose lipped staffer, why would seven other staffers also be willing to confirm it? The bottom line: this isn’t happenstance. This is something organized.
There are a couple possibilities here. One is that a group of John Kelly’s underlings have gotten sick of him, and collectively decided to leak this to the media today in the hope that it’ll lead to his demise. Another possibility is that Donald Trump has decided he wants Kelly gone, and because he’s too much of a coward to just fire the guy, he’s instead instructed his staffers to leak this to the media. Yet another possibility is that Trump had this leaked today as a distraction from the real news he didn’t want anyone paying attention to.
Just a few hours before John Kelly’s remark hit the newswires, we learned from federal election records that Donald Trump has funneled more than a quarter million dollars in campaign money to Michael Cohen to pay for his legal bills. Did Trump and his allies whip up this “idiot” controversy on purpose, to distract from that? Or are forces in the White House – Trump himself and/or others – truly trying to plot Kelly’s demise?
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report