General John Kelly crosses the line and joins Donald Trump in the gutter

| 5:18 pm EDT October 19, 2017
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When you work for a senile malignant narcissist like Donald Trump, there can be a fine line between publicly saying enough ignorant things to keep him happy so you can keep your job and thus keep him in line, and simply enabling him. When it comes to General John Kelly, that line was crossed today in rather disgusting fashion – and for Kelly, there may be no coming back from it.

General Kelly took to the White House podium today to try to explain away Trump’s abhorrent behavior toward the family of a fallen U.S. soldier. We’ve seen Kelly do this before. We’ve all cut him some slack, with the understanding that Trump expects his underlings to publicly defend his every indefensible move. But today was different. Kelly didn’t just misguidedly defend Trump. He took things further by attacking Congresswoman Frederica Wilson by name – and attacking the family of the fallen soldier by extension.

Kelly insisted that Congresswoman Wilson was out of line when she publicly stated that Donald Trump had told the military widow that her husband “knew what he signed up for.” But everyone involved knows that Wilson is close with the family, and was speaking on their behalf. Thus, Kelly was criticizing the family of the fallen soldier for having gone public with Trump’s offensive remarks. That’s simply not okay.

Whether John Kelly was intending to throw the family of the fallen soldier under the bus, or whether he simply took his remarks too far in unintentional fashion, he crossed a line today. He didn’t simply defend Donald Trump’s latest gutter move; he joined Trump in the gutter. Kelly has a lifetime of service to America built up as goodwill – but what he said today was indefensible. If he’s not willing to publicly apologize to the soldier’s family, he’ll have become no better than Trump himself.