Thursday, February 8, 2018

The Trump Taint

By this time, it seems that Donald Trump has a corrupting effect on just about everybody he comes into contact with. Take, for instance, John Kelly, who rose through the ranks of the US Marine Corps, then was nominated Secretary of Homeland Security before being appointed White House Chief of Staff. If Kelly had refused to serve under the Trump administration, he probably would have been remembered as an honorable and good man, a dedicated public servant. Well, that's all gone to shit, like anything that falls into Donald Trump's clutches.

Kelly has revealed his rather lackluster racism (heh, lazy Hispanics are going to steal your jobs, paradoxically) and now he's on record as having defended a serial wife-beater. Put simply, this man with a remarkable career has turned out to be a shitbag. The real question about the Trump taint is whether Trump surrounds himself with deplorable people, or whether being around Trump actually makes people more bigoted... it's probably a mixture of the two- Trump chooses people with unsavory characteristics as his minions, and the normalization of vileness makes them even more unsavory.

I really can't muster any sympathy for Kelly. I could be intoning 'how the mighty have fallen', but the guy chose to throw in his lot with the most contemptible politician in US history, so his sink into a moral morass was entirely predictable.

1 comment:

mikey said...

I think you give him way too much credit.

Kelly clearly is a true believer in the core of Trump's rather limited 'ideology' - that of white male supremacy, use of violence as solution to disagreements and a strong authoritarian bent. He went to work for the Trump administration not in spite of his core beliefs, but because of them.

And it should come as NO surprise whatsoever that these people don't feel any empathy for battered women and children - they're just collateral damage caused by their own actions in the face of powerful, brilliant men.

Once again, if it wasn't for the photograph, this piece of shit would still be a rising star in government. The growth of ubiquitous digital imaging has been a two edged sword, but it has done some very good things....