From honour to disgrace
As if the pile of disturbing evidence wasn’t already high enough, the world has learned a couple of more appalling things about Donald Trump since Monday morning.
It learned first that he turned his presidential campaign over to a man now formally charged with money laundering and tax evasion. It was always known that Paul Manafort, who chaired the Trump operation for much of 2016, was an unscrupulous influence-peddler on a global scale. Now he’s officially accused of having being an unregistered foreign agent for a Kremlin front-man.
The conventional wisdom is that the charges levelled against Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates, don’t actually prove anything about Trump. The illicit activities they are accused of happened before they got involved in the Trump campaign early last year.
But they speak volumes about Trump and the type of people he surrounds himself with. Manafort had been a hired mouthpiece for dictators and strongmen for years, and his offer to chair Trump’s campaign free of charge was a transparent attempt to trade on that position. Simply by allowing such a man into his operation, Trump flung open the door wide to potential foreign influence. And, in fact, while Manafort was running the show the Trump campaign did try to use its Russia connections to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.
That’s bad enough, but it comes as no surprise. Manafort’s dubious foreign dealings were well known and many commentators predicted no good would come of inviting such a flagrant manipulator into Trump’s camp, long before special counsel Robert Mueller dug up evidence that he has committed actual crimes.
The world learned something else about the Trump administration on Monday that actually will come as a surprise to some. It learned that John Kelly, the retired Marine general who has served as White House chief of staff since late July, isn’t quite what people thought he was — or who they wanted him to be.
He’s not the moderate “adult in the room,” the man hired to make sure Trump doesn’t spin entirely out of control. In fact, it turns out that he’s more like what one CNN commentator aptly labelled “Trump’s Mini Me.”
Invited to weigh in on the controversy about Civil War-era history and what to do with the Confederate monuments littering the southern states, Kelly conspicuously did not take the calming, diplomatic route.
Instead, he waded in enthusiastically, calling the southern general Robert E. Lee an “honourable man” and blaming the Civil War on a “lack of an ability to compromise” — instead of, say, slavery. And he resurrected Trump’s racially charged “both sides” language from the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., by reflecting that “men and women of good faith on both sides” fought the war.
These are not the words of a man seeking to calm the waters in the wake of the president’s insensitive, inflammatory and arguably racist language. Just the opposite: they amount to a doubling-down on a tone-deaf discourse that does an injustice to history and slights the perceptions of Black people. Exactly like the language used by Trump, in other words.
Serving a president or president-to-be used to be considered a high honour for anyone aspiring to work in American political life. Among the many damaging things Trump has done is to turn this honour into its opposite.
He has brought men, like Manafort, who are manifestly unfit to serve into the heart of his campaign and the White House. And even those thought to be exceptions, it turns out, cannot withstand the erosion of values that comes with enabling this president. Kelly now stands as a warning to anyone else who believes he can serve Trump and escape with his honour intact.
Serving a president used to be considered a high honour in American political life. Among the many damaging things Donald Trump has done is to turn this honour into its opposite