Gen. Kelly struck the right note

As most of you know, I am not an avid supporter of the president, but neither do I despise him.

But when I see a problem, I call it out, and this week I saw a problem with the way that Donald Trump reacted to the whole military casualty crisis. Initially, it was a crisis of his own making. When journalists attempted to get information about what had happened to our servicemen who had been killed in Niger, he somehow sensed that he was being criticized, He was probably right, because it’s no secret that the press corps likes to needle him even while they presume to seek truth. That Diogenes lamp they are holding up has a bit of a taser attached to it as well, and it’s pretty clear that some of those folk aren’t just asking questions: They are setting traps. And that’s okay, presidents should be smart enough to know when they are being challenged by reporters who want to be on “Morning Joe” so they can say “Hey ma, look at me!”

Trump, however, is too concerned with his own “Hey ma, look at me, I’m president!” zeitgeist that he falls right into the traps that they set. So when he decided to respond to a question about the Niger ambush by essentially saying that he was more attentive to the survivors of our fallen soldiers than most other presidents (spelled P-R-E-S-I-D-E-N-T-O-B-A-M-A) he ended up putting his foot in his mouth. In suggesting that his predecessor had not called the families of the deceased, he was both factually wrong and, more importantly, he opened the door to a much more personal crisis. This time, it wasn’t his fault, and this time, it was much worse than his socially tone-deaf gaffe.

When he finally decided to contact the families of those killed in Niger, he apparently acted like an elephant in a China shop by telling the widow that “he knew what he signed up for” and then adding that it was still a great loss.

When I heard the initial version president’s words, I immediately knew that you had to view them in context. To me, and to any sensient human being, he couldn’t have been saying that the dead soldier had deserved to die because he had assumed the risk, God no. But the sounds of those words were so harsh and so unrelentingly cruel at such a mournful moment that you had to wonder if Trump was even capable of true empathy.

I believe that he is, but I believe that the path from his heart to his mouth is a twisted and tortuous one, and the goodness gets lost in the miasma of turns. Still, his inability to articulate profound feelings well and the fact that his narcissism is always an obstacle to authenticity does not make him a bad man. It just makes him the kind of man you do not want calling your loved ones in times of grief.

The type of person you do want reaching out is a man who has been through the hellfires of grief, and knows how to choose words wisely, so they touch the heart and not the raw and open wounds of that grief. General John Kelly is that sort of man.

When Kelly, the president’s chief of staff and a Gold Star father himself, took the podium on Thursday to do triage in the wake of the media hurricane, we saw exactly how you deal with this subject.

Kelly wore the invisible uniform of the grieving father, and the helmet of truth. He pushed back against both the critics from the left and the apologists from the right, showing how it is that a great man deals with the loss of patriots. He also reminded us, in his sober dignity, that those who take a knee at football games are sending constitutional bullets through the heart of those heroic men and women who died for our freedoms.

Kelly was right to criticize Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, whose antipathy towards this administration moved her to make public a private conversation between a widow and the Commander-in-Chief of her husband. Some have said that the widow asked her to do so, and while there is no evidence of that, the possibility doesn’t change the sad fact that the sanctity of such a moment was shattered for political purposes.

That is despicable, and disrespects the deceased much more than any comments from a president who is trudging clumsily through this tragic moment.

The only one who struck the right tone, and the heart, was General Kelly. All the rest is noise.