USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: Porter abuse scandal exposes uncomfortable truths
Domestic violence comes in many faces
The face of domestic violence might be easier to ignore when it’s not the face you expect.
That is one of the many uncomfortable truths revealed by the White House handling — or, more precisely, mishandling — of domestic abuse accusations against Rob Porter, the top presidential aide who resigned last week.
Clean-cut Harvard graduate. Rhodes scholar. Longtime aide to a respected senator from Utah and son of a top aide to former president George H.W. Bush. Perhaps that’s why President Trump was still singing Porter’s praises Friday, stressing his assertions of innocence, and questioning in a Saturday tweet whether there is still “due process” in this country.
Everyone deserves due process, of course, but two things were glaringly absent in Trump’s comments: any mention of women shattered by domestic violence, and any reference to a second abuse allegation at the White House, against a speechwriter who resigned Friday.
Domestic violence, contrary to popular myth, crosses all socioeconomic lines. And yet when the violence involves the upper crust, it is too often considered an aberration or untrue.
In 1985, Charlotte Fedders, a suburban Maryland wife and mother of five who was abused by her husband for 18 years, became for a time the nation’s best-known victim of domestic abuse. Why? Because her husband, a lawyer, held an important position in the Reagan administration. Charlotte Fedders said later that she had told a doctor, her priest and the county police, but got little or no help.
This happens at all levels of society. Only 56% of non-fatal domestic violence is even reported to law enforcement. Over a 12-year-period ending in 2014, more than half the killings of American women analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were related to violence by intimate partners.
Domestic abuse allegations can be a land mine for everyone involved. Accusations can be false, used strategically by a spouse during bitter battles over custody, alimony or who will get the family home.
Nothing about this is simple, except a lesson: Accusations of domestic violence cannot be ignored. They ought to be investigated thoroughly and with an open mind. Too many people dismiss, disbelieve, or paper the accusations over with excuses.
That shouldn’t happen anywhere. It certainly shouldn’t happen in the White House.
Abuse case tarnishes staff chief’s brass
As a retired four-star Marine Corps general, John Kelly bore sterling credentials when he was named last July as White House chief of staff. He quickly won rave reviews for bringing discipline to a disordered White House. But the more we see of the chisel-jawed retired officer and former Homeland Security chief, the less he looks like the turnaround artist the administration needs.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders had portrayed Kelly as beyond reproach, cautioning a reporter last October: “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star … that’s something highly inappropriate.”
Well, let’s go there anyway, because Kelly is starting to display some of the dismissive views of minorities, women and immigrants more typically associated with his boss, the president.
Last week, Kelly initially leaped to the defense of Porter, insisting that Porter is “a man of true integrity” with whom he is “proud to serve,” abandoning this argument only after images surfaced of one ex-wife’s bruised face.
This came hard on the heels of Kelly’s gratuitous comment about hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, brought to the United States as children, as being “too lazy to get off their asses” and sign up for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
In recent months, the staff chief also: helped torpedo a promising immigration deal; blamed the Civil War on a failure to reach “compromise” on the issue of slavery; and falsely disparaged an African-American congresswoman.
White House aide Kellyanne Conway said Sunday that the president retains “full faith” in his embattled chief of staff. Yet Kelly’s recent behavior raises the question of whether the retired Marine is changing the White House for the better, or whether prolonged exposure to Trump is changing Kelly for the worse.
In this administration, good help is hard to come by
Trump has often said that he would hire only the “best people” for his administration.
So how do you explain Porter, who resigned Wednesday as staff secretary after two ex-wives accused him of domestic violence?
Or Michael Flynn, who resigned as national security adviser less than a month after being hired and then pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI?
Or the Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Price, who was forced out after racking up $400,000 in taxpayer-funded private jet charters?
Or the White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, whose 11-day chaos-and-expletive-ridden tenure was a gift to the late-night comics?
Or the mercurial Trump strategist Steve Bannon, whose ties to white nationalist groups made him controversial from the beginning, or Bannon’s oddball ally, Sebastian Gorka?
And then there’s Omarosa Manigault-Newman, the one-woman wrecking ball whose qualifications for a senior White House job were largely limited to her appearances on reality television shows. A White House spokesman said Omarosa was fired three times from The Apprentice and once from the Trump administration, making us wonder why she was hired in the first place.
The sad reality is that Trump is stymied because many people competent enough to serve don’t want anything to do with his administration. That leaves the president slim pickings for a number of key positions.
It also leaves him with a track record of ignoring red flags.
Former president Barack Obama had warned Trump about Flynn, a former general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency until he was fired in 2014. And Price’s slippery trading in health care stocks would have disqualified him from the HHS post in most any other administration.
As for Porter, his alleged misdeeds had apparently been known to senior White House staffers for months.
That leaves us mulling a proper slogan for Trump hires. Rather than “only the best,” it should be “you just can’t get good help these days.”