White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and his military service are now nothing but a tool that will be overtly wielded as a weapon to shield the White House against all honest inquiries. That's exactly how Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders used Kelly's credentials as a former Marine general and Gold Star father to paint him and the outright lies he relayed Thursday as unassailable.
Asked about Kelly's false assertion that Rep. Frederica Wilson had bragged about securing $20 million for an FBI building during a naming ceremony in 2015, Sanders responded:
"If you want to go after General Kelly, that's up to you. If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general I think that's highly inappropriate."
In other words, reporters have no right to question the account of a former Marine general. Why? Because. That's why.
Asked about the experience of Sgt. La David Johnson's mother, who said she felt disrespected by Trump during his phone call to her family, Sanders flat out denied the experience of Johnson's mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson. It's "unfortunate" that Jones-Johnson "misunderstood," Sanders said, assuring reporters that Kelly—the absolute authority on all matters—experienced Trump's call as "very sympathetic, very respectful." Here's the whole answer:
Certainly if the spirit of which those comments were intended were misunderstood, that's very unfortunate. But as the president has said, as General Kelly said, who I think has a very deep understanding of what that individual would be going through, his comments were very sympathetic, very respectful. That was the spirit in which the president intended them. If they were taken any other way, that's certainly an unfortunate thing.
Let's just say it—that answer oozes racism. Sanders blames the black mother of a fallen soldier for misunderstanding Trump, as if Trump is known for his pitch-perfect graces in tricky emotional situations.
Then Sanders invalidates Jones-Johnson's entire experience by noting that Trump and Kelly both thought the call was "very respectful." In other words, forget what the grieving black mother thought, the white guys on the other end of the line know what really happened.
It's just gross. And supposedly Kelly wants to restore some "sacred" treatment of Gold Star families. Good god. The White House is now using his military service and rank to bulldoze a mother who lost her son just weeks ago.
The icing on the cake was Sanders blaming the media for perpetuating the story, after Trump drove the story into the ground all week and then the White House sent Kelly out Thursday to cover Trump's behind.
[The conversation] should have ended yesterday after General Kelly's comments. But it didn't. It continued and it's still continuing today. It's still the bulk of the coverage on most every TV you turn on, in most every newspaper you open up today, and the president responded to those continued accusations and continued mischaracterizations of his comments.
In case you're wondering, they also provided zero evidence to back up Kelly's $20 million lie about Rep. Wilson, and they won't be apologizing for it either. Sanders:
General Kelly said he was stunned that she made the comments about herself. And that was the point of what he said. That was what took place here yesterday and we still stand by those comments.
As one reporter noted, far from claiming outsized credit for herself during that 2015 dedication, Wilson made a point of praising FBI agents "effusively" in her speech.
If you want a breakdown of Wilson’s perfectly appropriate speech, you can find it here.