General Kelly's October Shock

...and the GOP's spittle-licking reaction.

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? — Joseph Welch to Joseph McCarthy back when things like shame mattered.

“He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Happy Thursday. The Election is in 12 days, and Donald Trump’s former chief of staff just made a 911 call. Is America too numb to listen?

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The October Shock

Be alarmed — be very alarmed — say the folks who knew him best. My latest:

In a remotely sane political universe, retired Gen. John Kelly’s “October shock” would turn the presidential race upside down.

Kelly, who was former President Donald Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, spent several hours with a New York Times reporter warning the American people that the man who may very well be our next president met the definition of a fascist and would govern like a dictator if given the chance. Kelly describes his former boss as someone who has no understanding of the Constitution or respect for the rule of law.

“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators,” Kelly told the Times. “He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

If that were not enough: Kelly says Trump told him that “Hitler did some good things” and that he wishes America’s generals were more like the führer’s. We are also getting new details about the depths of Trump’s contempt for the men and women who serve in the military, especially those who are wounded, killed or captured.

Of course, it would have been better if this had come out sooner and if more insiders throughout Trump’s orbit had spoken out.

But let’s not overlook how amazing — and terrifying — all of this is and what the American people are being told in the final two weeks of this campaign. All the alarms are flashing. All of the warnings are blaring. And they are coming not just from Democrats or those of us who have been Never Trump since the moment he descended his golden escalator.

This warning is from Trump’s former chief of staff, and it comes just a week after the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, called Trump “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person ever.” Trump’s former defense secretary Jim Mattis — another general — seconded Milley’s warning. 

Kelly’s interview comes after Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, refused to endorse him and after another former secretary of defense, Mark Esper, said Trump was a threat to democracy. 

It’s all breathtaking — or it would be, if we had not all gone numb over the last nine years. 

I call this an October shock, rather than a surprise, because Trump’s affinity for strongmen and brutality has been a feature of his politics from the beginning, and his rhetoric has been increasingly suffused with Reichian rhetoric. He refers to migrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. He has openly fantasized about deploying the military against his fellow Americans, some of whom he calls “the enemy within.”

In the early days of his first campaign, Trump mocked Sen. John McCain’s status as a POW, saying, “I like people who were not captured.” He called service members who were injured or killed “losers and suckers.” According to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Trump also told senior aides “that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action. To him, they could be left behind, because they had performed poorly by getting captured.”

But it is Trump’s appetite for power that is the most alarming. 

Kelly served with Trump in the Oval Office for nearly a year and a half. What he saw was a man who was angered by the limits on his power and who did “not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot.” 

Kelly describes a man who lacks even a basic appreciation for the fundamentals of this democracy. “He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America, America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that,” Kelly told The Times.

This should be disqualifying. This is disqualifying.

But will any of it make a difference? Does Kelly’s warning come too late to stop America’s sleepwalk toward authoritarianism? My honest answer is I do not know. I would like to think there’s a chance.

The Democratic polling firm Blueprint found that the best-testing closing argument against Trump is one that emphasizes the opposition of his former Cabinet and fellow Republicans. The needle moved significantly when voters were old, “Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him.”

So with less than two weeks to go, the Harris campaign has just been handed what seems to be an effective closing argument. Put it on television. Blanket the airwaves. Break through the information silos.

If Americans hear what Kelly and Mattis and Milley are saying, they might still vote for Trump. But they cannot say that were not warned.

Send in the clowns

This is a measure of how far we have come.

Eight years ago, at least some Republicans felt a twinge of shame after Trump was caught on tape talking about grabbing women by the pussy. Some (temporarily) edged away. But most caved and began that long, slow march toward sycophancy and nihilism that has culminated in their full embrace and defense of a rapey fascist and convicted felon.

“You start out saying you have to vote for Trump because of Hillary Clinton and wake up one day attacking General Kelly to defend a criminal wandering around the country talking about Arnold Palmer’s penis,” Stuart Stevens wrote Wednesday

But here we are. In 2024, everything is “baked in the cake.” The sedition. the lies. The bigotry and brutality. The indictments. The convictions. The admiration for Adolph Hitler.

On Wednesday, Kamala Harris reacted to the latest news: “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is.”

Republicans barely blinked. Few even bothered to pretend to care. Here’s New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu drinking deep from the chalice of self-humiliation, laughing off the latest reports:

And then there are merde-polishers of Fox News. Brian Klimeade suggested that Trump’s admiration for Hitler’s generals was understandable because maybe he didn’t know about the whole Nazi thing.

And I can absolutely see him going, now you know what, it would be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do — knowing that's a third — maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis and whatever.

“Okay, okay. Did you just ‘whatever’ the Holocaust?” asked the Daily Show’s Michael Kosta.

“’Whatever’ is for insignificant things, like when you put the plastic recycling in the paper recycling. It’s not ‘Oops, I did a genocide.’ I like that Kilmeade thinks praising Hitler is a ‘third rail,’ like it’s a taboo subject that’s not PC to discuss at the office anymore. ‘Ugh, you can’t even compliment a woman’s haircut or tell her about the good things Hitler did anymore. Thanks, woke police.’”

**

But Kilmeade was hardly alone.

A red-pilled Ben Shapiro brushed off the story as “the Left-wing media's latest oppo dump” and quickly pivoted to a discussion of black people committing crimes.

Not to be outdone, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly also flexed their capacity for suckitude by offering cringey defenses of Trump’s fetish for Nazi generals. Here’s O’Reilly with head deeply up his Spin Zone:

What's the context of the Hitler remark by General Kelly? Silence. Nobody knows what the context is. Was it a discussion about the effectiveness of the Wehrmacht during World War II? Was that the discussion? What was the discussion? No one knows. Okay. 

Number two, who witnessed this, beside Kelly? No one. Okay. So, you're in territory where the haters, the Trump haters take whatever they can get and throw it out as fact. 

CNN’s reliably spittle-licking MAGA pundit, Scott Jennings, also did not disappoint, as he complained about “thousands of Hitlers running around this country right now, running around college campuses.”

**

Exit take: My friend, Tom Nichols writes: “Trump’s Depravity Will Not Cost Him This Election.”

For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting. (Just ask Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who each in their own way tried to run as a Trump alternative.)

Meanwhile…

This is kind of a BFD. “Waukesha mayor endorses Kamala Harris; red city mayor plans to vote blue.”

The mayor of Waukesha, a key Republican stronghold, exclusively told FOX6 News he's voting for Democrat Kamala Harris for president.

It's a Republican city in Wisconsin's largest Republican county.

Mayor Shawn Reilly grew up a Republican and voted that way for most of his adult life.

"It's difficult. The easy thing to do is just not say anything and cast my vote the way I want, but I think we're at a crossroads now," Reilly said. "I feel in my heart that this is something that I need to come out and say: I am going to be voting for Vice President Harris to become our next president."

Reilly voted third party in 2016 and for President Joe Biden in 2020 but kept that to himself. For other officers, he said he votes Republican "more often than not."

Now this red city mayor is publicly endorsing blue for president.

"It is a vote against Trump," he said. "I am terrified of Donald Trump becoming our next president for all the reasons I have indicated: he's already been impeached twice. He's been convicted of felonies and this is not what the United States needs."

**

Nota bene: Reilly was at the Harris-Cheney event Monday night. I had some more thoughts in Tuesday’s Atlantic about the outreach to Republicans.

[This] election could come down to a sliver of a percent, and the Harris campaign has decided to make a concerted play for disillusioned and discarded Republican voters in places like Waukesha County, where we met Monday night.

In April’s GOP presidential primary, Nikki Haley won about 14 percent of the vote in Waukesha County. Some of those voters [including Reilly] were in the audience Monday when Cheney made it clear to them that voting for a Democrat was okay because Trump should never be allowed in any office of public trust again.

Perhaps her words will give a few Republican voters the cover they need to put country over party.

You can read the rest here.

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