Trump’s Awfulness Doesn’t Make Old Smears Any More Credible Than They Were in 2020

Supporters of Ron DeSantis need to remember that we're trying to replace MAGA, not emulate its worst qualities.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, those who fight MAGA must take care not to become MAGA. Some online opponents of renominating Donald Trump for president have lost sight of that in reaction to comments this week by Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly.

First, a background refresher: In 2020, The Atlantic published an anonymously-sourced story claiming that Trump had canceled a visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France, which holds U.S. war dead from World War I, because it was “filled with losers” and “suckers” who weren’t worth honoring if it meant rain mussing up his hair, according to statements he supposedly told staffers, and that inclement weather was just a pretext.

Nobody in a position to know was willing to attach their names to the allegations at the time, but numerous people with Trump during the time in question were willing to attest on the record that they never heard anything close to those quotes come out of his mouth, and that weather really was the reason for cancellation (as further corroborated by Navy documents). Notably, among those unambiguously debunking the hit piece’s logic was Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who by that point was a vehement Trump critic with every incentive to back up a damaging story about his old boss.

Fast-forward to Monday, when Kelly gave the following statement to CNN:

What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

Naturally, CNN takes this statement as “confirming, on the record, a number of details” from the Atlantic story. And because Trump is no longer an incumbent Republican president, now stands in the way of nominating a real conservative for the presidency, and has gotten substantially worse since 2020, many who previously defended him from such smears will naturally feel more inclined to believe the worst of him this time around. Anecdotally, I’ve seen several fellow DeSantis supporters on social media promote Kelly’s words.

The temptation is understandable, but not excusable, as a review of both Kelly’s statement and the previously-available information makes clear.

First, note that Kelly says Trump “wouldn’t visit their graves in France,” suggesting the trip’s cancellation was Trump’s decision. But as mentioned above, we have the military emails confirming it was a weather call, and Bolton—again, no friend to or spinner for Trump—depicts Kelly himself as involved in the “straightforward decision” to “recommend” canceling.

Second, among those aforementioned denials was former White House deputy chief of staff Zach Fuentes, a top aide to Kelly who “said he was in the room for all of the conversations regarding the trip to the Aisne-Marne cemetery, and that he would know what was and wasn't said,” and who dismissed as absurd the notion that “General Kelly would have stood by and let ANYONE call fallen Marines losers.”

Third, Kelly is hardly an unbiased source. Upon his departure from the administration he was all-too happy to milk his “jaded insider” status for the left-wing media circuit, and his true colors shined through on multiple occasions, from affirming that he “probably” would have served a Hillary Clinton White House, to pushing the lie that Trump said Mexican illegal immigrants were “all rapists.” In his statement to CNN, Kelly demonstrates that casual relationship to the truth yet again by tossing in the claim that Trump showed “open contempt” for “all Gold Star families” in 2016 (what actually happened was that Trump pretty tamely responded to a Democrat National Convention speaker who viciously attacked him on stage, whom Democrats were exploiting because he happened to be a Gold Star father).

Kelly’s statement reads not like an insider finally shedding light on an incident after years of silence, but rather like a generic tirade that could have been produced with equal detail by skimming mainstream media headlines from the last eight years. Is it possible that Trump holds, and has expressed in the presence of others, such vile opinions about killed and wounded soldiers? Sure; the man displays his mental derangement on a daily basis on Truth Social. But “theoretically could have happened” is a long way from “did happen,” and basic intellectual honesty demands a high burden of proof for claims of this nature and severity.

And no, Trump’s grotesque 2015 dismissal of John McCain’s heroism as a Vietnam POW because “I like people who weren’t captured” doesn’t meet that burden. That attack was both morally obscene and indicative of serious psychological issues, but was also clearly rooted in preexisting personal animosity between Trump and McCain, and fit Trump’s habit of saying anything about anyone he feuds with regardless of truth or taste, not a pattern of contempt for soldiers. If anything, the relationship between it and the Atlantic story was mostly likely the other way around—the latter quotes were probably based on the McCain attack, on the theory that people who already hated Trump would remember it, fabricating a pattern.

So why does all this matter? Why did someone who sees Donald Trump as an enemy just spend so many words defending him? Certainly not for Trump’s sake. No, it’s because we’re never going to beat him—or, just as important, make beating him worthwhile—by acting just like him.

One of the reasons the Left and NeverTrump’s attacks on Donald never landed is that crossing the line from his actual sins and defects into exaggerations and lies and double-standards always backfires. It generates more sympathy than he deserves and feeds the narrative that “they” resort to such tactics because he’s a threat to them (never mind that he manifestly isn’t). The absolute truth about the man is the only thing with the potential to resonate with anyone who is sympathetic to him because they’ve been misinformed, but not locked into MAGA cult mentality.

More fundamentally, I for one was under the impression that we were trying to nominate DeSantis instead of Trump because we didn’t like Trump’s habit of running with whatever wild claims he finds on the internet without giving a damn whether they’re true or false.

Of course we shouldn’t emulate MAGA’s worst qualities. That would defeat our entire reason for being here: replacing Trump and his cancerous influence with something that can win, deserves to win, and is able to turn victory into the foundation for something worth preserving.