Once a Marine Corps general and then a White House chief of staff, John Kelly has seemingly fallen victim to that scourge of retirement: the combined evil of drugs and alcohol — that toxic brew so often abused by those elderly who've too much free time and too little to do.
Of Kelly's involvement in this geriatric goofjuice ring, we now have damning evidence. In lieu of diagnosed dementia, only a drug-addled, hooch-dazed cranium could conceive of something so ludicrous:
"I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place [as WH chief of staff]," reported Kelly, "I said whatever you do, don't hire a 'yes man,' someone who won't tell you the truth — don't do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached."
Instructing this president to forego a yes man — that singular animal species that Trump's enfeebled ego can tolerate — is pathetically futile enough. But it gets even worse:
"Someone has got to be a guide that tells [the president]," added Kelly, "that you either have the authority or you don't…. The system of advising, bringing in experts, having these discussions with the president so he can make an informed decision, that clearly is not in place…. I believe if I was still there or someone like me was there, he would not be kind of, all over the place."
When Kelly was there, was Trump a model of informed decision-making? A bit more than a year ago, when the general was indeed still there, "Anonymous" reported that "meetings with [Trump] veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions."
This president, continued Anonymous, is "impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective." Which is another way of saying that Trump is just being Trump, always has been, always will be.
Kelly's replacement, Mick Mulvaney, has been anything but an improvement — with one exception: He's much funnier than Kelly.
One imagines that the befuddled former Freedom Caucuser dipped into some of Kelly's left-behind gateway stash before blurting out at a press conference that which Trump had been denying for weeks: You're damn right the $400 million in Ukraine's military aid was the extortionist quid to Trump's profane quo. So get over it, you Constitution-abiding pansies, even if you can't handle the truth.
Mulvaney's statement was astoundingly short-tenured as the unrivaled Zaniest Thing To Be Shat By This White House. We thought it could not be done. But Stephanie Grisham, the executive asylum's press secretary, of sorts, managed to do the impossibly undoable.
She released a statement accusing Kelly of being "totally unequipped" to cope with the majestic splendor of Donald J. Trump, which Grisham otherwise called "the genius of our great President."
Thereupon observed MSNBC's unflappable Jonathan Alter: Grisham erred in her statement; she should have written "the genius of Dear Leader," since never before has a U.S. president aspired to the squalid monstrosities of every totalitarian thug.
We gather that Grisham either takes dictation from this horror of a small man who fancies himself not only a president, but a great one, or she too had dipped into Kelly's little treasure chest of chemical relief.
Before long, we — like the staggering, desperate subjects of Putin's hellish Russia — will all be popping diazepam and guzzling vodka just to get through one more day of Trump's hellish America.