John Kelly’s working assumption on Rob Porter: what’s the problem?
Months ago, Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly guaranteed that he would eventually bring down upon himself the ire of feminists and pro-feminists, when he allowed wife-beater Rob Porter to continue working in the White House. He did this despite having been warned by the FBI that allegations of domestic abuse made Porter a target for blackmail, and therefore he should not be given a permanent security clearance.
If Kelly thought that he could keep the allegations against Porter permanently under wraps, then he is even more politically naive than he has already shown himself to be on several occasions.
However, I hesitate to attribute even to Kelly that level of political clumsiness. Rather—as we now know from Kelly’s fulsome praise of Porter even after Porter’s terrorizing two former wives had been made public—Kelly had taken the news from the FBI with an attitude that boiled down to “so what?” It seems very likely that Kelly did not consider Porter’s spousal abuse a disqualification for a position in the White House—after all, Donald Trump himself had bragged about assaulting women, and then gotten elected President of the United States. And maybe, just maybe, the women were lying.
Therefore (in Kelly-think), Porter would not be subject to blackmail. That’s because in the worst case Porter could ride out the storm under protection from the administration’s supporters—the latter could be counted on to launch a smear campaign against the wives, throwing a mudstorm of doubt over Porter’s culpability. Having received the report from the FBI months ago, Kelly believed that it was just not that big a deal.
Whether this reasoning was wholly conscious on Kelly’s part is open to question. I believe it was not. The “so what?” mentality is implicit in his male chauvinist worldview. Does John Kelly really condone wife-beating? I think not. But he still holds the view that wife-beating is mitigated by service to country—that the abuser should not be fired for relatively minor (in Kelly-think) offenses. This judgment persisted for the months that Porter was kept in his job after the FBI reported the potential for blackmail, and the reasons for it. It persisted even while Porter, potentially a target for blackmail, continued to handle highly classified documents.
During this last week, Kelly discovered that a major proportion of the public does consider it a big deal. That probably surprised him. His defense of Porter rested on the argument that Porter was doing a good job as a “trusted professional,” and got along well with co-workers in the White House, all of which should have justified keeping him on, no matter what charges were brought against him short of hospitalizing his victims.
Porter’s good job performance was, unsurprisingly, also a mitigating factor in the view of Donald Trump, who implied, in defiance of common sense, that the allegations against Porter were false. Is it possible that Trump actually believes that Porter is innocent? If Porter is guilty, would it really matter to Donald Trump? No more than it mattered to John Kelly, and probably less.
More on the situation ethics of John Kelly
Defending Rob Porter on the grounds of his good job performance was reminiscent of Kelly defending Robert E. Lee’s embrace of the Confederacy because, in Kelly’s words: “I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days.” *
Situation ethics always calls into play a measure of degree. Every day during sentencing, judges and juries take into account both the magnitude of the crime and the context in which it occurred. The degree of the offense, and the mitigating strength of the context, matter.** It is one thing for a mother to shoplift groceries to feed her kids (a small wrong), quite another for a man to beat, half-strangle, and threaten his spouse (a big wrong) because he has mood problems. Robert E. Lee’s treason–responsible for at least 100,000 deaths from prolongation of the Civil War—is about as big a wrong as you can do without being a psychopath, and John Kelly believes it was justified by Lee’s allegiance to a slave state.
Kelly’s past record of disparaging and disbelieving women sings the same misogynistic tune as we’ve heard from him in the White House, as recounted in Jen Kirby in Vox: Kelly’s male chauvinist history
What is happening with Kelly is that his frame of reference—his context—is a waning culture. Fifty years ago, the President’s chief of staff calling a congresswoman an “empty barrel” (as he repeatedly called Representative Frederica Wilson) would not have triggered much more than a wince from most observers—oh, he just overreacted. In 2017, it is recognized as an unacceptably demeaning insult to a woman’s (and especially a female public servant’s) character. That’s because women’s stature in the culture has grown significantly in the last fifty years. It’s now undergoing a growth spurt as a result of the bright light being shed on misogyny and exploitation of women as never before. Still a long way to equality, but it’s trending.
The long view: potential for deep transformation
When the Tea Party—conspicuously angry, bigoted, racist, patriarchal, and regressive—took control of the U.S. Congress in 2010, I thought here’s the last spasm of a dying culture that will, like a rogue wave crashing upon the shore, finally exhaust itself and subside. I was so wrong. Trump has re-energized that angry, bigoted, racist, patriarchal, and regressive portion of our society—his core following—by embodying their worst traits and being proud of it.
But there’s a tide of change, having its source far out in the sea of possibilities of which humanity is capable, that is slowly but irresistibly approaching—a deep perturbance, often hidden, often slowed, but patiently mounting. That’s my hypothesis, on which I will expand in future posts on Is It still a Man’s World?
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* I addressed the dangers of John Kelly occupying the position of Chief of Staff in an earlier post to be found here.
** Who is not appalled by the sentencing of the fictional Jean Valjean (in Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables) to five years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving sister’s family? (In real life, Victor Hugo observed police arresting a man for stealing a loaf of bread, although it is not known what kind of sentence the thief got.)