Sometimes you drain the swamp, sometimes it drains you

When a reporter at the White House on Friday asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the glaring discrepancy between Kelly’s account and the actual speech, she said that the White House stood by his remarks. “There was a lot of grandstanding,” she said. “He was stunned that she had taken that opportunity to make it about herself.” The reporter pressed: “He was wrong yesterday in talking about getting the money. The money was secured before she came into Congress.”

Sanders shot back with the kind of statement that would be normal in an authoritarian country, suggesting that Kelly’s previous military service placed him beyond criticism. “If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you,” she said. “But I think that that—if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.”

No, it is not. Kelly is the chief of staff and a political operative. He held a press conference and told a lie that smeared one of Trump’s political opponents. No government official’s military background, no matter how honorable, makes him immune to criticism, especially given the subject at hand. Sanders’s response was unnerving. But the bigger lesson of the episode is that no matter how good one’s intentions are, when you go to work for Trump, you will end up paying for it with your reputation. For Kelly, not even his four stars prevented that.

-- John Kelly and the Dangerous Moral Calculus of Working for Trump | The New Yorker

I had hope that Kelly would be a sobering influence on the president, and I think he has, but I think that from this, we can also see the influence that Trump has had on Kelly. I don't think that Kelly a year ago would have lied to the American public, but it looks like the desire to protect his boss drove him to it. As we come up on a year of this administration, I've yet to see anything good come out of it.