Trump slams John Kelly, who warned about ex-president’s fitness for office

AUSTIN — Donald Trump on Friday called his former chief of staff John Kelly a “total whack job” and “a nutjob to start off with,” lashing out days after the retired four-star general said Trump fits the definition of a fascist and raised alarms about his fitness for office.

Kelly is one of many former senior Trump aides and Cabinet members who are publicly criticizing their old boss ahead of the presidential election. Trump responded at length during a Friday event in Austin, Texas, focused on border policy, attacking Kelly and also denying new reporting in the Atlantic that he refused to pay for a dead soldier’s funeral despite promising to do so.

Trump noted that the Atlantic previously reported that he called American war casualties “suckers” and “losers” - something Kelly later confirmed publicly - and denounced what he called “phony stories by a general that got fired.”

“And he’s a whack job, total whack job,” Trump said, adding: “It’s funny, when you fire people … when you fire people for doing a bad job, they get a little bit angry. … But he was a nutjob to start off with.”

Trump said throughout his presidency that he hires the best people. Kelly was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff.

Trump sought to rebut the Atlantic’s latest reporting that he made offensive comments about Vanessa Guillen, an Army soldier bludgeoned to death in April 2020. Citing anonymous attendees of a 2020 meeting, the magazine said Trump offered to pay for Guillen’s funeral but later grew angry at the cost and used an expletive to complain about the cost of burying a “Mexican.”

Trump on Friday thanked members of Guillen’s family for pushing back on the story and said he “was going to help them if they didn’t get the military funding … but they were able to get the funding.” He referenced Guillen family members in attendance, some of whom appeared to nod as he spoke, and took a photo with them after his speech. He then kissed each woman in the group and shook a man’s hand.

Earlier this week, Trump raged against Kelly on social media. “Thank you for your support against a total degenerate named John Kelly, who made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred!” he wrote.

Kelly has continued to raise public concerns about Trump since his comments to the New York Times that the former president meets the definition of fascist.

“To use the U.S. military in terms of domestic law enforcement, it’s not the American way,” Kelly said in an interview with The Washington Post after Trump suggested the military could be deployed against people Trump calls the “enemy from within.”

“The fear is he will tell them to do something illegal, and that’s a really bad thing to do,” Kelly continued. “And then you have generals resigning. And very possibly within the ranks, you have people refusing to do it. These guys are going to follow the law.”

Trump has also drawn criticism for his repeated positive comments about dictatorial foreign leaders. On Friday, he contrasted President Joe Biden with the leaders of Russia and North Korea. “Putin and the whole group, Kim Jong Un, they’re tough guys out there,” Trump said. “They’re tough and they’re smart and they’re streetwise and that they’re at the top of their game. And we don’t have that.”

Trump spent most of the Austin event discussing immigration. He reprised the language he used in Arizona on Thursday that compared undocumented individuals to trash.

“We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people that they don’t want,” Trump said.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, responded to Trump’s latest criticism of the United States on Friday.

“It’s just another example of how he really belittles our country. This is someone who is a former president of the United States, who has a bully pulpit, and this is how he uses it,” Harris told reporters.

Trump on Friday noted that Harris is also campaigning in Texas and criticized her upcoming event in Houston with Beyoncé, suggesting the vice president came “to rub shoulders with woke celebrities.”

Trump introduced Alexis Nungaray, the mother of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was killed in June allegedly by two Venezuelan men. Nungaray, an advocate for stricter border security, thanked Trump for his support and criticized Harris’s recent comments during a Fox News interview that she was sorry for Nungaray’s loss.

Trump often makes false or unsubstantiated claims about immigration. On Friday, for instance, he repeated his frequent, unsupported claim that 325,000 children are dead, missing or have been sold into sex slavery. Trump appears to be referencing a recent federal report that said more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children have not been served notices to appear in court and that more than 32,000 of them did not show up at their immigration court hearings over the last several years. The report did not say those hundreds of thousands of children were hurt or missing.

Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report. Knowles reported from Birch Run, Michigan.