Kelly’s experience shows why many officials decide to keep quiet. Trump’s critics aren’t eager to absolve officials who were part of an administration whose policies they abhor. And Team Trump, meanwhile, won’t tolerate a whiff of dissent.
So most of the Trump diaspora has simply decided to stay silent. We’ve heard little from former Defense Secretary James Mattis since he resigned in 2018 over Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria, though he did speak to the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, about his tenure last year. In that interview, he said he owed the Trump administration a period of silence, though he added that it wouldn’t last forever.
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who once reportedly called Trump a “moron,” hasn’t said all that much about the president’s go-it-alone approach to foreign policy. Gary Cohn, the White House’s former top economic adviser, clashed with Trump over tariff policy and the president’s remarks about the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since his departure the following year, though, Cohn has been circumspect. Indeed, what we know about the White House’s inner workings has largely come from the press. (Last night, Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, praised Barbara Starr, the longtime defense reporter for the very same cable network Trump loves to hate: CNN.)
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