Slate’s chief political correspondent says Gen. John Kelly is a “racist, just like Trump”

The chief political correspondent of Slate magazine has accused outgoing White House Chief of Staff and retired Marine general John Kelly of being a bigot.

As Chief of Staff John Kelly prepared to leave the White House at the end of the year, the retired Marine was thoroughly lambasted by Jamelle Bouie, the political correspondent of Slate and a well-known left-leaning pundit.

“What the outgoing chief of staff lacks in Trump’s intemperate attitude and undisciplined behavior, he makes up for in his commitment to basic elements of the president’s ideology- including his casual cruelty and tolerance for bigotry and bad behavior,” Bouie wrote in an article titled, “John Kelly Was Always Just Donald Trump With Better Manners.”

Bouie immediately began bringing up several cases where Kelly allegedly displayed “racist” behavior patterns by opposing Florida Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson on several occasions, including alleged “insensitivity toward the widow of a slain Soldier, who was black.”

The correspondent goes on to say that Kelly criticized Wilson on several other occasions, in what he calls “a pattern of open disrespect for black female critics of the administration.”

The Slate article then criticized Kelly for referring to Civil War General Robert E. Lee as “an honorable man,” and failing to demonize Confederate soldiers, with the retired general praising “men and women of good faith on both sides” of the conflict.

While Bouie has a clear axe to grind when it comes to Kelly, it appears that he takes more issue with the administration as a whole.

“Kelly might value normalcy and temperance over chaos and impulse, but he shares the president’s basic worldview,” Bouie said. “Even if he could have wrangled Trump into something like a typical president, the Trump administration would likely still display the same enthusiasm for cruelty and contempt for common decency. Indeed, it might have been worse; a more disciplined Trump would be a more effective one, better able to translate his ethnonationalist instincts into concrete, actionable policy. In which case, it’s to our collective benefit that Kelly failed to control the president.”

Kelly served in the US Marine Corps from 1970 to 2016, with three of those years being in inactive reserve. His youngest son, Marine First Lieutenant Robert M. Kelly, was killed in 2010 when he stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan, making John Kelly the highest-ranking US military officer to lose a child in Iraq or Afghanistan.