CNN published an exclusive statement from Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, John Kelly, on Monday, purporting to “confirm” the Atlantic’s election-season hit piece from three years ago. The media, it seems, is going to run the exact same inference campaign it conducted in 2020.
Trump, according to the anonymously sourced story from Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, disparaged the graves of WWI veterans on a trip to France. According to The Atlantic, the president canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside of Paris in 2018 because of his hair.
Though numerous outlets including NBC News, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Axios, and The New York Times contend that Kelly had “confirmed” the stories, a closer reading tells us something different. “What can I add that has not already been said?” the former chief of staff told CNN’s Jake Tapper, prefacing his statement before mentioning the alleged Aisne-Marne incident. That is not a confirmation, but a retelling.
“[Trump] blamed the rain for the last-minute decision, saying ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true,” Goldberg wrote without a single on-the-record source three years ago.
Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway covered the saga in her book on the 2020 election, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.“
“In fact, both claims were true,” she wrote. “A visit by helicopter was deemed unsafe by military officials because of low cloud cover, and so was a
