Ex-Trump Chief of Staff Calls Out Trump’s Medal of Honor Diss
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Former Trump chief of staff and retired Marine General John Kelly criticized former President Donald Trump on Monday for recent comments downplaying the significance of the Medal of Honor.
Trump made the remarks during a speech on Thursday as he recalled giving the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom to conservative mega-donor Miriam Adelson, suggesting the award was “much better” than the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the country.
He told the crowd:
It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. But civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead. [Adelson] gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.
Kelly, who served as Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told CNN that the awards were “not even close” that they had “no equivalency of any kind.” He told the network “the Presidential Medal of Freedom is given for some good works done or in fewer cases for other considerations, but they’re not even close.”
Kelly underscored the gravity of the Medal of Honor, which he said is “earned, not won, by incredibly brave actions on the battlefield under fire typically by very young men who joined when others did not to defend their country.”
He added: “No president, member of Congress, judge or political appointee — and certainly no recipient of the Presidential Medal — will ever be asked to give life or limb to protect the Constitution. The two awards cannot be compared in any way. Not even close.”
Kelly’s rebuttal marks yet another point of contention between the retired general and his former boss.
Kelly famously came under fire from the former president after he confirmed Trump’s notorious disparagement of dead U.S. servicemen killed in World War I’s Battle of Belleau Wood. During a 2018 visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France, The Atlantic reported in 2020 that he questioned why he should visit the cemetery, saying “it’s filled with losers” and “suckers.”
In further remarks at that time, Kelly told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump had shown an “open contempt” for all Gold Star families who had lost loved ones in war.
