Profile of John Kelly

Nick Miroff at the Washington Post profiles John Kelly and how his work with Latin America shaped him. We already knew his views were not totally in sync with Trump and that he tended to embrace the alarmist Middle Eastern terrorist threat narrative. But you can see more about how his son's death affected him and prompted him to get out of his military comfort zone. In Latin America he is a man with a mission, and that is fundamentally conservative, sometimes zealously so.

What's still not clear is why he chose the job and stayed in it. Perhaps it's just that sense of mission. As interviewees in the article note, it must eat at him to be defending someone like Trump. There is a strong ideological thread between them, though, and it may well be that Kelly buys into that strongly enough to stay the course.