The reports of John Kelly’s handling of the case of the now former White House staff secretary Rob Porter raise a question: What does Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, see when he looks at the people around him? In April, 2015, Kelly, who was then serving as a four-star Marine general, attended the dedication of a new F.B.I. building, in Miramar, Florida. It was named for two agents, Benjamin Grogan and Jerry Dove, who had been shot dead as they tried to apprehend a pair of bank robbers and armored-truck hijackers who, over a period of months, had killed a number of other people. Kelly sat and watched as a local Democratic congresswoman, Frederica Wilson, paid tribute to the agents—she spoke about how Grogan was near retirement, and Dove, who was younger, had dreams of attending law school—and to all law-enforcement officers. She quoted another agent, who was also caught in the shoot-out, as saying afterward that he was certain that he was going to die, too, “But I was going to do my very best to make sure those suspects did not get away.” She asked all officers present to rise and be recognized. “Stand up now, so that we can applaud you, and what you do,” she said. “We are proud of you! We’re proud of your courage.” The F.B.I., she said, stood for “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.” She closed, “God bless the F.B.I., and God bless America.”

Kelly, recalling the moment last fall, just two and a half years after the ceremony, said that as Wilson spoke he had grown angrier and angrier, until, when she finished, he was “stunned—stunned that she’d done it. Even for someone who was that empty a barrel we were stunned.” The reasons for his rage are perhaps best known to himself. He said that Wilson had done nothing more than get up, crassly brag about getting the money for the building, and sit down; that is false, in all respects. (The Sun-Sentinel had the video to prove it.) His vision of that moment was disturbingly disconnected from the reality of what happened in 2015. But it was clearly connected to the circumstances of 2017: Wilson had criticized Trump for his handling of a call with a military widow, Myeshia Johnson. And Wilson’s assertiveness or, rather, truth telling in that matter seems to have stunned Kelly, too.

What about the Dreamers, young people brought to this country, without documentation, who are trying to hold on to the lives that they have built here? Does Kelly see their hopes, fears, or promise? Some of them never enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) or, in the past few months, as Trump declared the program dead, have not found their way through a shifting bureaucratic maze to reënroll. This week, Kelly said that those who were eligible to register but had not done so “were the people that some would say were too afraid to sign up, others would say were too lazy to get off their asses.” Later, given a chance to take back those remarks, he essentially reiterated them: “I’ve got to say that some of them just should have probably gotten off the couch and signed up.” Kelly then called a proposal, from Trump, to offer a route to legalization for those Dreamers anyway, in return for a border wall and other immigration restrictions, “stunning.”

Kelly was, to hear him tell it, stunned again this week. “I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter,” he said, in a statement on Wednesday evening, when the White House’s staff secretary was in the process of resigning. It was hard to know what Kelly meant by “new allegations.” Both of Porter’s former wives had already, on the record, alleged that he had abused them, physically and verbally, during their marriages. (Porter has denied the charges.) When Kelly was asked, a day earlier, to comment on a Daily Mail story on the allegations, he had said, “Rob Porter is a man of true integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidant, and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.” In the interim, the Intercept had published a picture showing the bruised face of one of the women; even then, it took a good part of a day for Kelly’s support to fade. (The Washington Post reported on Friday that Kelly has since tried to rewrite the time line, to make it seem as though he had responded more promptly; some on the White House staff, the Post noted, “felt his latest account was not true.”) But Kelly should not have needed either publication to help him see the Porter situation for what it was. The F.B.I. had, according to the Post, already told him all about it months ago. That was why Porter, whose job included organizing the highly classified materials put before the President, was not given a proper security clearance and, reportedly, was not going to be. Instead, he had an interim one. Maybe it looked real enough. It wasn’t; even beyond the issues of violence against women, the lack of care concerning security and classified materials is breathtaking. (On Friday, speaking about Porter, Trump said, “We certainly wish him well. It’s obviously a very tough time for him. He did a very good job while he was in the White House. And we hope that he will have a wonderful career.” Trump added, “He says he’s innocent, and I think you have to remember that.”)

Kelly, in his “shocked” statement, included a line about domestic violence being “abhorrent and unacceptable.” Nonetheless, he added, “I stand by my previous comments of the Rob Porter that I have come to know since becoming chief of staff, and believe every individual deserves the right to defend their reputation.” Porter’s efforts to do so had included accusing his ex-wives of taking part in “a coördinated smear campaign.” Could Kelly see what it would have meant, for the women’s reputations, if the White House signed on to that characterization?

In some way, in some direction, the lens through which Kelly regards these cases appears to be distorted. Is it that people like Wilson, the Dreamers, and Porter’s former wives never quite come into view for him? And do the reasons why have connections to policy decisions that the Administration might make, regarding, for example, immigration? Or is it that when he looks at someone like Rob Porter—a Rhodes Scholar, Harvard graduate, former Mormon missionary—he sees only what he wants to see? Whether loyalty, denialism, stubbornness, or bigotry is a factor in any given case is unknown. All those possibilities, though, point to the most important question of all: Whom does John Kelly see when he looks at Donald Trump?