Forsyth, Georgia
—
Prison or the White House. Mark Kelly is having to consider whether either place is a realistic possibility.
The Arizona senator and retired Navy captain has done a lot of things very few others have. He’s gone to space four times, cared for a wife who survived an assassination attempt, flipped a US Senate seat long controlled by Republicans.
He never expected to see the secretary of defense accusing him of sedition or the president suggesting he should face the death penalty – all from a few minutes of a recording that he didn’t think would be such a big deal.
Kelly was one of six Democrats with national security backgrounds who taped a video reminding members of the military that they didn’t have to follow illegal orders. President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth singled him out, with the Pentagon opening an investigation and threatening disciplinary action. Kelly has responded with defiance, suing Hegseth in federal court last week in an attempt to hold up the military process, with the expectation they’ll end up in front of the Supreme Court.
“I’m a fucking US senator,” Kelly told CNN in a recent interview. “I have, in theory — in theory — supercharged First Amendment speech rights under the speech and debate clause, and they’re trampling on that.”
“If they can go after me, they can go after anyone.”
Far from Washington or Arizona or the site of a potential court-martial, Kelly’s fight with the Pentagon has elevated his profile and pressed him into a new leadership role within the Democratic Party.
Kelly has a well-earned reputation for being stiff and dry, more at home digging into minutiae on the Senate Armed Services Committee or talking about immigration in his border state. Now, he’s gaining hundreds of thousands of new followers on social media and receiving standing ovations in restaurants. People at airports are urging him to run for president.
Meanwhile, he’s had a spike in death threats serious enough to forward to the FBI. Police have to patrol outside his adult children’s houses. There have even been new threats directed at his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who two weeks ago attended his Senate speech to mark the 15th anniversary of when she was shot in the head at a congressional event.
Kelly was the only national Democrat invited to campaign in a deep-red Georgia state Senate district ahead of a special election on Tuesday. LeMario Brown, who advanced to a February runoff, joked that Kelly was one of his favorite astronauts – and that he found common cause in the senator’s fight with the Pentagon.
“The whole point about trying to take his pension away from him and all that crazy stuff – like we’re used to that, used to being kind of treated like second class,” Brown told CNN.
Over a lunch of fried chicken in Atlanta on Saturday, Kelly was describing the last few months in a way that radiated and occasionally made him bang his hands on the table.
The curses flew. The pique flared.
“I feel this obligation more so than anything I’ve ever done in my life, to fight back against an unhinged president and a weaponization of the federal government against the constitutional rights of a million retired veterans,” Kelly said. He says multiple retired generals and admirals have told him they’ve started watching what they say out of fear Hegseth will go after them too. He’s been hearing from active service members too.
Told of this comment, a Defense Department spokesman referred CNN to Hegseth’s previous social media posts, including one in which Hegseth called the video “reckless and seditious” and focused in on Kelly, saying he was “still accountable to military justice.”
Kelly told CNN for the first time what he has been starting to say privately: he is starting to think seriously about running for president.
“I still think it needs to be the right person for the moment, and we don’t know what that moment is yet,” he said.
Off the Senate floor, Kelly usually has a Navy cap to cover his completely bald head. He got a new one recently after he’d worn the last one to the point of getting a little ratty. Almost all his standard political bits come back to mentions of flying combat missions; commanding space shuttles; being, in reference to that work, “a numbers guy.” His personal account on X is still @CaptMarkKelly.
But the focus on his service since November was a surprise.
Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA officer, was the one who recruited him for the video, out of conversations in response to Trump’s talk about sending troops into American cities last summer.
Kelly is the son of two cops. The prospect of a deployment into cities – and the ongoing presence of border agents in Minnesota – disgusted him on principle and that it looks to him like Trump’s “going to use US citizens to train on.”
“You’re putting members of the military in a really shitty situation,” he said.
There was talk of joint town halls among several Democrats with public service backgrounds, but the coordination logistics got too hard, so Slotkin’s staff wrote a script for six lawmakers to record. Kelly just liked that at 61, he still qualified for the “young veteran” vibe Slotkin said she was going for.
Then, the week before Thanksgiving, Kelly and Slotkin were sitting next to each other in a secure briefing room, their phones locked up outside, for an administration briefing on what it was saying of its plans for Venezuela. Slotkin received a note from an aide. Kelly glanced over.
“The President has tweeted calling for your arrest. The team is working on it. I am outside if you want to come back to office,” it read, according to a copy obtained by CNN.
“I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’” Kelly told CNN. He watched Slotkin walk out to check in with her staff and on social media herself. “Five minutes later, she comes back in, she looks at me and she goes, ‘Well, he called for your execution too.’”
Kelly insists he did not expect the level of response generated by the video – or really any kind of reaction.
“Nooooo, I did not,” he said. “None of us did. Not like this. We did not think it was going to be a thing. I thought if Donald Trump was to say anything about this, he would say, ‘Well, I’m never going to do that, and of course you wouldn’t want members of the military following illegal orders.’”
On Friday night, he appeared at a veterans’ town hall with Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who called him an “American hero.”
Being threatened by the Pentagon, Ossoff said, “wasn’t just an effort to silence a United States senator, that was an effort to intimidate veterans across the county from speaking out and speaking their minds … and it represents an even deeper threat to all of our civil liberties.”
A lot of heads wearing a lot of service branch hats nodded along.
‘When the king tries to touch you, then everybody knows your name’
Kelly has visited several states expected to vote early in the presidential primary process, including two trips to South Carolina and one to Michigan last year. He also campaigned in the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races. Sometimes he goes with Giffords, building trips around town halls on gun violence. Sometimes he goes on his own.
His speech Saturday afternoon in Forsyth, Georgia, was just nine minutes long and no great achievement of rhetoric or oratory, wrapped around reliable bits like how he’s not sure that had he been the one shot that Giffords would have switched into his career and become an astronaut (and how she says she totally would have).
He talked about rising prices, about how he brought his 30-year-old daughter recently to the house she first lived in when he was starting out in the Navy and she couldn’t believe he had been able to afford it on his salary then.
Kelly didn’t mention the situation with Hegseth. It resonated with attendees anyway.
He is “doing what we can’t because of who he is. But he is trying to guide the country back. I mean, suing the Navy? That’s huge,” said Charmaine Smith, a retired hairdresser who came to see Kelly speak. “He is going to pay for it and they’re going to come after him, and there’s no telling what they’ll do.”
Another woman who attended the event made the same point, adding that though she said she was planning to donate money to Kelly when she got home, she was going to keep it under the $200 legal reporting limit and declined to provide her name because she was worried that there could be repercussions for her husband at work.
In between fundraising calls on the drive to Forsyth, Kelly was watching videos of immigration agents’ actions in Arizona. Amid all that, he was trying to keep up with Trump’s latest threats to Greenland, scoffing at Trump’s comment to the New York Times earlier this month that he was constrained by “my own morality.”
“I don’t think the guy’s got any moral or ethical compass at all. I think he wants to get as rich as he possibly can,” he said. “The legacy that he wants to leave is like the legacy of a strongman, and I think that’s un-American.”
“We could find ourselves in a really bad situation in 2028. What happens if we have a close election in ‘28? What is he going to do? He’s going to say, ‘Hey, this was stolen from me in 2020, I’m not going to allow this to happen again.’ And then who knows what he does?”
If it does, said Joshua McLaurin, a state senator who was part of a small group of legislators who met with Kelly on Saturday morning before also joining him in Forsyth, “given the nature of the crises we’re in as a country, he has the background experience where I fully believe he’s capable of meeting that moment.”
At the very least, said Jesse Goolsby, a 36-year-old delivery driver who came to hear Kelly speak before going to knock on doors for Brown, “When the king tries to touch you, then everybody knows your name.”
