Can Mark Kelly translate goodwill to excitement for presidential campaign?
The Atlantic·July 20, 2026
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Obviously, I knew this. Senator Mark Kelly’s wife, the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and grievously wounded in a mass shooting outside a Tucson Safeway in 2011. It was one of the most notorious acts of political violence in America.
In several recent conversations with Kelly, however, I was struck by how often and how bluntly he repeated these exact words. Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and former NASA astronaut, seems to appreciate the curt repetition of the statement: My wife was shot in the head. It captures how stark and defining this incident was, and continues to be, in his life.
The near-assassination ended Giffords’s career in Congress and his in space. She was left with acute damage to the area of her brain that controls speech. Kelly was compelled by circumstance to create a new course for himself as a caregiver to his wife, Democratic senator, possible candidate for president, and severe critic of President Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Fifteen years after the shooting, Kelly and Giffords remain a singular entity in American public life. I went to Arizona to join them at a series of events around Phoenix. We met at a coffee shop. It was a Friday afternoon, with triple-digit heat, and had already been a grind of a day for both of them. From our meeting, they would go to a reception, followed by a dinner, and then Giffords would fly to Louisiana, where she would attend a memorial service for eight children who’d been slaughtered in a mass shooting a few weeks earlier.
Interviewing Giffords and Kelly was like nothing I’ve ever experienced in 25 years of reporting on politics. In our time together, I kept snagging on the same inescapable question: How would their unparalleled dynamic play within the merciless spectacle of a presidential campaign?
She says this by way of introduction, and as a wistful acknowledgment of her name’s cruel irony. Even by politician standards, Giffords was quite the chatterbox. In their joint memoir, Gabby: A Story of Courage, Love, and Resilience, Kelly estimates that before she was shot, Giffords did about 60 or 70 percent of the talking between them. Kelly was the reticent one in the couple, happy to let his wife gobble up the silences. The massacre left Giffords with a condition known as “non-fluent aphasia.” It does not affect intelligence, or ability to comprehend events or remember stories—only to relay them. After Tucson, Kelly says, he started carrying 95 percent of their conversations.
During my visit, Kelly often finished Giffords’s sentences and elaborated on what she was trying to say. She speaks in bursts of words and short fragments. It’s evident when she is trying to express something but her voice is not cooperating. She shakes her head, moves her mouth, rocks back and forth.
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When we were first getting settled at the café, Kelly walked over with a blueberry muffin and a large cup of ice water.
“Drink your water!” Giffords declared. “China. Drink more water.”
“You know what people say in China when you sneeze?” Kelly explained. “Drink more water.”
Giffords chuckled—which she does a lot. Kelly often joins her. They share a dry, absurdist, and understandably dark sense of humor. It’s a bit of a platitude to say this about political couples, but Kelly really does project as a different person around his spouse. His usual solo mode is quiet intensity. With Giffords present, he becomes much more engaged, as if he’s trying to draw out whatever he can of his wife’s former extroversion.
“They’re very symbiotic,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a close friend of the couple who was elected to Congress with Giffords in 2006, told me. As an example, Gillibrand said that Giffords might throw out a single word to prompt Kelly to tell a whole story.
I watched this pattern several times. At one point, Kelly mentioned a trip that he and Giffords had taken to Western China early in their relationship.
“China,” Giffords said. “Gorilla. Monkey.”
“Oh, panda,” Kelly said, and took it from there. They had visited a panda preserve. For $80, visitors could be photographed holding a newborn.
“Then Gabby’s like, ‘I want to hold the baby panda,’” Kelly told me. A woman at the preserve told Kelly that for $35, she could offer a photograph with a less adorable panda. Kelly referred to it as a “raccoon,” but it was in fact a scruffy little red panda. Or “Budget Panda,” as Giffords called it.
“Oh yes, it’s endangered,” Kelly said. They still have the photo of Giffords holding Budget Panda.
“She has a smile on her face,” he said of Giffords. “But you know what she’s really thinking?”
“Fuck!” Giffords said, and they laughed again.
Giffords can be mischievous in what she encourages Kelly to say, sometimes leading him into impolitic stories. At one point, I asked Kelly whether he gets more questions about what it’s like to be a fighter pilot, an astronaut, or a senator.
Kelly translated: “How do you go to the bathroom in space? I get a lot of those questions.”
“Skull,” Giffords said at another point.
“Yeah, we still got Gabby’s skull,” Kelly explained. “Like, her real skull.”
After she was shot, doctors performed an emergency craniectomy on Giffords, removing a large portion of her skull to reduce pressure on her swelling brain. Kelly asked the doctor what would happen to the original chunk of bone. “It will go in the incinerator,” the doctor told him. “And I was like, Gabby’s in a coma right now. I think she might want it.”
“We stuck it in the freezer,” Kelly told me—in a Tupperware container. They still have it too. “Next to the turkey,” Kelly said.
I thought this might be a joke, but it was not. Kelly seemed to notice me looking perhaps slightly taken aback. “It’s not in the freezer we use every day,” he clarified. “It’s a separate freezer.”
Here are some things that Mark Kelly has survived: a turbulent and sometimes violent childhood, 39 combat missions in Desert Storm, a missile blowing up just above his plane, and four space-shuttle voyages (two as mission commander). He has also braved the near-murder of the person he loves most and watched her get deluged with death threats for years afterward.
It is fair to observe that Pete Hegseth cannot scare him.
Kelly, who is 62, presents as a somewhat reserved, even sheepish, figure, which can belie the crowded and suspenseful life he has led—and the chilling conflict he now finds himself in with his own government. He also has a knack for understatement.
“I mean, it’s not great to wake up one morning and to find out the president wants you hanged,” Kelly said.
He was referring to a series of Truth Social posts from Trump last November. Kelly and five of his Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate had made a video reminding U.S. service members of their duty not to obey illegal orders. Trump responded by accusing the lawmakers of sedition and threatening to seek their execution. When I asked Kelly how he first learned of the president’s foreboding pronouncement, Kelly conceded that he did not in fact “wake up” to the news. He had been sitting next to another one of the video participants, his Senate colleague Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, during a mid-morning briefing on Venezuela. A security officer walked over and passed Slotkin a note from an aide.
“It says something like, ‘President called for your arrest,’” Kelly told me.
Slotkin left the room, came back a few minutes later, and informed Kelly that Trump had called for his arrest too. Slotkin confirmed this account to me. “I just slid the note over to him,” she said. “And we just had a whole conversation with our eyes.”
In addition to the president issuing a “punishable by DEATH!” decree via Truth Social, he also called for the video participants to be “ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” Hegseth followed up with a letter of censure to Kelly, seeking to reduce his military rank and pension, and threatening “criminal prosecution.” (Of the lawmakers involved, only Kelly served more than 20 years in the armed forces, and thus has retired-military status and a continuing relationship with the Department of Defense.)
On a cloudy morning in early May, I sat with Kelly and Giffords in the back of a sedan headed to a federal courthouse in Washington. Kelly would be appearing before a panel of appeals-court judges in connection to a lawsuit he had filed against Hegseth to block his intended punishments.
“I think this is the first time in our country’s history that a president has ordered, or has called for, the execution of members of Congress,” Kelly told me.
This is the kind of historical distinction that you’d think would shake even the most jaded naval aviator. Yet during the short ride to the courthouse, he and Giffords appeared quite unbothered by any of this. Kelly spent much of the drive talking about how people often ask him his view on whether Pluto meets the criteria for being a full-size planet. The topic then shifted (as topics do) to the cryonically frozen head of the baseball legend Ted Williams, which is currently housed at the Alcor life-extension facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I’m Ted Williams’s head’s senator,” Kelly pointed out.
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Kelly started reading headlines from his phone about an old controversy involving the allegedly shoddy treatment of the Splendid Splinter’s remains: “Williams’ Head Abused at Facility,” he declared merrily.
“It’s hard to get me nervous,” Kelly said as we arrived at the courthouse. “You think about, like, Trump saying he wants me hanged,” he told me later—“all right, I’ll deal with it.”
This was the inescapable subtext of pretty much everything we discussed over several hours of interviews: Adversity is extremely relative to Kelly. It is a notion that he internalized a long time ago, but especially after Giffords was shot.
If anything, being targeted by Trump and Hegseth appears more invigorating than ominous to Kelly. Not to be crass, but if you’re a Democrat, having Trump call for your execution can be excellent for business. Especially so if you are a Democrat who, like Kelly, is “seriously considering” a presidential run.
Since arriving to the Senate in 2020, Kelly’s storybook résumé and the goodwill he’s accrued as Giffords’s spouse have granted him a high level of admiration that has yet to translate to a high level of excitement for him as a potential standard-bearer. He was a finalist to be Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, but was passed over. He is seen as a serious and respected lawmaker, steeped in such matters as national defense and border security. But in his relatively brief time in Washington, he has struggled to acquire main-character status or a readily identifiable fight that could burnish the profile of an ascendant national candidate.
He sounds eager to be viewed as a cause célèbre. “This is not about me,” Kelly often insists, as politicians are wont to do (usually at events featuring themselves, and devoted to their career advancement).
At his May 7 court hearing, Kelly was trailed by about a dozen reporters and cameras, and a campaign-worthy entourage. After the session, which lasted about 90 minutes, he delivered a brief, ostentatiously defiant speech in front of the courthouse entrance on Constitution Avenue. “The secretary of defense picked the wrong guy,” Kelly said.
He was flanked by Giffords; his younger daughter, Claire (one of two grown kids from his first marriage); a former Navy colleague; and several other veterans and retired service members. The courthouse loomed directly behind him, and American flags flew overhead while, at the next building over, a massive likeness of Trump’s face dominated the front of the Labor Department’s headquarters.
“They’re trying to send a message to other retired veterans, and really to all of us,” Kelly said. “If you say something that the president, or this administration, does not like, they’re going to come after you.”
As much as Kelly might be milking this attention, being subjected to such a high-level threat can arouse serious menace from the acolyte mobs. After Trump’s posts about the lawmakers in the video, Slotkin told me that her father, in the last weeks of his life, was swatted in the middle of the night. Kelly said he received more death threats in a single day than he would typically get in several months. (For what it’s worth, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later insisted that Trump in fact did not want the lawmakers to be executed.)
Kelly told me that he tries not to worry, because he is oriented to probabilities. “I’m a believer in math,” Kelly said. “So, when you look at Desert Storm, you look at all the combat missions flown, and the number of people killed—flying on the space shuttle is probably 10 times more dangerous.” And both, certainly, are much more dangerous than his current profession, he said. Statistically speaking, the universe of contemporary U.S. politicians who have actually taken a bullet is minuscule.
“But not in my family,” Kelly noted. “I thought I had the risky job—until January 8th of 2011.”
Giffords was scheduled to hold one of her regular “Congress on Your Corner” meetings with constituents in front of a Tucson Safeway that day. She had just been elected to her third term, even as Republicans had retaken control of the House in a torrent of Tea Party–driven anger over the Affordable Care Act. At about 10:10 a.m., a few minutes into the event, a gunman named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire.
Kelly was in Houston, training for a space-shuttle mission. He learned of the shooting in a call from one of Giffords’s staffers. As he flew to Tucson with his mother and his two teenage daughters, NPR reported that Giffords had died. Kelly, typically a non-demonstrative engineer, retreated to the airplane bathroom and sobbed. When he emerged 20 minutes later, he called the hospital and learned that Giffords was in fact still clutching to life. University Medical Center in Tucson corrected the media reports.
Giffords woke from a medically induced coma about a week later. Loughner’s bullet had ripped through the left hemisphere of her brain, entering over her left eye and exiting out the back of her skull. She could barely move, and could speak only a few words at a time, though it was clear that her brain worked well enough to know that something unimaginable had occurred. “What is happening to me?” she kept saying.
Kelly was diligent in documenting this period in which it all changed, taking video of her ordeal from close in. Giffords was hooked up to tubes and monitors, and her head was shaved. Some of the footage appears in the 2022 documentary Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down. The video shows, more than anything visible today, Giffords’s despair. As happens with aphasia, she perseverates on random words. “Chicken, chicken, chicken” keeps tumbling out. At one point, she puts her head down and just cries.
The shooting scrambled each of their plans entirely. Although Kelly had already traveled multiple times into space and seemingly reached the pinnacle of his career, Giffords had very much been rising in hers. She was hailed as a natural politician, a performer from a young age who had starred in music and theater productions. (Gwyneth Paltrow is her second cousin.) She grew up in the Tanque Verde Valley, northeast of Tucson, and after college in California and a stint in New York, returned home to run her family business, El Campo Tire. She built her local celebrity as a motormouthed pitchwoman, appearing in TV ads in which she would order viewers to “Race into the El Campo Service Center today, before the offer is gone!” Giffords launched her first campaign in 2000, for the Arizona House of Representatives. Six years later, at 36, she won her U.S. House seat and was immediately touted as a future senator. She was a vibrant speaker, hawkish on border security, and, yes, a proud gun owner.
Kelly and Giffords met in 2003, on a trip to China for an international conference of young leaders. She was a state legislator, and he was at NASA. They reconnected at another conference, this one in Arizona, a year later, by which point Kelly was divorced and Giffords was single. In November 2004, Giffords was doing research for death-penalty-related legislation and invited Kelly to join her on a tour of an Arizona state prison in Florence. “We went to death row on our first date,” Kelly says. He recalls at one point stepping into the actual gas chamber.
Before long, Giffords started showing up to Kelly’s rocket launches in Houston. Kelly came to Giffords’s campaign events in Tucson. As political sidekicks went, Kelly jumped straight out of the catalog: the sturdy astronaut, content to toil in the wings with his intricate machinery. He sent her emails from space. “Tell my wife I love her very much; she knows,” Kelly said, quoting David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” while appearing via video at a U2 concert, from the International Space Station.
Beyond the storybook optics, Giffords and Kelly were also well-matched workaholics with high-velocity careers. It was a commuter arrangement: After they were married, Kelly continued to live in Houston, while Giffords split time between Washington and Arizona. “We did not live together until the day she got shot,” Kelly told me.
Before the shooting, the couple had been trying to have children. Giffords, then 40, desperately wanted to become a mother and was undergoing fertility treatments at Bethesda Naval Hospital. She’d had an appointment to have an embryo implanted on Monday, January 10. After the shooting, that dream, too, quickly faded. She embarked instead on a prolonged and agonizing rehabilitation.
In addition to her difficulty speaking, Giffords was left with severely limited peripheral vision in one eye, and suffered partial paralysis and motor impairment on the right side of her body. She uses a walking stick, sometimes a wheelchair for longer distances. Flights can be difficult. She travels with a full-time health aide. Yet Giffords keeps a punishing schedule, much of it connected to her anti-gun-violence organization. She meets with victims and families, attends vigils and funerals, and spends more than half of her time on the road.
Periodically, Giffords breaks into song. Although the speech part of her brain was ravaged, the music area remains intact, Kelly told me. Lyrics flow more easily for her than words.
“The sun will come out tomorrow,” she sang on the topic of the Democrats’ prospects in the midterms this fall. “Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, come what may!” On other occasions, when I referred to something that had occurred the day before, Giffords would chime in with, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”
“Yesterday” and “Tomorrow” are Giffords’s go-to refrains. Her life with Kelly carries a hard line of demarcation between the before and the after.
Kelly grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, in an Irish Catholic household of little outward affection and high tumult. Richard and Patricia Kelly—both police officers—were at constant odds. “One of the worst feelings in the world is, you’re in a deep sleep and then you slowly wake up to your parents screaming at one another and throwing things,” Scott Kelly, Mark’s identical twin brother, told me. “We were raised in that environment of, you know, a lot of cops, alcohol, some violence, definitely a lot of drunkenness.” The twins’ general approach, for much of their youth, was to try to protect their mother as best they could and stay occupied outside the house. After getting their driver’s licenses, the Kelly boys worked as EMTs, rushing in ambulances to the scenes of shootings, stabbings, and car crashes.
Mark said he never realized there was anything unusual about his upbringing. “When you’re a kid, that’s your experience,” he told me. “So, you’re not so sure, like, Is this normal or not normal? And you realize later it’s not normal.”
Kelly described his father as an alcoholic, but one who did not drink every day and rarely at home: “It was, like, a Friday, Saturday-night thing at the bar with his cop friends.” In some ways, Kelly added, he looked up to his father. Richard Kelly coached his sons’ Little League teams, worked as a detective, and “was putting bad guys in jail.” He also investigated mobsters, Mark told me. (New Jersey in the ’70s and ’80s, go figure.) With some pride, Kelly noted that in The Sopranos, Tony went to West Orange High School.
In his memoir with Giffords, Kelly writes that he and Scott were “borderline juvenile delinquents” growing up, always getting into trouble, accidents, and fights. They were late academic bloomers. Mark was the first to become captivated by a career in outer space; his twin, younger by six minutes, became an astronaut as well. Mark had no interest in politics, let alone a career in it. He wanted to pursue the moon, not the swamp.
But after the horror of January 2011 and Giffords’s forced retirement, Kelly began to get mentioned as a potential political candidate himself. He first ran for Senate in 2020 to fill the seat vacated by John McCain’s death in 2018; he defeated Republican Martha McSally, and was reelected to a full six-year term in 2022. I asked Kelly what had made him decide to run for office. First off, he said, he was concerned about “the trajectory of our country with Donald Trump in the White House.” This did not exactly make him a brave and lonely voice in the Democratic wilderness. But Kelly traces his particular aha moment to a get-out-the-vote rally that he attended in Phoenix before the 2018 midterms. A woman, probably in her 30s, approached him.
“She just stands next to me and says, ‘Hey, my son has Down Syndrome. And I’m terrified he’s going to lose his health insurance. Would you please consider running for the U.S. Senate?’” Kelly told the woman he would think about it.
As political origin stories go, this one feels quite labored. It seemed dubious to me, given that Kelly’s name had come up in the past, that it had never occurred to him to run for something until a woman he met at a GOTV rally brought it up. “I don’t know if I wanted to be in the Senate badly enough,” he told me. “But when I focus on something, I work really hard at it.”
Kelly makes frequent cracks about the astonishing sequence of events that landed him in his current peacocking profession. Before a taped interview at a Phoenix TV studio, he pulled out a makeup brush and applied foundation to dull the shine of his bald head. “I used to be the commander of the space shuttle,” he said, shaking his head. “Now I carry my own makeup.”
After the interview, Kelly headed off on a visit to the John S. McCain III VFW Post 7401, a half hour away in Chandler. When we arrived, he spent about 10 minutes serviceably glad-handing his way through a front bar area, dressed in an old flight jacket and camouflage cap with NAVY in big print across the front. At least two of the people Kelly met urged him to run for president. He said he’d not yet decided, though he is taking many of the so-called necessary steps, including traveling to South Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire in recent months.
His speeches need work. Kelly’s voice is more conversational than booming. His words sync awkwardly with robotic hand motions. When Kelly tries to amplify, it sounds like he’s straining. He’s used to working in tight places rather than big rooms.
At the VFW, Cindy McCain, the widow of the late senator, introduced Kelly. He moved quickly to his skirmish with the administration. “I said something the president didn’t like,” he said. “Anybody see this?” Nods and scattered applause across the room. “And the president said I should be hanged, executed, prosecuted,” Kelly said. He paused for effect. “The guy couldn’t even get the order right!”
Kelly’s main message was grounded in the old soldiers’ credo: that “to fight for a cause larger than yourself,” as McCain used to say, was its own reward. It was a friendly audience. He took questions, and came well briefed and well versed in legislative detail.
