Presumptive Republican 2024 presidential nominee Donald Trump, during his time as President, praised Nazi leader and genocidal mass murderer Adolf Hitler to his chief of staff, John Kelly, a new book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto reveals.
The news comes amid increasing scrutiny of Trump, who said in his second term he would be a dictator on “day one,” and revelations of Trump’s admiration for foreign dictators, spurred by his own recent remarks and even his hosting of Hungarian president Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago on Friday. Orbán is a Christian nationalist who has been described as a “neo-fascist dictator,” and “the Pimp of Putinism.”
Trump has praised other authoritarian extremists also.
He has called Orbán “fantastic,” Sciutto reveals. “Chinese leader Xi Jinping is ‘brilliant,’ North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is ‘an OK guy,’ and, most alarmingly, he allegedly said Adolf Hitler ‘did some good things,’ a worldview that would reverse decades-old US foreign policy in a second term should he win November’s presidential election, multiple former senior advisers told CNN.”
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General John Kelly (ret.), Trump’s now-former White House chief of staff, told Sciutto when Trump spoke of Hitler he didn’t talk about the Holocaust.
“It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theater,” Kelly told Sciutto. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy thing.”
Kelly told Sciutto that Trump had “said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things.’ I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”
Trump, Kelly said, “would ask about the loyalty issues and about how, when I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to him, and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, and he didn’t know that.”
“He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal — that we would do anything he wanted us to do,” Kelly said.
Kelly also revealed Trump was “shocked” he was not granted dictatorial powers when he became President.
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“My theory on why he likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is,” Kelly told CNN. “Every incoming president is shocked that they actually have so little power without going to the Congress, which is a good thing. It’s Civics 101, separation of powers, three equal branches of government. But in his case, he was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial-type powers to send US forces places or to move money around within the budget. And he looked at Putin and Xi and that nutcase in North Korea as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.”
Calling Trump’s Hitler remarks “jaw-dropping praise,” Mediaite adds that recently, “Trump has been taking flak from media figures and others for months over his use of language that these critics link to that of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi and fascist figures — particularly his use of the terms ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning the blood of our country.'”