Former President Donald Trump praised German dictator Adolf Hitler while in the White House, former chief of staff John Kelly told CNN.
Trump repeatedly praised authoritarian leaders while serving as president, Kelly and other former senior advisers told CNN’s Jim Sciutto. Trump praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the former aides said. But his most unnerving praise was for Hitler.
“He 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,’” Kelly recalled, according to Sciutto. “I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”
“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 added. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy thing.”
It wasn’t just Hitler’s economic policies, Kelly said. Trump also expressed admiration for Hitler’s hold on senior Nazi officers as he lamented his own lack of staff “loyalty.”
“He 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,” Kelly recounted. “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 added.
Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton added that Trump "views himself as a big guy.”
“He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that," Bolton told Sciutto.
A Trump spokeswoman in 2021 denied that he had praised Hitler. Trump campaign spokesman Steve Cheung told the outlet, “John Kelly and John Bolton have completely beclowned themselves and are suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. They need to seek professional help because their hatred is consuming their empty lives.”
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