On Tuesday, The Atlantic published an article by its editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg alleging that while serving as president, Donald Trump once said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
Goldberg attributed this account to “two people who heard him say this” and also cited John Kelly, Trump’s White House chief-of-staff from 2017 to 2019, who said the then president expressed admiration for the loyalty of “Hitler’s generals.”
In a statement sent to Newsweek, Trump campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer said: “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”
In an interview with The New York Times published on Tuesday, Kelly said: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly also alleged he had said, “you know, Hitler did some good things too.”
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,'” Kelly told The New York Times.
The claims were rejected by Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung who in a statement to The New York Times said Kelly was spreading “debunked stories.”
The accusations come as polling analysis suggests the 2024 presidential election remains a nail-biter, with website FiveThirtyEight giving Democratic candidate Kamala Harris a 1.7-point lead over Trump in its latest polling average published on Tuesday. However, the website says that overall Trump has a 52 percent chance of victory in November, against Harris at 48 percent.
Senior Democrats have suggested a second Trump term could pose a threat to American democracy with Harris recently labeling the Republican nominee “unstable” and “dangerous,” while the voice-over in one of her recent ads said that “if he wins, he’ll ignore all checks that rein in a president’s power.” Trump has denied this claim and hit back saying the threat to U.S. democracy comes from another Democratic administration.
Journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser said in their 2022 book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 that Trump had asked Kelly “why can’t you be like the German generals?” When Kelly replied that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off” Trump reportedly replied: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him.”
Kelly gave a separate account of the “German generals” conversation with Goldberg. The chief of staff said he replied: “Do you mean [Otto von] Bismarck’s generals?
He added: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who [19th-century German Chancellor] Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the Kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that [field marshal Erwin] Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.”
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Speaking to CNN on Tuesday John Bolton, formerly Trump’s White House national security adviser, said he believed Kelly’s account.
Bolton said: “You can take what John says to the bank.
“If John says that Donald Trump said them, I believe them implicitly.”
Donald Trump on Nazi Rally Comparisons
During the 2016 election campaign, then Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto condemned Trump’s “strident” rhetoric, adding: “That’s how Mussolini got in, that’s how Hitler got in.”
At one 2016 rally in Orlando, Trump asked his supporters to raise their right arm and pledge to vote for him. This prompted condemnation from Abe Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who said: “As a Jew who survived the Holocaust, to see an audience of thousands of people raising their hands in what looks like the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute is about as offensive, obnoxious and disgusting as anything I thought I would ever witness in the United States of America.”
Still in 2016, JD Vance, now Trump’s running mate, reportedly sent a text to a friend saying: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a****** like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”
Does Donald Trump Have a Copy of ‘Mein Kampf’?
In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s late first wife, had told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that her husband kept a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, titled My New Order, in a cabinet by his bed and used to read it periodically.
When challenged over this by Vanity Fair reporter Marie Brenner, Trump reportedly replied: “Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.”
Brenner then asked Davis about this who reportedly said: “I did give him a book about Hitler,’ Davis told her. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”
Update 10/23/24 8:10 a.m. ET: This story has been updated with a statement from Trump campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer.