In his new book The Return of Great Powers, which comes out Tuesday, reporter Jim Sciutto interviews several of Trump’s former advisers. All of them stressed that Trump regularly lavished praise on authoritarian leaders around the world, calling Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “fantastic,” Chinese President Xi Jinping “brilliant,” and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un an “OK guy.”
Horrifyingly, Trump also said, “Well, but Hitler did some good things,” according to John Kelly, who served as White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019.
“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 told Sciutto. “I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”
Kelly said that Trump also praised Hitler for achieving complete loyalty from senior Nazi officials—and Trump expected similar fealty from the retired generals he brought on to his cabinet.
“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 said. “He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal—that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”
“Hitler did some good things” would end absolutely anyone else’s campaign in America. And this guy still has a chance of winning.
Trump striving to be like notoriously vicious dictators is part of what makes him so appealing to conservative voters.
If history is our guide, your conservative coworkers, neighbors and family members will politely watch as you are escorted onto a bus headed for re-education camp. They won’t be overt or cartoonish in their evil. They will just be themselves.
I’m convinced conservatives would vote for a potato if you put it in a Nazi arm band at this point.