WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 5: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as White House chief of staff John Kelly at a briefing with senior military leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House October 5, 2017 in Washington, D.C. Mattis said this week that the U.S. and allies are "holding the line" against the Taliban in Afghanistan as forecasts of a significant offensive by the militants remain unfulfilled. (Photo by Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images)
Donald Trump‘s former White House chief of staff, General John Kelly, revealed that Trump had repeatedly praised Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler while in the White House.
Kelly and the former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton spoke to CNN’s chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto about Trump’s appreciation for strongmen like the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping.
Sciutto published the interviews in his book, The Return of Great Powers, which was published on March 12.
“He views himself as a big guy,” said Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump and even openly criticized him. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”
“[Trump]’s not a tough guy by any means, but in fact quite the opposite … But that’s how he envisions himself,” Kelly said in agreement with Bolton’s claim.
“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,” Kelly stated. “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.’ 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.”
According to Kelly, the former president’s admiration for Hitler went beyond the German leader’s economic policies.
Trump also showed appreciation for Hitler’s hold on senior Nazi officers.
Trump lamented that the Nazi dictator, as Kelly reported, maintained his senior staff’s “loyalty,” while his often did not.
“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,” the ex-chief of staff then recalled. “He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal — that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”
The claim that Trump praised Hitler was initially made in Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender‘s book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, published in 2021.
The former president denied this claim to Bender at the time.
In December 2023, Trump was criticized for repeating Hitler’s rhetoric when talking about the health risks posed by undocumented immigrants, saying that they were “poisoning the blood” of America.
He recognized the controversy that surrounded his previous comments and dismissed the connection to the rhetoric Hitler used in his autobiography, Mein Kampf.
Despite the criticism and comparisons, Trump and his campaign downplayed the significance of the language used. They denied that his remarks were racist or xenophobic and rejected the comparisons drawn to the German dictator’s defamation of individuals seen as threats to the Aryan race.
When asked to respond to the accusation from Kelly and Bolton, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not comment on the substance of what they said to Sciutto.
However, Cheung stated that they “have completely beclowned themselves and are suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” He also said that they must “seek professional help because their hatred is consuming their empty lives.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates responded to the former president’s alleged praise for Hitler in a statement, saying that Joe Biden called the dictator a “demonic figure.”
“No American should ever praise the genocidal monster who committed the Holocaust,” Bates stated. “Just like it is incumbent on all leaders not to associate with Neo Nazis and Holocaust deniers.”
“Hundreds of thousands of American service members – heroes, not ‘suckers’ or ‘losers’ – gave their lives to defeat that evil,” he added. “Admiring Hitler is an insult to their memory. President Biden is committed to bringing all Americans together based on our shared values.”
In October, Kelly confirmed several remarks made by Trump during his presidency, including one in which he called deceased U.S. service members “losers” and “suckers.”
Kelly verified many details published in a 2020 article by The Atlantic in a statement, including some that Trump made about deceased military members.
The former chief of staff was, at the time, thought to be the source of these quotes.
On top of this, Kelly, in January, revealed that he saw the former president make insulting comments about U.S. veterans and service members on several different occasions.
Kelly’s statements confirm multiple details mentioned in a 2020 article published in The Atlantic.
After these statements were released, Trump attacked Kelly in a Truth Social post. He argued that Kelly made these stories up, calling him “the dumbest of my Military people” and that he was “confirming the made-up stories of the Dems and Radical Left.”
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I doubt Trump ever "praised" Hitler. This sounds more like groundless complaints from disgruntled employees. But even the worst person to ever live, probably Stalin since he killed more of his fellow countrymen than Hitler, probably did one good some time or other in his life? But Trump is right about the immigration situation being out of control. The country is already over-populated. I'm not against immigration. But let's limit it to those who are willing and able to make a positive contribution to our country. That begins with being more selective. Let's not ask what our country can do for them, but what they can do for our country! And to do that we have to slow the pace of immigration to the point where each applicant can be evaluated on an individual basis. BEFORE they are granted access!