Donald Trump has insisted that he’s actually the “opposite” of Adolf Hitler, after his longest-serving chief of staff John Kelly described him as a “fascist” who spoke fondly of the Nazi Germany dictator.
Kelly issued a series of warnings on Tuesday, recalling that the former president allegedly heaped praise on Hitler’s generals and said that the tyrant, who oversaw the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust, did “some good things.”
On Thursday, Trump tried to brush off Kelly’s remarks while speaking to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin ahead of his Nevada, Las Vegas, campaign event.
“He made a statement that I’m like Hitler. It’s… just couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s just the opposite, actually,” he claimed.
Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, told The Atlantic that Trump once praised the loyalty that Hitler’s generals had for the dictator.
“Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking the former president, instead suggesting he meant the generals of the Otto von Bismarck, “Iron Chancellor” of the German Empire.
But Trump allegedly confirmed: “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
The ex-Trump staffer also told The New York Times that Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too’.” To Kelly, Trump fits the “general definition” of a fascist.
Trump told another reporter in Las Vegas that he would “never say that” Hitler did “good things” before sniping at The Atlantic branding it a “failing magazine.”
Kelly, who Trump once called a “true star” of his administration, served as White House chief of staff from July 2017 before leaving at the beginning of January 2019 amid tensions with the former commander-in-chief.
“Years ago… I fired him,” Trump told Melugin. Kelly was not formally fired, but resigned as pressure mounted for him to leave his post.
“He was a bully, he was a bad guy. And he ended up being a weak guy because all bullies end up being weak,” Trump said. “And he wasn’t a smart guy, it’s a bad combination.”
The former president also took a swipe at Kamala Harris after she agreed that Trump is a fascist during her CNN town hall in Pennsylvania on Wednesday evening.
After attacking her “horrible” town hall performance, Trump added: “She did call me a fascist and everybody knows that’s not true. They call me everything, until something sticks.”
Earlier, Trump vented his fury at his Democratic presidential rival’s comments in a separate Truth Social post on Wednesday night, falsely claiming that she called him Hitler.
“Comrade Kamala Harris sees that she is losing, and losing badly, especially after stealing the Race from Crooked Joe Biden, so now she is increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind,” he wrote.
Harris and other Democrats have seized on Kelly’s revelations to warn about the dangers of a second Trump administration.
At Harris’s campaign rally in Atlanta on Thursday night, former president Barack Obama warned that “just because he acts goofy,” doesn’t mean Trump isn’t dangerous.
“Unlike the first time, he won’t have people like John Kelly around to stop him,” Obama said.
“He will be surrounded by people just as loony as he is and who will let him do what he wants. So my question to you, Georgia: How is any of that going to help you?”
The Democratic National Committee trolled Trump his alleged comments by erecting billboards outside his Las Vegas rally on Thursday, reading: “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had.’”
