- John Kelly says Trump told him that Hitler “did some good things,” the New York Times reported.
- Kelly said even after he told Trump not to say that, the former president brought it up again.
- The stakes of speaking out against Trump are higher than ever with the election looming.
With Election Day less than two weeks away, former President Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff John Kelly voiced his concerns about the Republican presidential nominee in a series of interviews with The New York Times.
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,'” Kelly told the Times. Kelly, a former Marine general, served in Trump’s White House from 2017 to 2019.
Kelly said he responded by telling Trump, “First of all, you should never say that.”
The interactions, Kelly said, showed that Trump had little understanding of history.
“But if you knew what Hitler was all about from the beginning to the end, everything he did was in support of his racist, fascist life, you know, the, you know, philosophy, so that nothing he did, you could argue, was good — it was certainly not done for the right reason,” Kelly told the Times.
Kelly’s conversations about Hitler with Trump had been reported by other outlets, but this is the first time Kelly has confirmed them.
In Michael Bender’s 2021 book “Frankly We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” Bender wrote that Trump told Kelly that Hitler “did a lot of good things,” which “stunned” Kelly at the time, according to Bender.
In a statement shared with Business Insider, the Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, disputed Kelly’s story.
“John Kelly has totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated because he failed to serve his President well while working as Chief of Staff and currently suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung said in the statement.
Trump has previously defended himself against accusations that his rhetoric is similar to Hitler’s. In 2023, after Trump said immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of this country, critics accused the former president of adopting the same kind of racist, dehumanizing language that Hitler had used against Jewish people.
In a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt at the time, Trump said, “I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler,” adding that he had never read Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf.
This isn’t the first time Kelly has sounded the alarm about Trump.
Kelly told CNN last year that he had witnessed firsthand Trump calling veterans “suckers” who had “nothing in it for them” — alleged statements that were first detailed by The Atlantic in 2020.
In August, Kelly also blasted Trump for suggesting that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, is better than the Congressional Medal of Freedom, which is given to honor service members’ acts of valor and sacrifice to the country.
In the Times interview this week, Kelly also said that Trump fits the definition of a fascist, and warned that the Republican would rule like a dictator if re-elected.
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