Retired Gen. John Kelly served as White House chief of staff for failed one-term president Donald Trump for two years (2017-2019) and recalls that his former boss had great admiration for despots and dictators he saw across the globe, including an outright envy of perhaps the most evil man who ever lived, the late German chancellor Adolf Hitler.
Speaking with CNN, Kelly recalled when Trump praised Hitler.
“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things.’ 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 recounted. “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 told me. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy thing.”
Trump also praised modern-day tyrants, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, and Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, according to Kelly.
“He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy — that we had pushed North Korea into a corner. To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s the boss and he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”
Trump’s obsession with Orbán is so complete that he invited him to spend the past weekend at Mar-a-Lago, where the Hungarian prime minister was treated like some sort of demigod and showered with endless praise.
The disgraced ex-president sees himself as the American Hitler and will attempt to turn the United States into a modern-day Nazi Germany if he manages to win reelection in November. That’s why he has to be defeated and, if convicted of his many alleged crimes, sent to prison for what remains of his pathetic life.
