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Donald Trump was complimentary of Adolf Hitler during the ex-president’s time in the White House, his former chief of staff John Kelly, according to a shocking new report from CNN.
The network’s Jim Sciutto reported that several Trump administration insiders, including Kelly, said the Republican nominee was magnanimous in his praise of other dictators, including Putin, China’s autocratic leader Xi Jinping and North Korean despot Kim Jong Un.
“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 the economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world, Kelly said.
The comments are part of segments released from Kelly’s upcoming book The Return of Great of Powers.
After his brutal rise to power in the 1930s, Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions of people after instigating World War II. The Nazi ruler killed six million Jews in his death camps in Central Europe alone.
And I said, “Lord, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.” I mean, Mussolini was a great guy by comparison.’
Republican candidate Donald Trump greets fans at a rally in Rome, Georgia, Saturday, March 9
According to a new book from his former chief of staff, Trump is full of praise for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler
The book also alludes to Trump’s admiration for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
Trump is also a fan of Chinese leader Xi Jinping despite his undemocratic policies
Trump’s love/hate relationship with Kim Jong Un has been an ongoing saga since his ascension to the presidency in 2016
Trump pictured with former chief of staff John Kelly and former national security adviser John Bolton in 2018
Trump referred to Kim Jong Un as ‘an okay guy’ and called Xi Jinping ‘brilliant’, while also privately praising Putin in addition to his public admiration for the Russian leader. Trump has publicly called Putin ‘very, very strong’.
Last week, Trump was widely criticized for hosting Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, a darling of American conservatives despite his anti-democratic policies, at Mar-a-Lago last week.
Orbán’s approach appeals to Trump’s brand of conservatives, who have abandoned their embrace of limited government and free markets for a system that runs counter to their own ideology, said Dalibor Rohac, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“They want to use the tools of government to reward their friends and punish their opponents, which is what Orbán has done,” Rohac said.
Orbán’s government has retaliated and repeatedly praised the former president.
The Hitler praise may not come as much of a surprise after Trump hosted neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West at his Florida residence in November 2022.
“It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs killed in the European theater. But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy,” Kelly continued, talking about Trump’s feelings for Hitler.
Kelly went on to say that Trump would compliment Hitler’s ability to engender extreme loyalty from his inner circle as he accused his own inner circle of betraying him.
“He asked about loyalty issues and how, when I pointed out to him, the German generals as a group were not loyal to him and actually tried to assassinate him a couple of times, and he didn’t know that,” Kelly said.
‘He really thought when he brought us generals in that we would be loyal – that we would do anything he wanted us to do.’
Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton told CNN that the former president considers himself a ‘big guy’.
‘He likes to deal with other big guys and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey are going to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He likes that, said the former UN ambassador.
In response to the allegations, a Trump spokesman said Kelly and Bolton suffer from ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’.
“John Kelly and John Bolton have completely regretted themselves and are suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. They need to seek professional help because their hatred is consuming their empty lives,” said Steven Cheung.
Kelly’s book examines “a new, more uncertain global order, reporting on the front lines of power from existing wars to looming wars across the globe,” according to a new synopsis.
Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un once exchanged threats of destruction and crude insults after North Korea conducted a series of high-profile weapons tests in 2017 aimed at gaining the ability to launch nuclear strikes on the US mainland.
Trump had said he would rain ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea and mocked Kim as ‘Little Rocket Man’ on a suicide mission, while Kim responded that he would ‘tam the mentally deranged American dotard with fire’.
But they stopped such rhetoric and instead developed a personal relationship after Kim abruptly reached out to Trump in 2018 to discuss the fate of his advancing nuclear arsenal.
They met three times in 2018-2019, starting with a summit in Singapore that made Trump the first sitting US president to meet a North Korean leader since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Their meetings made little progress since their second summit in Vietnam in early 2019 ended without any agreement following disputes over US-led sanctions against North Korea.
Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes was invited to dinner at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022
Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un once exchanged threats of destruction and crude insults, but met twice during Trump’s presidency