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Ex-chief of staff accuses Trump of praising Hitler

Trump campaign blasts ex-aides over claims former president praised Hitler and other authoritarian leaders.

By David Rosenberg, World Israel News

Former President Donald Trump frequently praised authoritarian foreign leaders during his time in office, two former aides claim, including Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler – a claim the former president’s campaign has denied.

Speaking with CNN‘s Jim Sciutto, John Bolton, who served as Trump’s National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019, and retired Marines general John Kelly – Trump’s second chief of staff – both said the 45th president had a penchant for lavishing praise on authoritarian leaders.

“He views himself as a big guy,” Bolton said. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”

The former National Security Advisor also claimed Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin during a 2018 NATO summit, saying their meeting was the “easiest of them all,” Bolton recalled.

Kelly added that the former president had sympathy for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

“He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy — that we had pushed North Korea into a corner.”

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“To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”

In his interview with CNN, Kelly backed a 2021 allegation by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, who wrote in his book, entitled, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, that then-President Trump once told Kelly he believed “Hitler did a lot of good things.”

When Bender first made the claim in 2021, Trump denied he had made the comments, with a spokeswoman calling the book’s allegations “fake news.”

“This is totally false. President Trump never said this. It is made up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired,” Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington said.

In his interview published Tuesday, Kelly recalled his conversation with Trump, claiming the president lauded Hitler’s handling of the German economy.

“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things.’ I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’”

“And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.”

Kelly also claimed that Trump admired Hitler’s grip over his senior military staff, lamenting that as president, he did not command the same level of loyalty from American top brass.

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“He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal — that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”

Trump’s former chief of staff said he told the president Hitler’s own generals had attempted to kill him in a failed assassination plot in the summer of 1944.

The Trump campaign rejected Bolton and Kelly’s claims, with spokesman Steven Cheung saying the two were suffering from a “severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

“John Kelly and John Bolton have completely beclowned themselves,” Cheung said, adding they should “seek professional help.”

Kelly, who had been tapped to replace interim chief of staff Reince Priebus in July 2017, reportedly lamented working in the Trump White House in June 2018, fueling rumors of a falling out between the president and his chief of staff. In December of that year, Trump announced Kelly’s departure from the administration.

Bolton, who served 17 months as Trump’s National Security Advisor, left in September 2019, following a series of policy differences.

After leaving office, both Bolton and Kelly became vocal critics of Trump, publicly criticizing the former president in repeatedly interviews in major media outlets.