Former US president Donald Trump told his chief of staff in 2018 that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler “did a lot of good things,” according to a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender.
Bender says Trump made the comment to John Kelly on a 2018 trip to Europe to mark the centenary of the end of World War I, while the latter was giving him a quick history lesson on Germany and the world wars.
The report appears in Bender’s book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election’: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.”
Kelly was reportedly “shocked” by Trump’s comments, which apparently referred to Hitler’s actions to build up the German economy in the 1930s.
He “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred,” according to Bender. “Kelly pushed back again and argued that the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.”
And at any rate, he told the president, “you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”
A spokeswoman for Trump denied the report. “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,” she says.