The US election is less than two weeks away and it remains an inexplicably close race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Harris is competent; Trump is, to put it mildly, not. And worse, Trump has an unnerving fascination with and very possibly a desire to emulate Adolf Hitler, one of the world’s worst monsters. Tim Walz has jumped on Trump’s reported remarks, but will it be enough to steer the United States away from MAGAism and the worst the country has to offer?
According to a new, bombshell article by The Atlantic, Trump once grew agitated when his cronies failed to be completely obedient and said, in private, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” What he means, of course, is that he wants his own military dictatorship—people who he can turn against the “enemy within.”
Two people allegedly heard Trump say this, but his spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer adamantly denied it to The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg. Another source backs up Trump’s obsession with loyal generals, though: none other than John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff. The Atlantic asked him to relay a conversation between himself and the former president where Trump wished he had “German generals.” According to Kelly, he had responded, “Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?” But Trump, “didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War.”
Kelly went on, “I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” We can count German history as yet another thing Donald Trump knows nothing about, then.
The Atlantic also quoted Kelly from a previous interview he did for the book The Return of Great Powers, written by CNN reporter Jim Sciutto. According to what he said in that interview, Trump did in fact shockingly praise Hitler in private. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,'” Kelly explained. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.'” Kelly claimed he told Trump to “never say anything good about the guy”—advice Trump clearly did not take.
Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, is rightly very disturbed by all this and he said as much at a rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday. “Don’t be the frog in the boiling water and think this is okay,” he told the audience. “As a 24-year veteran of our military, that makes me sick as hell, and it should make you sick.” Walz served in the National Guard and actually has military experience, unlike Trump, who famously claimed “bone spurs” in order to get out of Vietnam.
Walz went on, “Folks, the guardrails are gone. Trump is descending into this madness. A former president of the United States and the candidate for president of the United States says he wants generals like Adolf Hitler had. Think about it.”
Hopefully, Trump’s Hitler comment may swing some still undecided voters away from him. But others seem to openly approve of his racism, sexism and all-round fascism. John Kelly told The New York Times (via NBC) that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.” Warnings are everywhere. It seems incomprehensible that so many people would enthusiastically support such a man as Trump, and yet here we are. As Walz says, we need to not be the frog in the boiling water—a horrible thing happened to that frog.
Published: Oct 23, 2024 12:29 pm