A bombshell report in The Atlantic that alleged Donald Trump praised Adolf Hitler hasn’t featured much on Fox News, but one of its most popular hosts did address the story on Wednesday—at least, sort of.
Bret Baier, still fresh off a contentious interview with Kamala Harris, said Wednesday that The Atlantic’s article was, somehow, part of Kamala Harris’ “threat to America” messaging. That appeared to suggest that Baier believes the article was planted by Harris’ team to publish just ahead of Election Day.
“It seems like Vice President Harris is closing with the threat to America from the former president,” Baier said on Fox & Friends. “You saw that Atlantic piece referencing former chief of staff John Kelly talking about how the president talked about Hitler. All of these things will be packaged together to make this closing argument that she’s making alongside former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.”
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Like most of his colleagues have done since Tuesday afternoon, Baier didn’t detail the report at all. Instead, he merely alluded to it and moved on, as if the story doesn’t potentially carry serious weight regarding Trump’s character and what he’d do if he returned to power.
The Atlantic reported Tuesday, citing anonymous sources, that Trump said during his presidency, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
John Kelly, the retired U.S. Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, told The New York Times—in a story published just after the Atlantic’s report on Tuesday—that Trump wanted to emulate his far-right heroes.
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that,” Kelly said. “So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly later added: “He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
Trump’s campaign has denied he ever praised Hitler in private and that he disparaged a murdered soldier as a “f---ing Mexican.”
While mentions of the report have been few and far between on conservative network news, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade offered his own explanation for Trump’s comments on Wednesday. He suggested that Trump may have just gotten used to acting like a dictator over his businesses, where his deputies would do whatever asked of them.
“I could see him going, ‘I’d love generals that listened, that would be great,’” Kilmeade said. “He’s also from a world where his company is huge, but it’s a family company. When he asked Eric [Trump] or somebody to do something, they’d do it. It’s not even publicly traded, he doesn’t have board members and all of a sudden now he’s like, ‘Do this. What do you mean, you can’t do it?’... After a while, there were probably times [where he said], ‘Wouldn’t it be great if generals actually listened?’”
