Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade has leapt to the defense of former president Donald Trump after bombshell claims that Trump would rule like a dictator if re-elected and has an admiration for Adolf Hitler and his regime.
Kilmeade said he could see how the Republican nominee for president would have expressed frustration with the former military officers who served during his administration.
The Fox News personality also excused Trump’s irritation by noting he was used to essentially being a dictator at his empire of companies before taking office, ordering his compliant family and corporate yes men around with little to no pushback.
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Two sources told The Atlantic in a report published Tuesday that Trump said, “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, confirmed to the magazine that he quizzed Trump when he asked, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“‘Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’” Kelly recalled replying to his boss. “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.”
The Trump campaign called the allegations “absolutely false,” adding “President Trump never said this.”
Kelly also told The New York Times—in a story posted soon after the Atlantic’s report—that Trump wanted to emulate his far-right heroes. “He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” Kelly said. “He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
On Fox & Friends’ Tuesday broadcast, Kilmeade laid out a defense of Trump’s purported anger with his top officials.
“Play this out: if your general, who’s your chief of staff and your Secretary of Defense [Jim Mattis, another retired general], is not doing what you say on an everyday basis, 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,” he added. “When he asked Eric 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?”
Kilmeade said he “can absolutely see that happening.” He accused the leakers of Trump’s alleged remarks as knowing them “in context” but said they wanted to “stop him” because they fear he might win the election.
