Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff revealed Tuesday how the then-president praised Adolf Hitler and met the dictionary definition of a “fascist.”
John Kelly, the retired Marine general who was Trump’s Homeland Security secretary and then chief White House aide for almost 18 months, told The New York Times that Trump wanted to rule as a dictator. Kelly also shared damning recollections in an interview with The Atlantic about Trump once pining after “Hitler’s generals.”
Kelly told the Times that, after leaving Trump‘s White House in 2019, he’d decided he would talk on the record only if the former president made comments that deeply troubled him. He was therefore motivated to speak up after Trump’s recent remarks about potentially using the military against the “enemy within.”
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“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” Kelly told The Times. “He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
“I think he’d love to be just like he was in business—he could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot,” Kelly said.
And when asked whether Trump had any empathy, Kelly replied simply, “No.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called Kelly’s accounts “debunked stories” and said he had “beclowned” himself.
Kelly’s interview came mere hours after The Atlantic reported that Trump, while president, expressed admiration for Hitler’s Nazi generals. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” he said in the White House, according to two people who heard him. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
Kelly told the magazine that when Trump asked him why he couldn‘t “be like the German generals,” he’d asked if Trump was referring to “Bismarck’s generals.”
“I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War,” Kelly said. “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.’
The outlet also quoted Trump—who avoided the Vietnam War draft on medical grounds after being diagnosed with bone spurs in his heels—as bashing veterans by telling a Cabinet official that “only suckers went to Vietnam.”
The Atlantic piece was written by the publication’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Four years ago, Goldberg was the first to publish allegations that Trump had slandered American troops who died in battle as “suckers” and “losers.”
Trump has consistently denied making the remarks—but Kelly, whose own son was a Marine killed in 2010 while deployed in Afghanistan—last year confirmed to CNN that the stories were true. He doubled down in his new interview with the Times, claiming Trump insulted fallen troops on several occasions.
Kelly said during a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 2017—where his son his buried—Trump asked what had been in it for the soldiers who’d died in battle. “I didn’t realize he was serious—he just didn’t see what the point was,” Kelly said. “As I got to know him, again, this selflessness is something he just didn’t understand. What’s in it for them?”
Kelly’s blistering criticism of Trump echoes that of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. “A total fascist,” Milley said of Trump, as told to Bob Woodward for his book War.
The revelations come as Trump promotes a rally at Madison Square Garden to be held nine days before Election Day. Since the announcement, critics have compared the event to the 1939 pro-Nazi rally held at the Garden.
“We’ve held a lot of rallies, and we’re going to have our biggest of all at Madison Square Garden,” Trump told supporters at a rally in North Carolina on Tuesday night.
“We’re going to make a play for New York. It hasn’t been won in many decades, but with what’s going on in New York, between the illegal migrants, and the crime they’re causing, and hurting people so badly and all of the problems in New York, we’re going to give it a hell of a shot,” Trump added.
“So we took Madison Square Garden, we filled it up, think of this, sold out, in three hours, done,” Trump said. “Can you imagine?”
