Kamala Harris said Wednesday that comments praising Adolf Hitler, reportedly made by Donald Trump to his longest-serving chief of staff, offer a window into who the former president “really is" and the kind of commander in chief he would be.
In interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic published Tuesday, John Kelly warned that the Republican nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that while in office he suggested that the Nazi leader “did some good things.”
The Trump campaign has vigorously denied the remarks and called Kelly's comments a political hatchet job.
That didn't stop Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee, from repeating increasingly dire warnings about Trump’s mental fitness and his intentions for the presidency.
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best, from the people who have worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room,” Harris told reporters outside the vice president's residence in Washington.
The comments from Kelly, the retired Marine general who worked for Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019, built on warnings from other former top Trump officials as the election enters its final two weeks.
Kelly has long been critical of Trump and previously accused him of calling veterans killed in combat “suckers” and “losers.” His new warnings emerged as Trump seeks a second term vowing to dramatically expand his use of the military at home and suggesting he would use force to go after Americans he considers “enemies from within.”
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Kelly recalled to the Times. Kelly said he would usually quash the conversation by saying “nothing (Hitler) did, you could argue, was good,” but that Trump would occasionally bring up the topic again.
In his interview with the Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing “German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant “Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who oversaw the unification of Germany. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Trump’s campaign denied the accounts. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Kelly had “beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated" and, after Harris' statement, accused the Democratic candidate of sharing "outright lies and falsehoods.”
Chris Sununu, New Hampshire's Republican governor and onetime Trump critic, said Kelly's comments did not change his plans to vote for the former president.
“Look, we’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump, from Donald Trump. It's really par for the course,” the governor told CNN. “Unfortunately, with a guy like that, it’s kind of baked into the vote at this point.”
Some of the former president's supporters in swing states responded to Kelly's comments with a shrug.
“Trump did his four years, and we were in great shape. Kelly didn’t have anything good to say about Trump. He ought to have his butt kicked," said Jim Lytner, a longtime advocate for veterans in Nevada who served in the Army in Vietnam and co-founded the nonprofit Veterans Transition Resource Center.
Polls show the race is tight in swing states, and both Trump and Harris are crisscrossing the country making their final pitches to the sliver of undecided voters.
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