Former Trump Chief of Staff Kelly Warns Trump is a Fascist

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By Joe Gandelman
The Moderate Voice

Joe Gandelman

SAN DIEGO — A major political firestorm is swirling around Trump’s former Chief Of Staff John Kelly’s warning that former President Donald Trump is a fascist who admired Adolf Hitler and had said he needed totally obedient generals like Hitler.

It has opened the media and political floodgates for people using the political “fword” – fascist – in discussing Trump.

Democratic Presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris charged Trump wants “unchecked power.” She called Trump “increasingly unstable and unhinged.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that President Joe Biden believes Trump is a fascist.

Here’s how CNN framed the story:

John Kelly, the retired Marine general who was Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, entered the 2024 fray in stunning fashion, saying the former president fits “into the general definition of fascist” and wanted the “kind of generals Hitler had” in a series of interviews published Tuesday.

Kelly’s comments, two weeks from Election Day, are the latest in a line of warnings from former Trump White House aides about how he views the presidency and would exercise power if returned to office.

In addition to the fascist comments, Kelly — who was Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019 — told The New York Times that the former president “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

He also confirmed to The Atlantic that Trump had said he wished his military personnel showed him the same deference Adolf Hitler’s Nazi generals showed the German dictator during World War II, and recounted the moment.

“‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” Kelly told The Atlantic he’d asked Trump. He added, “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. 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.”

Trump’s campaign denied the exchange. “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this,” campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer said.

And what has the response been among Republicans who support Trump? This:

Republicans are struggling to defend the report of Donald Trump’s wild comment pining for “the kind of generals that Hitler had”—and in some cases, they’re not defending it at all.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu said Wednesday that a casual appreciation for Hitler’s Nazi regime was “par for the course” for the Republican presidential nominee.

During an interview with CNN, Sununu was asked whether Trump’s alleged statement was a deal-breaker for the Republican governor.

“No,” Sununu said, explaining that in the end, “it’s all about results.” Independent voters, he said, don’t care for “ultraliberal extremism” and just “need a cultural change coming out of Washington.”

“Look, we’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump from Donald Trump. It’s kind of par for the course. It’s really, unfortunately, uh with a guy like that, it’s kind of baked into the vote at this point,” Sununu said.

Sununu showed just how quick he, and likely other Republicans too, have been to accept Trump’s extremist tendencies. But, as Sununu explained moments later, he was only doing it because it’s what everyone else was doing.

Meanwhile, on Fox News:

Trump loyalists are defending the former president following the report. On Wednesday morning, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade went to bat for the former president.

“[Former Defense Secretary Jim] Mattis and Kelly didn’t like the president,” Kilmeade said, referencing the memoir of H.R. McMaster — Trump’s former national security adviser who also wrote that Putin is manipulating Trump by exploiting his ego. “I can absolutely see [Trump] go, ‘It’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do, maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever,” Kilmeade said. “But he was frustrated with the slow down of commands that were not implemented.”



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Joe Gandelman is editor and publisher of The Moderate Voice website.

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