By
It was about a year ago when the names “Donald Trump” and “Adolf Hitler” started appearing more regularly in the same news reports. In fact, it was in a Veterans Day message published in November 2023 when the former Republican president condemned Americans who “live like vermin“ in the United States, leading many to note the degree to which he was echoing the Nazi leader’s dehumanizing language.
It was around the same time when the GOP candidate started accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood“ of the country — phrasing that was effectively the same as what appeared in “Mein Kampf” — while vowing to “root out” his ideological foes.
As Trump went on to insist that Americans he doesn’t like pose a “threat from within,” The Washington Post published an analysis that added, “This was also a theme often promoted by Hitler.”
In the months that followed, as the Republican grew more explicit when touting an authoritarian-style vision for the United States — he even started talking about the genetic inferiority of immigrants — a variety of observers noted the hard-to-miss parallels between Trump and the World War II-era leader. The Post’s Catherine Rampell explained, for example, that the GOP nominee “seems intent on making the Hitler comparison happen.” Soon after, The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum added that Trump’s language “isn’t merely ugly or repellent: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often.”
But just over the last couple of weeks, the conversation has taken a rather dramatic turn. The public learned, for example, that retired Gen. Mark Milley, who served as Trump’s handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, condemned the former president as “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” This week, Americans also learned that retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s handpicked White House chief of staff, not only endorsed the idea that Trump is “fascist,” he also said Trump privately longed for “Hitler’s generals“ and privately commented more than once Hitler “did some good things.”
The Republican nominee continues to issue denials. NBC News reported:
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday denied ever having said positive things about Hitler during his time in office, including that he needed ‘the kind of generals that Hitler had.’ ‘I never said that,’ Trump said in response to a reporter’s question about an article this week in The Atlantic. ‘I would never say that,’ he added, directly denying the magazine’s reporting.
Before proceeding, let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Americans have reached the point in our collective history in which the Republican Party’s nominee for the nation’s highest office is having to address credible questions about his alleged pro-Hitler comments — which are not to be confused with the Hitler-like comments he’s already made in public.
Complicating matters is that Kelly isn’t standing alone: 13 former Trump White House officials signed an open letter expressing support for the former chief of staff’s condemnations.
“We applaud General Kelly for highlighting in stark details the danger of a second Trump term. Like General Kelly, we did not take the decision to come forward lightly,” the letter said. “We are all lifelong Republicans who served our country. However, there are moments in history where it becomes necessary to put country over party. This is one of those moments.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the partisan divide, Barack Obama has begun incorporating Kelly’s comments into his pitch to the public.
“Now, I want to explain that in politics a good rule of thumb is: Don’t say you want to do anything like Hitler,” the former Democratic president told a massive crowd in Atlanta. “That’s just good political advice, but it is useful because it gives us a window into how Donald Trump thinks.”
For his part, Trump also published an item to his social media platform, complaining that Democrats have gone “so far as to call me Adolf Hitler.”
That, of course, wasn’t true. For one thing, the allegations have come from members of Trump’s own team. For another, Trump’s critics didn’t call him Hitler, they’ve instead drawn obvious parallels between him and Hitler.
As for who actually did question whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” that was his running mate.