In his new book The Return of Great Powers, which comes out Tuesday, reporter Jim Sciutto interviews several of Trump’s former advisers. All of them stressed that Trump regularly lavished praise on authoritarian leaders around the world, calling Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “fantastic,” Chinese President Xi Jinping “brilliant,” and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un an “OK guy.”
Horrifyingly, Trump also said, “Well, but Hitler did some good things,” according to John Kelly, who served as White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019.
“I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing,’” Kelly told Sciutto. “I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”
Kelly said that Trump also praised Hitler for achieving complete loyalty from senior Nazi officials—and Trump expected similar fealty from the retired generals he brought on to his cabinet.
“He would ask about the loyalty issues and about how, when I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to him, and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, and he didn’t know that,” Kelly said. “He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal—that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”
“Hitler did some good things” would end absolutely anyone else’s campaign in America. And this guy still has a chance of winning.
My list has two things:
- he lost
- he killed himself
It’s true. Say what you want about Adolf Hitler… he did kill Adolf Hitler.
People ain’t sick of reading it yet, but I think the only reassuring thing about racist governments is that they inevitably fail by their own doing.
I could build a good economy too, if I redistributed wealth while saddling an entire ethnic/religious demographic with debt, forcing them in to slavery and excluding them from economic statistics. Oh, and make meth legal for the workforce.
The thingy is, it wasn’t that good of an economy outside of the war industry. People paid for car IOUs that would build tanks, but they never got the cars. Compared to east Germany that eventually got the cars.
Seizing the assets of a vast number of people is indeed a great way to prop up your economy even before you decide to use them as slave labor.
And that’s already legal in America! Hooray!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States
Ah yes, the “hitler was good for the economy” bullshit. Even if you’d ignore all the atrocities (which you shouldn’t), fact is that the outcome was a country in ruins.
And Hitler’s economic plan was always based on stealing resources from other countries through war, because else the country’s spending was unsustainable.
Yes. In fact it’s a myth that the economy was strong even in the short term.
So I guess Trump wants the government to take over most businesses, have them make panzer tanks and Messerschmitts, and invade a bunch of countries to get slave labor.
sigh
Fine.
Hitler-loving demented rapist fraud.
You forgot:
Orange Hitler-loving demented rapist fraud.
Treasonous orange Hitler-loving demented rapist fraud.
I do like how Kim is just “an OK guy”
Trump striving to be like notoriously vicious dictators is part of what makes him so appealing to conservative voters.
If history is our guide, your conservative coworkers, neighbors and family members will politely watch as you are escorted onto a bus headed for re-education camp. They won’t be overt or cartoonish in their evil. They will just be themselves.
Dunno how much credit Hitler can be given for this, nonetheless we all have to admit: Those Third Reich uniforms are without equal, even today
That would be thanks to Hugo Boss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Boss#Manufacturing_for_the_Nazi_Party
Had Armani been around prior to the second world War, Mussolini could’ve outdone The Fashion Of The Fuhrer
The Fashion of The Fuhrer sounds like a great musical.
Has the same ring to it that The Passion Of The Christ had
Not that anyone would expect Trump to know this, but Hitler rebuilding the economy was kind of a fraud. He basically used fake currency (before it was cool), banned unions and made it nearly impossible to quit a job, and stole from a big chunk of Germany’s own population and those surrounding it. Ordinary Germans saw a decline in their real wages by 25% from 1933 to 1938, and obviously things only got worse from there.
The right has always loved to say shit like “Mussolini made the trains run on time,” as code for “maybe a little fascism is good.”
And he didn’t even do that.
