It should go without saying but Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was not a good guy, the Biden campaign said in a statement Tuesday.
The campaign’s declaration of an universally accepted historical fact comes following an interview given by former Trump Administration Chief of Staff John Kelly, in which the retired four star general recounted comments allegedly made by then-President Donald Trump.
“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things.’ 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 CNN’s Jim Sciutto.
President Joe Biden’s campaign apparently felt the need to point out the obvious.
“We can’t believe we have to say this, but Hitler did not do ‘good things,’” the Biden-Harris campaign said in a statement they later shared on social media.
Biden-Harris campaign statement on new report that Donald Trump said Hitler “did some good things” pic.twitter.com/YYjKrGgWkR
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 12, 2024
Kelly’s confirmation of Trump’s long rumored affinity for the genocidal Nazi leader is all the more concerning, according to the Biden-Harris team, as it comes after the former president proclaimed that, if reelected, he hopes to be a dictator “for just one day” and while he employs Nazi-like rhetoric to describe migrants and his political opponents.
It also comes following Trump’s Friday dinner with Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, who he hosted at his Florida resort-home Mar-a-Lago. Trump called Orbán, whose crackdowns on the press and the Hungarian judiciary are widely documented, a “great leader.”
According to General Kelly’s telling of it, Trump frequently praised dictators while he was in the White House, even going so far as to suggest that Russian aggression in Ukraine, which unlawfully annexed Crimea in 2014, could have been avoided if not for NATO.
“’If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things,’” Kelly said, apparently quoting Trump.
Trump’s alleged praise of the man responsible for the atrocities of the Holocaust and the deaths of more than 400,000 U.S. service members should come as no surprise, according to Biden campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika.
“Donald Trump’s praise for Hitler is disgraceful but wholly unsurprising from the man who has parroted Nazi rhetoric on the campaign trail, called his political opponents ‘vermin,’ and sucked up to dictators and authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong Un, and the rest of the gang,” Chitika said.
“When Donald Trump talks like a dictator, praises dictators, and says he wants to be a dictator, we should probably believe him,” she said.
Trump’s campaign responded to Sciutto’s interview with Kelly, conducted for his new book “The Return of Great Powers,” and said only that Kelly was suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and that the retired general had “beclowned” himself, but did not speak to the alleged Hitler comments.