Former White House Chief of Staff Compares Trump to Fascist

Photo: Donald Trump, 1.11. 2018. Chief of Staff John Kelly, right/AP/Susan Walsh

Donald Trump's longest-serving chief of staff in the administration of the 45th US president claims that the Republican presidential candidate “meets the definition of a fascist.” John Kelly also claims that Trump privately said that Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, “did some good things.”

The comments by John Kelly, a retired Marine general who served with Trump in the White House from July 2017 to January 2019, came in a series of interviews published Tuesday, Oct. 22, in The New York Times and The Atlantic magazine, the Associated Press reported.

These publications appeared in the information space for a reason: the election race has entered the home stretch, with only two weeks left until Election Day. The publications in both publications are based on conversations with former subordinates of Donald Trump, whom the ex-president fired from his administration.

Kelly has long criticized Trump and previously accused him of calling veterans who died in battle “morons” and “losers.” Kelly's new accusations against his former boss have appeared just now, when Trump is running for a second term, “promising to greatly expand the use of the military at home and suggesting that he would use force to go after Americans he deemed “enemies within.”

“He's said more than once, 'You know, Hitler did some good things,'” Kelly told the New York Times. He said Kelly responded by saying that “nothing (Hitler) did was arguably good,” but Trump has brought it up again from time to time.

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In his interview with the Atlantic, Kelly said that when Trump brought up the idea of ​​needing “German generals,” Kelly assumed the former president was referring to generals from the time of Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor of the German Empire from 1871 to 1890. When Kelly said Trump “clearly doesn't mean generals from Hitler's Germany,” the former president responded that he was talking about “Hitler's generals.”

Donald Trump's campaign denied the claims later in the day, with Republican campaign spokesman Steven Cheung saying Kelly “made a fool of himself with these exposés that he fabricated.”Before becoming Trump's chief of staff, Kelly spent six months as the 45th president's secretary of Homeland Security, where he oversaw the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Kelly was also at the forefront of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement efforts, leading to the separation of thousands of immigrant parents and their children who crossed the southern border. All of this has made him a villain in the eyes of many on the left, including Kamala Harris.

Kelly is not the first former senior Trump administration official to view the former president as a threat.

Retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, told journalist Bob Woodward in an interview for his recent book, “War,” that Trump is “a fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous man for this country.” And retired Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as Trump's defense secretary, later reportedly told Woodward that “he agreed with Milley's assessment.”

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has enjoyed the support of military veterans.

About six in 10 military veterans said they voted for Trump in 2020, as did just over half of veterans' relatives, according to a VoteCast poll conducted for The Associated Press. The study also shows that among voters in the South Carolina Republican primary this year, nearly two-thirds of military veterans and veterans' relatives voted for Trump over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who ran against Trump in the 2024 Republican primary.

By Sergey Daga