Former President Donald Trump “stunned” his then-chief of staff John Kelly after reportedly saying that German Dictator Adolph Hitler “did a lot of good things” during his reign of terror.
Kelly revealed Trump’s comments in a forthcoming book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, who reported Trump’s remark while on a visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.
“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump told Kelly, leaving him stunned, according to the book, The Guardian reports.
Trump made the remark after Kelly “reminded the president which countries were on which side during the conflict” and “connected the dots from the first world war to the second world war and all of Hitler’s atrocities,”
According to the book, sources said that Kelly “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred” and praised the German economic recovery under Hitler during the 1930s.
Kelly pushed back, saying that “German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.”
Even if Germany’s economy recovered after the Nazis took over in 1933, Kelly told Trump, “you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”
