What John Kelly said about Trump’s praise of Hitler and fascist tendencies

Retired four-star General John Kelly, who was one of Donald Trump’s White House chiefs of staff, told the New York Times Trump would rule like a fascist if reelected. Kelly also spoke to The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg for a new piece which quotes Donald Trump as once having said “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Geoff Bennett discussed more with Goldberg.
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Geoff Bennett:

As we just heard, retired Four-Star General John Kelly, who was one of Donald Trump’s White House chiefs of staff, told The New York Times, Donald Trump would rule like a fascist if reelected.

Kelly also spoke to “The Atlantic”‘s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, for a new piece which quotes Donald Trump as once having said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Goldberg is also moderator of “Washington Week With The Atlantic” here on PBS and joins us now.

Thanks for being here.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Moderator, “Washington Week With The Atlantic”: Thank you.
Geoff Bennett:

So John Kelly confirmed to you that Trump had said he wished military leadership showed him the same kind of deference that Hitler’s Nazi generals showed him during World War II, people who were totally loyal to him that followed orders, Trump is quoted as saying.

Walk us through that part of your reporting.
Jeffrey Goldberg:

Well we have known for several years from other reports, background reports mainly, that Trump, particularly in moments of high tension — think the 2020 George Floyd unrest — has expressed frustration that, in a democracy, generals can’t just be ordered to do things that they consider to be illegal or immoral.

He had a frustration with obviously the generals he had hired into his Cabinet, Jim Mattis and so on. But he also had frustrations with the Pentagon itself. And so these expressions of desire to be more like Hitler and have Hitler’s relationship with his generals came out in these moments of tension, and, again, especially around that George Floyd area, where Trump has been cited as saying, “Why can’t you just go shoot them, shoot them in the legs?” is what he said to Mark Esper, the former secretary of defense.

And this is what’s so interesting about it. When John Kelly explained to Donald Trump, among other things, that Hitler’s generals repeatedly tried to assassinate him, Donald Trump showed himself to be impervious to that knowledge and said, no, no, no, no, that’s not true.

So Kelly grew more and more frustrated with Trump’s inability to understand his role or what Hitler did.
Geoff Bennett:

And John Kelly’s comments don’t exist in a vacuum because they’re the latest in a line of warnings from former Trump Cabinet officials and top aides about how Donald Trump views the presidency and how he would exercise power if reelected.

Did John Kelly express concerns about how Donald Trump would govern in a second term, especially given that there will likely be fewer guardrails in a second term than existed in the first one?
Jeffrey Goldberg:

Yes, well, that’s — the assumption that we have to make is that the kind of person Donald Trump put in the first term, especially at the beginning, Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, he has learned from his — quote, unquote — “mistakes” and will get people who are more compliant.

He’s looking for obedience. This is the thing that shocks him about American generals and continues to shock him, is that they swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. That’s what he’s looking for, personal loyalty. And we know that from many other discussions we have heard around him.

In terms of what people are expecting in a second term, I think it’s fair to say that not just John Kelly, but a wide swathe of people who worked in the national security area, from John Bolton to H.R. McMaster to many others, have expressed varying degrees of concern that the guardrails will be off next time and that Donald Trump will try to do the things that he wasn’t — quote, unquote — “allowed to do” in the first go-around.

So, yes, they are. They’re extremely worried about it, which is why I think you hear more and more of this discourse over the last couple of weeks.
Geoff Bennett:

You also report in this piece that Donald Trump, then-President Trump, in July 2020, he promised to cover the funeral cost of 20-year-old U.S. Army Private Vanessa Guillen, who had been bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, but he reneged months later after inquiring about the cost during an Oval Office meeting.

And you write that Trump became angry — quote — “‘It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury an effing Mexican.’ He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: ‘Don’t pay it.’ Later that day he was still agitated. ‘Can you believe it?’ he said, according to a witness, ‘effing people trying to rip me off.'”

According to your reporting, how did people in the room respond to that?
Jeffrey Goldberg:

Well, my sources were in the room and so there were some people who were upset about it, obviously, and I have contemporaneous notes taken in the room that reflect the kind of shock.

Remember, it’s shocking, but only to a degree if you worked for him for a while, because there’s a lot of, let’s say, emotion that coursed through that White House. Obviously, other people in the room, including Meadows and Kash Patel, who was the chief of staff to the secretary of defense, the acting secretary of defense at the time, because he had just fired Mark Esper, are denying that this happened and issued statements that saying that Donald Trump was very supportive of the family.

The fact remains that he didn’t pay. But there’s a split. Mark Meadows has come out and said that this didn’t happen. But I have great confidence in my sources and in the notes that I have seen.
Geoff Bennett:

What does this suggest about Donald Trump?
Jeffrey Goldberg:

He was triggered by this in a couple of ways.

Obviously, we know that the subject of Mexico and Mexicans is a sensitive one to him. It would go all the way back to 2015, when he was warning the country about Mexican rapists coming across the border. That’s been a through line. And, obviously, and this is the larger point of the story, he has difficulty expressing admiration in private settings and admiration for soldiers.

He — when he reads from a teleprompter, he says the right things and he has shown sympathy to certain groups of soldiers in the past. But his relationship with the military — this goes back to my reporting that he called World War I veterans who had lost their lives suckers and losers.

He has a very complicated relationship with national service and with the soldiers in a way that we haven’t seen in other presidents.
Geoff Bennett:

Jeffrey Goldberg, thanks so much for being with us. We appreciate it.