President Biden’s campaign is slamming former President Trump’s past comments favorably discussing Adolf Hitler on multiple occasions, calling his remarks “disgraceful but wholly unsurprising.”
The Biden campaign said a CNN report quoting former Trump chief of staff John Kelly’s remembrances of conversations with Trump “confirmed what we knew” about the former president.
In an emailed statement, the Biden campaign said it “can’t believe we have to say this, but Hitler did not do ‘good things.’”
Kelly, a retired general who served as Trump’s first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security before moving to the White House, spoke to CNN’s Jim Sciutto for a book. He told Sciutto of several conversations where the former president said the Nazi leader had done “some good things,” as well as inspiring loyalty within his military and rebuilding the economy.
Kelly questioned Trump on his statements and said he told his then-boss he can’t say things like that.
Biden-Harris 2024 Senior Rapid Response spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said she thinks the campaign speaks for “the VAST majority” of people that Hitler did not do great things.
“Donald Trump’s praise for Hitler is disgraceful but wholly unsurprising from the man who has parroted Nazi rhetoric on the campaign trial, called his political opponents ‘vermin,’ and sucked up to dictators and authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong Un, and then the rest of the gang,” Chitika said in a statement.
Trump met with Orbán at his Mar-a-Lago estate last Friday. The Hungarian leader told Trump to “keep on fighting” ahead of his scheduled arraignment Tuesday and said he would like to see Trump return to the White House.
“This is the same Viktor Orbán who undermines democracy, attacks the LGBTQ community, leads the most corrupt country in Europe, and is currently mired in a scandal after the pardoning of a man convicted of covering up sexual abuse of children,” the Biden campaign’s statement said.
The campaign also slammed Trump for his ties to other world leaders, including receiving “beautiful letters” from North Korean leader Kim, calling Chinese President Xi Jinping “a king” and telling Putin to “do whatever the hell” he wanted to the United States’s allies.
“When Donald Trump talks like a dictator, praises dictators, and says he wants to be a dictator, we should probably believe him,” Chitika’s statement said.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates criticized Trump for his reported comments, arguing in a statement that “no American” should praise Hitler, a “genocidal monster.”
“Hundreds of thousands of American service members – heroes, not ‘suckers’ or ‘losers’ – gave their lives to defeat that evil. Admiring Hitler is an insult to their memory,” Bates said. “President Biden is committed to bringing all Americans together based on our shared values, against the most horrifying ideologies in history.”
Updated: 3:12 p.m.