Admiring Hitler Is Disqualifying. Period.

Sixteen million Americans fought against fascism and the Nazi regime to secure freedom and democracy. We have a duty to defeat this candidate for president who rejects our basic values.

(Photo by Win McNamee via Getty Images)

Gen. John Kelly is ringing the alarm bell. In interviews published in both The Atlantic and The New York Times this week, Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff revealed that Trump told him that Adolf Hitler “did some good things.”

Beyond his nauseatingly familiar attraction to dictators, Trump’s admiration for Hitler crosses an intolerable line. Trump also told Kelly that “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had”—and he refused to believe it when Kelly explained to him that some of those generals not only were not loyalists, but they tried multiple times to assassinate Der Führer.

And yet, Trump’s sycophants are responding with predictable support. Whenever criticism of their beloved leader appears, they have ready-made excuses to minimize his desecrations: It’s a lie, they insist. He didn’t really say those things. He didn’t mean what you think he meant. And they deflect: What about the terrible thing some Democrat did?

Kelly, at the heart of Trump’s inner circle, was no lickspittle; he said he tried to advise Trump. “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.” But his words fell on deaf ears.

These new revelations from Kelly—a four-star general, a Gold Star father who lost his son in Afghanistan—were dismissed by Trump enablers on CNN, one claiming that The Atlantic’s reporting “doesn’t pass the smell test” and Kelly’s comments were just part of his “farewell tour.”

In fact, Kelly’s remarks align with our knowledge of Trump’s admiration for other dictators like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un and Viktor Orbán. Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of Americans and employing dehumanizing language such as “vermin” and “animals” to describe them also matches closely with Hitler’s own rhetoric about the Jewish people. Let’s never forget Trump’s attraction to and backing of neo-Nazis—in Charlottesville and at his dinner table in Mar-a-Lago. In recent weeks, he was already blaming the Jews if he loses this election.

In his interview with the Times’ Michael Schmidt, Kelly clearly acknowledged that Trump is “a fascist” and “an authoritarian” who “admires people who are dictators” and believes that fascist practices “would work better in terms of running America.” In his new book, War, Bob Woodward notes that Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Trump “the most dangerous person to this country” and “a fascist to the core!”

The media’s spotlight on Trump’s admiration for Hitler may well peter out in the days ahead, just like the hundreds of other appalling transgressions during and after Trump’s presidency. But it strikes me that if it does fade out—treated as just another Trumpian quirk—this is not simply because too many voters are numb or indifferent to all the degradation.

Rather, nearly 80 years after the end of World War II, it would also represent that the American electorate has lost awareness of the utter horror of the Nazis, the incomprehensible scale of their crimes—and the profound sacrifice of so many Americans.

That includes six million Jewish men, women and children who were systematically murdered, as well as millions more non-Jewish victims who were Soviet and Polish prisoners of war, German political opponents, people with disabilities, gay and bisexual men, and Romani men, women and children. Overall death counts from World War II range from 50 million to 85 million, including estimates of 24 million Russians, 6.6 million to 8.8 million Germans and over 400,000 Americans.

“Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in 1941. “The Nazi regime…is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. It excels in all forms of human wickedness, in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression.”

Churchill described the mission that ultimately made victory possible: “We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this, nothing will turn us. Nothing. We will never parley; we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land; we shall fight him by sea; we shall fight him in the air, until, with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its people from his yoke.”

We shouldn’t doubt that Trump is ready to bring back that Hitlerian shadow, a yoke which so many Americans and Europeans fought and died to escape from—making it possible for us to live in freedom. And rather than seeing our military fundamentally as a defender of freedom here and around the world, he has said he would employ American soldiers “if necessary” to attack Democrats and other citizens that he deems are “the enemy within.”

I see it as my main task in these final days before Nov. 5 to communicate as clearly as I can about why Donald Trump must never again step foot in our Oval Office. I’m not the only one: You may want to check out the list of 200 reasons to vote against Trump from my friend and colleague Mark Jacob, with whom I produce our Media Misses video series.

But this new evidence illustrating Trump’s admiration for Adolf Hitler may be the clearest expression of how profoundly unsuited he is to ever come near our White House again. This is a detestable slap in the face to the 16 million Americans (and their families) who fought against fascism and Nazism and for democracy and freedom. And it’s a sickening slap in the face to every American alive today who still holds dearly to these fundamental values.

We have 12 more days to make our voices heard. To help get out the vote in whatever way we can. To remind our friends, neighbors and family members that only one candidate in this presidential race rejects fascism, believes in American ideals and seeks to make our lives better.

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