Former President Donald Trump said Adolf Hitler "did some good things," according to his then chief of staff Gen. John Kelly. Kelly spoke with CNN's Jim Sciutto in an interview for his book The Return of Great Powers.
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“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things.’ I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing,’” Kelly said. “I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”
The book goes on to say, “It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theater,” Kelly said. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy thing.”
Sciutto goes on to quote Kelly, "Trump also expressed admiration for Hitler’s hold on senior Nazi officers. Trump lamented that Hitler, as Kelly recounted, maintained his senior staff’s “loyalty,” while Trump himself often did not.
“He would ask about the loyalty issues and about how, when I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to him, and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, and he didn’t know that,” Kelly recalled. “He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal — that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”
Trump's admiration for some of the worlds' autocratic leaders was often questioned by his critics including his praise for North Korea's Kim Jun Un Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He hosted Hungarian leader Victor Urban at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Friday. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump said. “He’s the boss and he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”