Vice President Kamala Harris called out former President Donald Trump for saying he wanted U.S. military generals to behave like Nazi leader Adolph Hilter’s generals — who Trump believes demonstrated unquestioning loyalty to their leader.
“Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution. … He wants a military who will be loyal to him, personally — one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon to their oath to the Constitution of the United States,” she said Wednesday at her vice-presidential residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. All of this is further evidence into who Donald Trump really is.”
Trump’s reported comments were shared by John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general who served Trump as both Homeland Security secretary and White House chief of staff from 2017-2019, and published in The Atlantic magazine.
“He told me that when Trump raised the subject of ‘German generals,’ Kelly responded by asking, ‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’ He went on: ’I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, “Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.’ Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel,” Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week with The Atlantic, reported.
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