Nick Ayers, chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, chimed in on the latest Nazi-themed attack against former President Donald Trump despite preferring to stay out of such affairs, calling General John Kelly’s assertions parroted by establishment news outlets “patently false.”
General John Kelly, who worked in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019, told the New York Times that Trump spoke highly of Adolf Hitler.
“‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Kelly said, supposedly quoting Trump. He also told the Atlantic that Trump wanted “German generals,” further specifying “Hitler’s generals.”
These narratives prompted Pence’s chief-of-staff to speak out.
“I’ve avoided commenting on intra-staff leaks or rumors or even lies as it relates to my time at the White House but General Kelly’s comments regarding President Trump are too egregious to ignore,” Nick Ayers wrote.
“I was with each of them more than most, and his commentary is patently false,” he added.
Along with the Times, another recent Hitler-centric Trump narrative comes from the far-left Atlantic, infamously known for the fake and debunked “suckers and losers” story still cited by President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their allies. In one story, the Atlantic quoted Kelly, who claimed that Trump wanted Hitler’s generals. In another piece, the Atlantic warned that Trump is like “Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”
The article reads in part:
Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
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This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”
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These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.
As Breitbart News’s John Nolte pointed out, the author of the “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” article is Anne Applebaum, “one of the first people to formulate the ‘Russia collusion’ hoax, even before the votes were counted in 2016.”
