What John Kelly said about Trump’s praise of Hitler and fascist tendencies

Jeffrey Goldberg:

Well we have known for several years from other reports, background reports mainly, that Trump, particularly in moments of high tension — think the 2020 George Floyd unrest — has expressed frustration that, in a democracy, generals can’t just be ordered to do things that they consider to be illegal or immoral.

He had a frustration with obviously the generals he had hired into his Cabinet, Jim Mattis and so on. But he also had frustrations with the Pentagon itself. And so these expressions of desire to be more like Hitler and have Hitler’s relationship with his generals came out in these moments of tension, and, again, especially around that George Floyd area, where Trump has been cited as saying, “Why can’t you just go shoot them, shoot them in the legs?” is what he said to Mark Esper, the former secretary of defense.

And this is what’s so interesting about it. When John Kelly explained to Donald Trump, among other things, that Hitler’s generals repeatedly tried to assassinate him, Donald Trump showed himself to be impervious to that knowledge and said, no, no, no, no, that’s not true.

So Kelly grew more and more frustrated with Trump’s inability to understand his role or what Hitler did.