Playing the Hitler card: Will Trump backers dismiss John Kelly’s attack?

Earlier this year, there was some media chatter about when the Biden campaign would go “full Hitler.”

What that meant was, if they started talking about Donald Trump and the Nazi leader so early, what ammunition would they have left for October?

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Well, it’s late October, and the Hitler assault has begun.

It’s not like no one has heard this before. Trump’s detractors across the media landscape have periodically compared him to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Magazines have depicted him with a little mustache. He’s been dismissed as an aspiring dictator who would blow up American democracy, with few of the guardrails that constrained him in his first term.

But now we have John Kelly, his second chief of staff, denouncing his ex-boss in a series of three on-the-record interviews with the New York Times, which were recorded and posted on the paper’s site.

Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who lost a son in Afghanistan, said he was going public because he was disturbed by Trump’s attacks on “the enemy within,” which, as the former president told me in our weekend interview, included Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. And Kelly was equally concerned that he might use the military against Americans.

Kelly says in the Times audio that Trump meets his definition of a fascist. And in the context of wanting his generals (such as Kelly and Pentagon chief Jim Mattis) to be personally loyal to him, “He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’” 

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Kelly says he told the president “you should never say that” and explained some of the history of Nazi Germany. (Hitler’s generals tried to kill him more than once.)

The general also said that Trump referred to soldiers as “losers” and “suckers” and could not understand their sacrifice. If this and other passages sound familiar, it’s because it’s been previously reported in the Atlantic and elsewhere, rather obviously with Kelly as a background source.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung fired back, saying the former official was offering “debunked stories,” had “beclowned” himself and was suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

My question is this: Are John Kelly’s comments going to change the mind of any Trump voters?

They may dismiss the comments as old news. Or say Trump didn’t really mean it, he was just letting off steam. Or question Kelly’s motivation in going public in the final stretch of the campaign.

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It’s not that I’m defending the comments as reported by Kelly, who’s free to say what he wants. I have absolutely nothing good to say about Hitler or the Nazis. I don’t agree with everything Trump says, just as I don’t agree with everything Kamala Harris says.

But how many Trump voters, having lived through nine years of media attacks on the 45th president, having watched the violence of Jan. 6, are going to abandon him now? The answer, in my view, is very few. 

Still, it gave the vice president an opening, since yesterday’s bombshell was detonated by a man who was the highest-ranking staffer in the Trump White House. She read a statement to reporters in Washington without taking questions:

“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 for the American people of who Donald Trump really is,” Harris said.

I once had a candid chat with Kelly at a White House media party, and when I looked up 10 other reporters had surrounded us, straining to hear what the man who kept a low profile with the press had to say. At the time, the former Homeland Security secretary was being touted as the guy who’d bring military discipline to a chaotic White House after Reince Priebus was let go.

Now the “full Hitler” moment has arrived. Whether it has much impact on a candidate who has survived two impeachments, the fallout after Jan. 6 and two assassination attempts is, at the very least, in doubt.

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