Toward the end of his presidency, Donald Trump said in a private conversation in the White House that he wished he had the kind of generals that Adolf Hitler had in Nazi Germany, according to reporting published on Tuesday in The Atlantic.
"I need the kind of generals that Hitler had," Trump said, according to The Atlantic citing two people who heard the former president and current Republican nominee's comments. "People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
Trump spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer denied this happened, telling The Atlantic: "This is absolutely false,” he wrote in an email. “President Trump never said this.”
This is not the first time it has been reported that the then-president expressed a desire to have generals express similar levels of loyalty and obedience to the ones who served the Nazi dictator responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust.
In "The Divider: Trump in the White House," journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported John Kelly, the former U.S. Marine Corps general who was then serving as Trump's White House Chief of Staff at the time, was asked by the president, "Why can’t you be like the German generals?”
Kelly reportedly told Trump that those generals attempted to assassinate Hitler on three occasions and were nearly successful. Trump waved away that clarification, “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him."
Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic who wrote Tuesday's report, asked Kelly about this exchange this week and the subject of Trump and German generals and the former Marine general confined Trump had previously expressed a desire for generals like the Nazi leader.
Kelly recounted that he asked if Trump had meant Otto von Bismark's generals, referring to the German leader who oversaw the country's unification and 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,'" Kelly told The Atlantic. "I explained that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler."
Kelly told Goldberg Trump was "not acquainted" with Erwin Rommel, the commander of Nazi forces in Italy and North Africa who was later implicated in the 20 July plot to kill Hitler in 1944. Rommel chose suicide rather than face prosecution and execution.
In an interview with The New York Times published Tuesday, Kelly said that on more than one occasion Trump spoke positively of Hitler, confirming previous reports made about the former president.
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” he said Trump told him.
Kelly also confirmed to The Times that Trump had on multiple occasions told him that Americans wounded, captured or killed in action were “losers and suckers.”
The former Marine general said the former president looked down on service members who were disabled from combat wounds and didn't want to be seen at public events with them:
“Certainly his not wanting to be seen with amputees — amputees that lost their limbs in defense of this country fighting for every American, him included, to protect them, but didn’t want to be seen with them. That’s an interesting perspective for the commander in chief to have.”
"He would just say: ‘Look, it just doesn’t look good for me.’”
Comments on U.S. Army Pvt. Vanessa Guillen's funeral costs
In the same report, The Atlantic includes an incident in which the former president allegedly made a disparaging remark about the funeral costs for Vanessa Guillen, the 20-year-old U.S. Army private who was murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood in Texas in 2020.
During the Guillen family's visit to the White House, Trump told the slain soldier's mother, Vanessa, that if he could "help you out with the funeral, I'll help you with that. I'll help you out. Financially, I'll help you," according to a White House transcript of the meeting.
When informed by an attorney representing the family, Natalie Khawam, that the military would be paying, the then-president said, "Good. They'll do a military. That's good. If you need help, I'll help you out."
A reporter then asked Trump if he had ever offered to do that for other families, he said that he had written checks for other families personally if they needed help from a financial standpoint.
Five months after the July 30, 2020 meeting with Guillen's family, then Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy announced the results of an investigation that cited numerous "leadership failures" and relieved or suspended several officers, including Fort Hood's commanding general. McCarthy said at the time, “The tragic death of Vanessa Guillen and rash of others at Fort Hood forced us to take a critical look at our systems, our policies, and ourselves. But without leadership, systems don’t matter."
The Atlantic, citing a person close to Trump at the time, said the president was agitated by those comments and questioned the severity of the punishments being dispensed.
In a Dec. 4, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office about a separate national-security issue, Trump asked for an update on the McCarthy investigation, and, two people present at the meeting told The Atlantic, that Trump asked, "Did they bill us for the funeral? What did it cost?"
Guillen had a public memorial service two weeks after the White House meeting with Trump months earlier and a private funeral and burial.
An aide answered, that a bill was received with funeral costs of $60,000, the magazine said citing attendees and contemporaneous notes.
Trump became angry and, according to The Atlantic, said: “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f------ Mexican!” (Guillen was the daughter of Mexican immigrants.)
Trump said to his then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows: “Don’t pay it!” Later in the day, he turned to another person and, according to a witness, said, “Can you believe it?... Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
Khawam said a bill was sent to the White House but no money was received from Trump. Some of the costs were covered by the Army and others by donations, the attorney told The Atlantic.
In a statement to the magazine, Pfeiffer denied Trump made such a remark: “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie from The Atlantic two weeks before the election.”
After The Atlantic's story was published, Meadows posted a statement on social media: "I was in the discussions featured in the Atlantic’s latest hit piece against President Trump. Let me say this. Any suggestion that President Trump disparaged Ms. Guillen or refused to pay for her funeral expenses is absolutely false," he wrote. "He was nothing but kind, gracious, and wanted to make sure that the military and the U.S. government did right by Vanessa Guillen and her family."
Both Khawam and Pfeiffer emailed The Atlantic the same statement from Mayra Guillén, Vanessa’s sister: “I am beyond grateful for all the support President Donald Trump showed our family during a trying time,” the statement read. “I witnessed firsthand how President Trump honors our nation’s heroes’ service. We are grateful for everything he has done and continues to do to support our troops.”