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Learning to trust Trump's generals: There's a reason why his military men now call him a fascist
Learning to trust Trump's generals: There's a reason why his military men now call him a fascist
It's good that these former high ranking military leaders are finally going on the record
By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published October 23, 2024 9:14AM (EDT)
(Salon) Before Donald Trump was considered nothing more than a circus sideshow, some of us noted during the 2015 GOP presidential primaries that his rhetoric and agenda bore all the hallmarks of the "f" word: fascism. Historian Rick Perlstein wrestled with it as early as September of that year. I wrote about it just a couple of months later. At the time, Trump was extolling the virtues of torture, talking about a massive surveillance program to be used against American Muslims and promising to send Syrian refugees, including children, back to their war-torn country. He hadn't yet declared his intention to ban all Muslims from coming to the U.S. but it was easy to see the writing on the wall. It was also very easy to see that fascism was on the menu in the United States of America if Trump won the election
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Trump's 2024 run includes a ratcheting up the fascist rhetoric to previously unseen heights. The former president repeatedly says that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" and calls his political opponents "vermin" and "enemies within" who must be purged.
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Yet Trump has very little respect for the military either. The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled Trump's odd antipathy toward the military during his first term, the details of which were further confirmed by Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of the New York Times in their book "The Divider: Trump in the White House," as well as the New York Times' Michael Schmidt's book "Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President." They all relied on former US Army general and Trump chief of staff John Kelly as a primary source for such anecdotes as Trump's contemptuous references to service members as "suckers and losers" and his frequent demands to use the military unconstitutionally.
....(snip)....
Goldberg also recapitulates the stories about Trump's fascination with Adolf Hitler as told to him and the other authors by John Kelly. Trump had said to Kelly at one point, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?" and Kelly explained that those German generals had tried to assassinate Hitler three times and almost succeeded. Trump didn't believe him, insisting that they were totally loyal. Kelly went on the record with about that conversation this week:
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. 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.
https://www.salon.com/2024/10/23/learning-to-trust-generals-theres-a-reason-why-his-military-men-now-call-him-fascist/