WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris Wednesday blasted Donald Trump over reports that he has spoken positively about Adolf Hitler, and described the former president’s recent behavior as “increasingly unhinged.”
“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,” Harris said in brief remarks, speaking directly to the camera, from her residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.
Former White House chief of staff John Kelly told the New York Times in interviews published Tuesday that he witnessed Trump repeatedly praising Hitler and saying he did “some good things.” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung on Tuesday denied Kelly’s claim.
Harris also blasted Trump’s recent use of the term “enemy from within” to describe Democrats and other political adversaries, including Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. Harris said Trump’s comments are “further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is.”
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best, from the people who worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room,” she said.
“Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions,” she added.
NBC News reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.
In his interview with The New York Times, Kelly said that Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’” The Times released audio from three interviews with Kelly.
Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff from July 2017 to Jan. 2019, said he would try to explain to Trump why Hitler was terrible. The Times released audio from three interviews with Kelly.
“First of all, you should never say that,” Kelly said he told Trump. “But if you knew what Hitler was all about from the beginning to the end, everything he did was in support of his racist, fascist life, you know, the, you know, philosophy, so that nothing he did, you could argue, was good — it was certainly not done for the right reason.”
A separate story published by The Atlantic on Tuesday reported that Trump said during a private conversation in the White House that, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The Atlantic cited two people who said they heard the remark.
Trump campaign spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told The Atlantic that their reporting was “absolutely false” and that “President Trump never said this.”
Last year, Trump asserted that he knew “nothing about Hitler” and was “not a student of Hitler” as he defended remarks he made about immigrants, saying that they were “poisoning the blood” of America, which was similar to phrasing made by Hitler.
Harris’ decision to speak out in response to these reports comes in the closing days of the campaign as Trump has escalated personal attacks against the vice president.
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