WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris Wednesday blasted Donald Trump over reports that he has spoken positively about 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.
Former White House chief of staff John Kelly told The New York Times in interviews published Tuesday that he had witnessed Trump repeatedly praising Hitler and saying the Nazi leader had done "some good things."
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung on Tuesday denied Kelly’s claim. He told NBC News that Harris is peddling “outright lies and falsehoods” because he said her campaign is “in shambles.”
Trump also attacked Kelly in a Wednesday post to Truth Social, calling his former chief of staff a “lowlife” after he called Trump a “fascist.”
“The story about the Soldiers was A LIE, as are numerous other stories he told,” Trump wrote.
In her remarks Wednesday, Harris also criticized 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.
In his interview with The 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 January 2019, said he would try to explain to Trump why Hitler was terrible.
“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.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that President Joe Biden agreed with Kelly describing Trump as a fascist.
“You’ve heard from the former president himself saying that he is going to be a dictator on day one. This is him, not us. This is him,” Jean-Pierre said during a briefing on Wednesday afternoon when asked whether the president was aware of Kelly’s fascism remark and Trump’s reported admiration of Hitler’s generals.
“Do we agree about that determination? Yes, we do. We do,” she added.
A separate article published by The Atlantic magazine 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 had 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 saying that immigrants were "poisoning the blood" of America, which was similar to phrasing Hitler used.
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 her.
