(NewsNation) — Bill O’Reilly said Wednesday that Vice President Kamala Harris “made a big mistake” criticizing Donald Trump after his longest-serving chief of staff said the former president praised Adolf Hitler’s generals while in office.
Donald Trump makes “off-hand comments all the time,” O’Reilly said Wednesday on “CUOMO.” “His (Trump’s) comments don’t mean anything, and he doesn’t even remember them 30 seconds later. I listened to that stupid tape. … Why didn’t the reporters say to Kelly, ‘What was the context of the conversation?'”
O’Reilly said he believes Harris’ comments are going to “backlash.”
Speaking at a CNN town hall, Harris said Trump’s alleged comments offer a window into who the former president “really is” and the kind of commander in chief he would be. She said that Trump meets the definition of a fascist.
In the new interview with The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, retired Gen. John Kelly affirmed reporting from Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s book, “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” which quoted Trump asking Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?”
According to Goldberg’s account of Baker and Glasser’s reporting, Kelly responded by explaining to Trump that the German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off,” but Trump reportedly was not swayed by the correction.
“No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” Trump said, according to Goldberg’s telling of Baker and Glasser’s reporting.
Goldberg wrote that Kelly “told me that when Trump raised the subject of ‘German generals,’ Kelly responded by asking, “’Do you mean [Otto von] Bismarck’s generals?’”
Kelly continued, in the interview with Goldberg this week: “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 [Erwin] Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.’”
According to Goldberg, Kelly said Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Goldberg reported that Trump has grown “more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship,” and he included other examples that he thought would demonstrate this alleged interest.
“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump reportedly said in a private conversation in the White House, according to Goldberg, who cited “two people who heard him say this.”
“People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders,” Trump added, according to Goldberg.
The Trump campaign flatly rejected this account.
“This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this,” Trump campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer said in a statement, which was reported in The Atlantic and sent again to The Hill by a Trump spokesperson.
NewsNation’s “The Hill” contributed to this report.