Historian Douglas Brinkley said Thursday on CNN’s “The Lead” that former President Donald Trump was such an “imbecile” he thought Nazi leader Adolf Hitler is just a “celebrity.”
Brinkley said, “What we’re dealing with in Donald Trump is somebody who is clever and smart but is a bit of an imbecile and has no sense of history. In the famous moment when General Kelly went to Europe with Donald Trump and Trump started to praise Hitler about the Autobahn and roads. Kelly looked at him and said, never say anything nice about Hitler. We all know not to do that. Nobody would do that. Trump didn’t read the memos about World War II.”
He added, “The late writer Norman Mailer used to tell me that, in history, only a few names get known. So, you know, Andy Warhol would paint Mao Tse Tung or Elvis Presley. I think Trump always wanted to be in that class of a known name. He never took the time to notice that you don’t want to be considered with Mao or Mussolini or Hitler in any way, shape, or form. He saw them more as celebrities because he never did his reading on what the policies were representing and how heinous they were to the word.”
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