Never Forget That in the '90s, Donald Trump Enjoyed Reading Hitler Speeches
Insights from that old Vanity Fair profile.
This election cycle has given us all couples reasons not to support Donald Trump. Reasons like:
- Saying women should be punished for having abortions.
- Promising to ban Muslims from entering the country.
- Inciting violence at his rallies by saying things like "I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell ya," and offering to pay for court costs for people.
- Calling Mexicans rapists and murderers.
- Claiming a foreign country will build multibillion dollar wall for us because Trump will tell them to.
This is all to say that you shouldn't need more reasons not to vote for Trump, with several publications calling this "the beginning of the end for him," but I'm going to give you another one anyway. Now typically comparing a politician you don't like to Hitler is stupid. I disliked George W. Bush and I think he was bad for the country in a host of ways, but he was nothing like (and certainly not) as evil as Hitler. But the comparison, at least for Trump, makes some sense. For one thing, he has expressed many fascist policies (possibly supporting the required registration of Muslims for instance). For another, his political strategy seems to be to assemble a coalition of angry voters by tapping into and exploring their racism and xenophobia. But if that wasn't enough to make a Hitler comparison seem valid, how about this excerpt from Anthony Savignano's excellent early '90s Vanity Fair profile of Donald and Ivana Trump, which is floating around in the zeitgeist again and is worth bumping every time.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Now, maybe you read this differently than I do, but from where I'm sitting that's a guy who totally has those Hitler speeches and has definitely read them. You'd be hard pressed to find a quote in any article about anything that is a more obvious lie than “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.” Remember that this is the guy who may very well be the Republican nominee.