Amid new reports about Donald Trump’s admiration for Adolf Hitler and fascism, the former president’s national security adviser pretty much said the Republican nominee is not a fascist.
But it wasn’t a compliment. (Watch the video below.)
In an interview Tuesday on CNN, John Bolton suggested Trump was too lazy and dumb to wrap his head around political philosophy.
“I think it’s a mistake to get into a controversy over whether Trump meets the definition of fascist or not,” he told the news network’s Kaitlan Collins. “I think his behavior alone is troubling enough. To be a fascist, you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that. You know, Adolf Hitler wrote a profoundly troubling book called ‘Mein Kampf’ – ‘My Struggle.’ Donald Trump couldn’t even read his way all the way through that book, let alone write something like it.”
“I’m not trying to understate the dangers of a Trump presidency,” he continued. “I think it’s important to focus on the dangers themselves.”
Collins brought up the topic after Trump’s former chief of staff, Ret. Gen. John Kelly, told The New York Times that Trump “prefers the dictator approach” and meets the definition of a fascist.
In The Atlantic, Kelly said Trump asked him why he couldn’t be more like “Hitler’s generals” in terms of absolute loyalty. The article also revisited Kelly’s claim that Trump told him that “Hitler did some good things.”