Stephen Colbert has joked that John Kelly’s claims about his former boss Donald Trump praising Adolf Hitler are hardly an October surprise – but more like an “autumn no s***.”
From news of George Bush’s DUI in 2000 to Hillary Clinton’s email server probe in 2016, there have been numerous events that have threatened to derail candidates’ campaigns just weeks out from Election Day.
However, Trump’s alleged adoration of Hitler’s Nazi generals doesn’t fall into that category, according to Colbert.
“So this is less of an October surprise and more of an early autumn no s**t,” Colbert quipped on Wednesday’sThe Late Show.
The late night show host did however note the significance of the former president’s longest-serving chief of staff voicing such damning comments less than two weeks from Election Day.
“He was a key member of Trump’s team,” Colbert teased. “We haven’t seen someone turn on a leader like this since Hootie got ratted out by the Blowfish.”
Kelly, who served in the Trump administration between July 2017 and January 2019, told The Atlantic that Trump once praised Hitler’s generals.
“Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump, instead suggesting he meant the generals of the Otto von Bismarck, “Iron Chancellor” of the German Empire.
The former president allegedly confirmed: “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Colbert noted that it was “disturbing that he doesn’t know why that’s horrible.”
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to say, ‘I need the kind of generals Hitler had,’ and still somehow be statistically tied in all the battleground states,” he added.
Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, also told The New York Times that Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too’”.
“Now, to be fair, if I can make the argument,” Colbert joked.
“Hitler did one thing that was good: he killed Hitler. Hitler doesn’t get enough credit for that.”
Colbert also played a clip of Kelly telling the Times that Trump falls into the “general definition of a fascist,” before chiming in that the former president “also falls into the specific definition of a fascist.”
Trump lashed out at Kelly in a Truth Social post on Wednesday night calling his claims “lies” and branding his former chief of staff “a total degenerate”, “LOWLIFE” – and “JELLO.”
The Trump campaign also denied Kelly’s allegations and said the stories were “fabricated”.
