Former US president Donald Trump, on his visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, said to his then-chief of staff John Kelly that “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.” 

According to a report in Guardian, this comment from trump during the 2008 trip reportedly “stunned” Kelly, who is a retired US Marine Corps general. This revelation has been highlighted in the new book by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal.

The Guardian obtained a copy of the book.

In the book – Frankly, We Did Win This Election – Bender said that the comment was made during an impromptu history lesson in which Kelly “reminded the president which countries were on which side during the conflict” and “connected the dots from the first world war to the second world war and all of Hitler’s atrocities”.

“This is totally false. President Trump never said this. It is made-up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired,” Guardian quoted a Trump spokesperson, Liz Harrington as saying.

However, the authour said unnamed sources reported that Kelly “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred”.

“Kelly pushed back again…and argued that the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide,” Bender wrote in the book, Guardian reported.

In the book, Bender further added that Kelly told Trump that even if his claim about the German economy under the Nazis after 1933 were true, “you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”

Kelly left the White House in early 2019. Since his departure he has been critical of Trump, reportedly telling friends the president he served was “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life”.

The authour said that Kelly did his best to overcome Trump’s “stunning disregard for history”.

“Senior officials described his understanding of slavery, Jim Crow, or the Black experience in general post-civil war as vague to non-existent,” he wrote.

“But Trump’s indifference to Black history was similar to his disregard for the history of any race, religion or creed,” Bender wrote.

Throughout the years, Trump has made several positive remarks about far-right and white supremacist groups.