Walz speaks of Trump ‘madness’ after report of comment about Hitler

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz accused Donald Trump of descending into “madness,”  following a report that the former president pined for the loyalty of the “kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate seized on the report in the Atlantic as top party figures warned of dark days ahead if Trump wins the presidency in 13 days given his often-expressed autocratic instincts.

A tense atmosphere around a neck-and-neck election ratcheted up significantly following the article by Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg that said Trump had noted in a private conversation while president: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The report was substantiated in the article by Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Trump’s alleged fixation with Hitler was also supported by material in several books, including one by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

In a separate interview with The New York Times, Kelly said Trump fit the definition of a fascist.

During a rally Tuesday in Wisconsin, Walz capitalized on new suggestions of Trump’s extremism on a day when other senior Democratic figures raised what they see as the dire specter of an unchained Trump second term as they try to rally support for Harris.

“Don’t be the frog in the boiling water and think this is okay,” the Minnesota governor, who served in the Army National Guard, said, referring to the revelations in The Atlantic. “As a 24-year veteran of our military, that makes me sick as hell, and it should make you sick.”

“Folks, the guardrails are gone. Trump is descending into this madness. A former president of the United States and the candidate for president of the United States says he wants generals like Adolf Hitler had. Think about it,” he added.

Walz noted the recent ruling by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that granted presidents substantial immunity for official acts committed in office as he tried to ignite public concern about the nature of a second term for an ex-president who has already tried to overturn the result of a democratic election.

Trump’s campaign denied the exchange about Hitler reported in the Atlantic. “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this,” campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer said. And responding to Kelly’s comments to The Times, campaign communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement that the retired Marine general had “totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated because he failed to serve his President well while working as Chief of Staff.”

But even as the furor grew over the Atlantic report, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, played into Democratic warnings that they’d take the country down a dark road.

After musing about turning the military or the National Guard on “enemies from within” in recent interviews (even specifying he was referring to top Democrats) and warning that TV networks like CBS should lose their licenses to broadcast, Trump launched a searing attack on Harris during a rally in North Carolina.

“Does she drink? Is she on drugs? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I have no idea,” he said. Earlier in the day he called her “lazy” – a racist trope often used against Black Americans.

Trump also said he’d ask Congress to pass a law that says anyone who burns the American flag should spend a year in prison. “We’re going to ask Congress to – they say it’s unconstitutional, I disagree – to give a one-year prison sentence for anybody burning the American flag.”

Vance, meanwhile, said that a future Trump administration might consider deporting DACA recipients – children who were brought to the United States illegally but who have built lives here – as part of its hardline immigration policies. “When you’ve got 25 million illegal aliens in this country, you’ve got to deport people or you don’t have a border anymore. It’s just that simple,” the Ohio senator said in Arizona.

Harris pressed home her closing argument that Trump represents a fundamental danger to America’s character in an interview with NBC, while vowing to combat the high grocery and housing prices on which her rival has seized to lay out his own nightmare vision of a nation in crisis.

“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country, and it includes whether we are a country that values a president who respects their duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States,” she said in the interview.

Harris, who will appear in a CNN town hall event on Wednesday evening, warned: “The choice before the American people is the choice to choose to turn the page on the division and the hate and to bring our country together.”

The-CNN-Wire
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