By Philip Bump, The Washington Post (c) 2024
Retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly was one of Donald Trump’s longest-serving chiefs of staff when Trump was in the White House. He was in Trump’s company regularly and was present for some of Trump’s private comments. As when Trump reportedly praised the generals who served Adolf Hitler in World War II and when Trump suggested that Hitler “did some good things.”
Trump denies having made those comments, which Kelly has presented publicly in recent weeks. But even setting aside Trump’s general lack of credibility, the political damage that would result from an explicit admission of those sentiments would probably be relatively modest.
Recent polling from YouGov presented Americans with a series of questions related to Trump’s reported comments. For example, poll respondents were asked what they would do if a candidate they supported said that Hitler had done some good things. Only a quarter of people said they would still support that candidate; a plurality said they would support the candidate’s opponent.
Among Republicans, though, two-thirds said either that they would stick with the candidate or were not sure what they would do. Among those who said they plan to vote for Trump this year, just under half said they would vote for the candidate anyway. (Among Harris supporters, more than half said they would vote for the candidate’s opponent.)
Those results are certainly polluted by an understanding of why the question is being asked. Had Vice President Kamala Harris expressed an appreciation for some of Hitler’s work – an unlikely scenario we’ll get to in a moment – we might expect opposition from her own party to be slightly more muted. But the flip side of this also applies: Trump’s denial of having made these comments is less important than the fact that only a fraction of his support would dissipate even if he provably had.
Most Americans disagree with the idea that Hitler’s place in the history books deserves any sort of asterisk. Only 9 percent of Democrats say some of his ideas were right, though nearly a fifth of Trump supporters offered that opinion.
One way in which the broad disapproval of Hitler manifests is in how partisans perceive both him and the candidates for president.
Most Americans, for example, say Hitler was completely bad, including three-quarters of Democrats. About two-thirds of Republicans agree. Half of Americans also say that Harris thinks of Hitler as being completely bad, a percentage that is dragged down by the fact that just under 4 in 10 Republicans believe that is Harris’s view.
On the other hand, only a fifth of Americans think that Trump sees Hitler as completely bad – a percentage that’s pushed up by the just under 4 in 10 Republicans who believe that’s his position.
Yes, you’re doing the math correctly. Republicans are about equally likely to say that Harris thinks Hitler is completely bad as they are to say that Trump does. This is very much in keeping with other polling that presents Republicans as drawing a dubious equivalence between the two presidential candidates: that each is as likely to reject the election outcome, for example.
That this poll offers any insights at all is striking, of course. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that consideration of Hitler has shifted from viewing him as the archetype of political evil to shading him in gray for partisan purposes. That shift by itself is striking, both a reflection of and an apparent contributor to Trump’s politics.
On Monday, the day before Election Day, The Washington Post reported that a man who had been doing campaign work for Trump in Pennsylvania was fired after he was found to have been hosting a white-nationalist podcast. Presumably, he would fall into the “still willing to support” category of YouGov’s survey.