Heil Drumpf!

It's not news that John Kelly, Donald Trump's second White House chief of staff, said that Trump admired Adolf Hitler and said that Hitler did good things.  He said all that months ago.

What's news is that reporter Michael Schmidt got it on tape.

More so, Kelly described Trump's Hitler fascination in much greater detail, noting and lamenting is admonition for the loyalty Hitler demanded (but didn't get) from his generals in the Second World War.  Kelly - no one's idea of a liberal (he agreed with Trump that the Civil War could have been avoided by compromise and called Robert E. Lee "an honorable man") - made it clear to Trump that there was nothing Hitler ever did that was good and told Schmidt that he felt that Trump's desire for unlimited, extreme power clearly made him a fascist.

And, even as Kamala Harris has come right out and said that Trump was a fascist, more of her campaign surrogates have been stressing how Trump, as President, would not only arrest leading Democrats for speaking out against him but for arrest average Joes and Josephines for doing so - and even though no one has said that Trump would make dissent a capital offense - except me, of course - and Trump himself has said nothing of the sort, just remember, you should be afraid not just of what Trump says he'll do.  You should be afraid of what Trump doesn't say he'll do.  All you need to do is look at what Hitler himself did without ever mentioning any of it in the parliamentary campaign the Nazis ran in what would be the last free election held in Germany in Hitler's lifetime.

As for the good things Hitler is believed to have done . . . he stole the credit for both of them.  The autobahns were inspired by the first Italian autostradas built by engineer Piero Puricelli in the early 1920s.  Hey, how far back do you want to go?  The Long Island Motor Parkway, the world's first controlled-access road for automobiles anywhere, opened in 1908.  As for the Volkswagen, which Hitler built the autobahns for . . . even some VW enthusiasts mistakenly credit the VW Beetle to Hitler, calling it "the only good idea Hitler ever had."  The "people's car" was actually Ferdinand Porsche's idea, and he conceived of it before the Nazis came to power.  Hitler just gave him the means to develop it, and he used the people's car idea for propaganda purposes; the factory meant to produce Volkswagens (and did, but not until after the war) built military vehicles.