Republicans and conservative commentators spent Wednesday responding to shocking revelations by The Atlantic that Donald Trump, while president, said he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had” by basically saying: OK, so what?

On Fox News, host Brian Kilmeade spun the news – confirmed by John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff – in spectacularly dopey fashion:

“I can absolutely see him go, ‘You know what? It'd be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever.”

What? All of Adolf Hitler’s generals were Nazis, you schmuck. This is not a thing you can shrug your shoulders at and say, “Well, you know, Trump was just mad and trying to make a point.”

Something tells me Kilmeade would react a bit differently if we learned Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris once said she needed “the kind of Marxist guerrillas Che Guevara had.”

But this is Trump, so what’s a bit of Nazi-envy, I suppose. Kelly, in interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic, said Trump also regularly demeaned military veterans........

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