Donald Trump is currently married to his third wife, but a vintage Vanity Fair article about the crumbling marriage to his first wife, Ivana Trump has re-emerged and is raising some eyebrows. Apparently, after the divorce was underway, Ivana told her lawyer that her estranged husband kept a book called My New Order on his nightstand. It was a collection of speeches by Adolf Hitler.
At the risk of running right smack into Godwin’s Law, which states that you instantly lose an argument by comparing someone to Hitler, it’s really not surprising that someone with a reputation for narcissism and racially charged language would have at least read this book. Even just purely out of curiosity to veer into the head of someone starved for power and attention as a way to make up for his obvious shortcomings as a human being. But when it’s an ex-wife — one who may have been assaulted — telling her lawyer about her husband’s Hitler book, it seems a little fishy:
…[P]erhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
Now, Trump has said some outwardly racist things during his presidential campaign that he won’t back down on, like calling Mexicans rapists and expressing an intention to eliminate the 14th Amendment that grants birthright citizenship. He may have even included Nazi soldiers in a campaign ad, but does that really mean he looks to Hitler as an example? He defended himself by saying this to Vanity Fair:
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Yeah, he might have every book about Hitler and by Hitler, but he’d never read them. That’s disgusting. It’s disgusting and for losers.
(via Raw Story)