Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, Heil Hitler, possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitlers 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. Hitlers speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches? I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. Who told you that?
I dont remember, I said.
Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and hes a Jew. (I did give him a book about Hitler, Marty Davis said. But it was My New Order, Hitlers speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but Im 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.
Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitlers speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitlers genius at propaganda. The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories. Trump continues to endow his diminishing world with significance as well. Theres nobody that has the cash flow that I have, he told The Wall Street Journal long after he knew better. I want to be king of cash.
