Old interview: Donald Trump's first wife said he kept Hitler speeches beside bed – Hindustan Times
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Donald Trump’s late first wife Ivana Trump told Vanity Fair that her former spouse used to keep a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches in his bedside cabinet. The article from 1990 resurfaced following Donald Trump’s remark that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” in a speech at a New Hampshire rally.
“They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries we think about. But all over the world they’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia,” Donald Trump said.
The 1990 feature recounted, “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 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.”
When Donald Trump was asked about the truth of the anecdote, as per the article, he replied, “It was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.”
To this Marty Davis replied, “I did give him a book about Hitler. 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.”
Donald Trump then said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
The article then reads, “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 Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda.”
Ivana Trump also said that Donald Trump has a friend who clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,’ possibly as a family joke” whenever he visits him in his office.
When not reading, this ex-literature student can be found searching for an answer to the question, “What is the purpose of journalism in society?”