Trump Kept Hitler Speeches ‘In a Cabinet By His Bed,’ Said Ex-Wife Ivana Trump in Resurfaced Interview

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Former President Donald Trump reupped his hateful rhetoric about immigrants in two campaign stops over the weekend, twice saying that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” A similar version of the phrase appears in Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf, a book that some doubt Trump has read. However, in a 1990 interview with Vanity Fair, Trump’s first ex-wife Ivana Trump said the future president kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches in their bedroom.

According to the post-divorce profile of the couple by Marie Brenner, Ivana — pictured above in 1988 with her then-husband after she was sworn in as a United States citizen — recounted an instance of a Trump Organization employee greeting his boss: “[W]hen he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,’ possibly as a family joke.”

Brenner continued with the passage that has come up a lot since Trump entered politics:

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. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.

It is not a secret that Donald Trump does not mind being compared to the Nazi dictator. He also might have thought that he did have a copy of Mein Kampf:

“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.

Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“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.”)

Brenner wrote that later in her interview with Trump, he clarified: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”