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

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.”