Fox News Won't Air Tape Of Trump's Former Chief Of Staff Calling Him A 'Fascist'

Fox News Won't Air Tape Of Trump's Former Chief Of Staff Calling Him A 'Fascist'

Former President Donald Trump speaking with former White House chief of staff John Kelly

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS

Donald Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly went on the record in interviews released by The New York Times saying that Trump is a fascist, that he has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler, and that he repeatedly denigrated soldiers and the military. Fox News has so far refused to play those audio recordings for its audience.

In a triplet of recorded interviews released by the Times, Kelly — Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff — went on the record over concerns he has about Trump. In a series of breathtaking quotes, Kelly claimed that Trump “is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” and that Trump has “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’"

Fox News has yet to play the publicly available audio recordings of those quotes.

While Fox personalities have discussed some of the recent accusations of Trump’s admiration for Hitler, embarrassingly defending the former president, they’ve focused mostly on a different story from The Atlantic, titled “Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” which also alleged Trump has a “preoccupation with dictators” and a “disdain for the American military,” — not the Kelly interview from the Times.

Fox’s decision to not air the audio of Kelly’s quotes separates them from other TV news outlets. All three major broadcast networks’ morning news shows played parts of the Kelly recordings, as have CNN and MSNBC. This isn’t the first time that the network has chosen to keep its audience in the dark about how former Trump administration officials have come out against the former president.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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