Trump tells supporters to ignore books after they reveal he complimented Hitler and joked about Khashoggi

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Former President Donald Trump has slammed the new books written about him after one of them revealed that he allegedly complimented Adolf Hitler and joked about Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian journalist and US resident killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018.

Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender writes in a new book that then-President Trump said “well, Hitler did a lot of good things” to White House chief of staff John Kelly in 2018 while they were on a trip to Paris to commemorate the end of World War I.

Mr Trump also pushed back on Mr Bender’s reporting that the former president fought with then-Vice President Mike Pence over his political committee hiring Corey Lewandowski, a former 2016 campaign manager for Mr Trump.

An essay adapted from Mr Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost describes an incident in which Mr Trump crumpled up an article about the hiring of Mr Lewandowski and threw it at Mr Pence.

“Mr Trump was holding a newspaper article about the hiring and said it made him look weak, like his team was abandoning him as he was probed for his campaign’s role in Russian election meddling. He crumpled the article and threw it at his vice president. ‘So disloyal,’ Mr Trump said,” according to the essay. “Mr Pence lost it.”

“Mr Kushner had asked him to hire Mr Lewandowski, and he had discussed the plan with Mr Trump over lunch. Mr Pence picked up the article and threw it back at Mr Trump. He leaned toward the president and pointed a finger a few inches from his chest,” the essay adds. “‘We walked you through every detail of this,’ Mr Pence snarled. ‘We did this for you—as a favour. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.’”

Mr Trump issued a statement on Friday, saying: “The story written by third-rate reporter Michael Bender, that Mike Pence and I had a big fight over Corey Lewandowski, is totally false. No such fight ever happened, it is fiction as are so many others stories written in the vast number of books coming out about me.”

Mr Bender tweeted in response: “I stand by my reporting. The fight happened in front of others and multiple sources confirmed. It is correct—and just one of many revealing details in the excerpt and still unreported in the book.”

In a follow-up statement, Mr Trump added: “It seems to me that meeting with authors of the ridiculous number of books being written about my very successful Administration, or me, is a total waste of time. They write whatever they want to write anyway without sources, fact-checking, or asking whether or not an event is true or false.

“Frankly, so many stories are made-up, or pure fiction. These writers are often bad people who write whatever comes to their mind or fits their agenda. It has nothing to do with facts or reality. So when reading the garbage that the Fake News Media puts out, please remember this and take everything with a ‘grain of salt.’”

Mr Trump was reportedly fixated on the intelligence that a bone saw had been used by Saudi Arabian agents to dismember journalist and activist Jamal Khashoggi when he was killed in 2018.

Kirsten Fontenrose, who at the time was the director of Gulf affairs at the National Security Council, told Yahoo News that Mr Trump kept returning to that detail of the murder.

He allegedly said at the time: “I’ve been in difficult negotiations. I’ve never had to take a bone saw.”

In several calls with top Saudi leaders, Mr Trump repeatedly asked if they had ordered the murder or had any knowledge of it, Ms Fontenrose said.

She told Yahoo News: “I mean, he would go back to it and back to it and back to it, trying to press them and telling them, you know, ‘This will change everything, you guys. We’ve got to know. We’re with you. We’re standing behind Saudi Arabia... but we’ve got to get to the bottom of this. ‘Was there a bone saw? Was there a bone saw?’”

During his discussion about Hitler with Mr Kelly in 2018, Mr Trump reportedly kept defending the Nazi leader as Mr Kelly tried to explain who the allies and adversaries were in both World Wars.

Mr Trump was allegedly “undeterred” and noted that Germany had made economic gains under the leadership of Hitler.

When asked about it by Mr Bender, Mr Trump denied he had made the comments and that the conversation had occurred.

Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington told CNN on Wednesday: “This is totally false. President Trump never said this. It is made up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired.”

According to Mr Bender, Mr Kelly reportedly told Mr Trump: “Even if it was true that he was solely responsible for rebuilding the economy, on balance you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”

Mr Bender added that “others said the remark stunned Kelly”.