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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. I want to acknowledge something happening in the presidential campaign that in other years might have been a political knockout punch. This year, who knows? Donald Trump's former chief of staff and homeland security secretary, Gen. John Kelly, has decided to go public to say, on tape, that he thinks Trump would try to govern like a fascist for sure. That's part of the quote. We're going to play it, "fascist for sure." Not just any fascist. Kelly says Trump would praise Adolf Hitler in some of their conversations while in office. Is your head exploding? Kelly said these things in an interview with The New York Times. Here he is on Trump's authoritarianism.

Gen. John Kelly: The former president 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.

Brian Lehrer: Donald Trump's former chief of staff and homeland security secretary of all things, Gen. John Kelly, who decided he needed to break his silence about things like those before the election. He told them to The New York Times. We'll play what Kelly said about Trump and Hitler in a few minutes. All this from someone who Trump himself had appointed first as homeland security secretary and then trusted enough to elevate him to chief of staff. Of course, now Trump is trying to discredit him. Of course, he joins a long list of former high ranking Trump officials, starting with Vice President Mike Pence, who now say Trump is unfit to serve.

With that as prelude, Dana Milbank is here, The Washington Post columnist and former White House correspondent during the Clinton and George W. Bush years. For the last two years, Dana has been posted by The Post inside Congress on Capitol Hill and has now come out with a book called Fools on the Hill: The hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down The House. What does he really think? He's written that the chaos in the House has one source. Which brings us back to the alleged fascist wannabe in chief. Dana, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Dana Milbank: Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to Gen. Kelly's Trump and Hitler clip and whether anything, even that frightening, from such a restrained and conservative source as Gen. Kelly matters anymore. Let's start with your take on Trump and the Republican House. Your premise is that if Trump wins, he will likely draw a MAGA Republican House again on his coattails. Would that be different from the first time Trump was president? Because he did have a Republican House for his first two years, then.

Dana Milbank: I think it would be very different because the nature of the Republican Congress, it changes with each election cycle. Even predating 2016, but particularly in the Trump era, through a series of primaries after primaries, ever more exotic and extreme characters in the MAGA mold have come in, replacing what had passed for mainstream or moderate Republican candidates. At the same time, others are reading the handwriting on the walls. You have longtime veterans in the Republican caucus and Congress hanging it up and retiring, even if they're not actually getting defeated in primaries.

There's no John Boehner. There's not even a Paul Ryan to push back in any way. Mike Johnson very much owes his job to Donald Trump. He would have been-- he was endorsed by Trump. That's how he came to succeed Kevin McCarthy in the first place. He would have been tossed out on his ear had he not had Trump support against the motion to vacate him by Marjorie Taylor Greene. The way he has repaid Trump, of course, is going up to his trial in New York and trashing the American justice system and throwing aside the border security bill that he himself had supported. Donald Trump is very much in control of this House Republican majority, so that's what is significant if he were to take over.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the border bill. It's one of the things that, as many of our listeners know, Democrats keep campaigning on, that Congress had this bipartisan border security bill and that Trump got Republicans in Congress to kill the bill so he would have a worse border situation to campaign on. You write about this in the book. How good is the evidence that Trump actually did that or how he did that?

Dana Milbank: Oh, I don't think it's disputed at all. I mean, he said he was happy to be blamed for doing it. He said it out there in public. I mean, this is all happening in plain sight. This House has been this has made this Congress the most ineffective, the least productive Congress since 1860. That goes back a long way. In my view, that's probably a good thing because when you look at the sort of thing that these guys have tried to do, the vast majority of them have voted to eliminate the Department of Education, to cut off funds to Ukraine, to keep the names of confederate officers on military bases, the Life at Conception act, nationwide abortion ban, so I celebrate their inability to get anything done.

Right now, these are just poison pills that get knocked down by the Democratic Senate or if not vetoed by President Biden. Its not inconceivable that we wind up with a President Trump and it's likely we get a Republican Senate and possibly a Republican House, and all of a sudden, all of these poison pills become the actual policy of the United States government.

Brian Lehrer: That's what keeps you up at night after covering--

Dana Milbank: Among other things, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Well, do you have any local take on this for our New York, New Jersey audience? With so many swing districts around here right now with republican incumbents that could determine who controls the House, Anthony D'Esposito or Nick LaLota from Long Island, Mike Lawler or Marc Molinaro from the Hudson Valley, or Tom Kean Jr. from Jersey? Do any of them show up in your book in any notable way? I think I saw a D'Esposito reference.

Dana Milbank: They most certainly are very prominent now. I'm a Long Island boy originally, so I'm very proud of George Santos and the contribution he has made to American history and particularly to my book. Obviously, I focused on him quite a bit. You mentioned LaLota, who's in a close race. D'Esposito, I think, is probably likely to lose his seat. Mike Lawler up in the Hudson valley. New York will be absolutely pivotal to who controls the House.

In terms of Fools on the Hill, they have done themselves proud in that category because, of course, D'Esposito was one of those driving George Santos out of the House for his ethics violations shortly before the world learned about his own issues with his mistress and the child of his fiancé on the payroll. Mike Lawler was constantly attacking his Republican colleagues saying, "You keep running lunatics, you're going to be in this position," and then Mike Lawler's got his blackface episode going on. They have definitely held up-- I think they're punching above their weight, the New York Republicans, in terms of maintaining the level of crazy we've seen in the House.

Brian Lehrer: A few more minutes with Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist and author now of Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down The House. Let's get back to John Kelly, former Trump chief of staff and Trump homeland security secretary, Gen. Kelly, from his interview on tape with The New York Times. Such restrained and apolitical kind of guy for basically all of his 74 years on this planet, or at least his adult life in the public eye, but he felt compelled to say Trump would try to govern like a fascist for sure. We played that clip. Here's one more in which he discloses to The Times something he would hear from Trump about a certain former Fuhrer of Germany.

Gen. John Kelly: He commented more than once that Hitler did some good things, too. Of course, if you know history-- again, I think he's lacking in that, but if you know what Hitler was all about, you'd be pretty hard to make an argument that he did anything good.

Brian Lehrer: Dana, if you went around the Republican caucus in the House and asked who has more credibility on preserving American democracy, Gen. John Kelly or Donald Trump, what do you think you'd hear based on your book?

Dana Milbank: Well, I know what I'd hear. If you had gave them truth serum and woke them up in the middle of the night, they might say one thing. They have to say that John Kelly is a liar and that Donald Trump is telling the truth for the simple reason that if they don't do that, all you need is one mean tweet from Donald Trump and your career as an elected Republican is over. You're out in the next primary, and we've seen this over and over again. That's the stranglehold that Donald Trump has over the party right now.

That's why, as you were alluding to earlier, it's not clear that even this John Kelly-- he said similar things before, but now actually, in his own voice out there on the record, saying it's not clear that this moves the needle or anything else does. Because things are just so locked in, I'm just back from the storm-ravaged western North Carolina. We're on the ground. People are seeing that everything Trump has been saying about the government response is just a lie. People are able to see and hear these things with their own eyes and ears, but it does not, it seemed, to dislodge anybody.

Brian Lehrer: Again, based on my reading of your book, it's not only that a lot of the Republican members of the House won't say what they really think about John Kelly's vision of democracy versus Donald Trump's because they're afraid of being primaried or something. You seem to argue in the book that white nationalism dominates the current House if you look at the majority of Republicans in the caucus and where they stand. Would you expand on that a little bit before we run out of time?

Dana Milbank: Yes. It's just the way the Republican primaries are structured. Because they are dominated by the extreme far right, there's really no equivalent on the Democratic side where the primaries are dominated more by moderates. They elect over and over again what Tom Massie, a House Republican, has said is the craziest sob in the race. White nationalists are not the majority of the Republican party, but they could be or could become of the House Republican caucus because they are responsive to this tiny number of voters, maybe 10,000, 20,000 who they have to win over to win a primary, not the 800,000 or a million people who are their actual constituents.

Their behavior, though it may be abhorrent and seem irrational, is perfectly rational because the only way you can get unseated is by defying Donald Trump or letting somebody, a MAGA character, outflank you on the right.

Brian Lehrer: Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist, former White House correspondent, now the author of Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down The House. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Dana Milbank: Thanks very much, Brian.

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