A campaign aide has pushed back on a report that Donald Trump bragged multiple times to a member of Congress after former German Chancellor Angela Merkel compared the size of his crowds to those of Adolf Hitler, the disgraced antisemitic leader of Nazi Germany. (During the Holocaust, six million European Jews were brutally murdered.)
"This filth either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper," the aide said in a statement to Politico's Playbook.
Playbook offered readers a "buzzy" first look at the scoop from ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl's new book. According to Politico, Karl reported on the allegations in "Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party" as follows:
At least twice, Karl writes, Trump gloated to a prominent member of Congress that Merkel — who detested the 45th president privately and had trouble hiding her scorn publicly — told him she was “amazed” by the number of people who came to see him speak, and Trump said “she told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine.” The Trump-allied congressman knew who Merkel was comparing Trump to, but couldn’t tell if Trump, who took Merkel’s words as a compliment, himself understood.
Asks Karl, “Which would be more unsettling: that he didn’t or that he did?”
In addition to denying the claims, the Trump campaign aide called Karl "disgraceful and talentless." After the violent events of Jan. 6, Merkel called out Trump's refusal to concede the election. "Doubts about the outcome of the election have been stoked, and that set the atmosphere which made the events of the [last] night possible," she said at the time.
"A basic rule of democracy is: After elections, there are winners and losers," Merkel added. "Both have to play their roles with decency and a sense of responsibility, so that democracy itself remains the winner."
