The source of a document President Donald Trump proudly wielded that compares him favorably to Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, and other vicious leaders has been revealed.
The president, 80, bizarrely shared on Truth Social early this morning a document from someone named “Dave King” that suggested Trump is more dangerous than several notorious historical figures because he has a greater “global reach”.
“Presidential Historian Dave King — Sounds good to me!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday, paired with the assessment.
Now the truth has been disclosed. CNN reported that Trump had actually touted that document months earlier, during an interview with New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan—who have identified “Presidential Historian Dave King” as golfer Gary Player’s longtime caddy and personal confidant. The fact is in their new book.
Apparently, King presented the president with the two-page document during an event honoring Player, a Hall of Fame golfer who is now 90. And in Trumpworld, apparently, that was as good as fact.
King told the New York Times’ journalists that he “had first shared his assessment of Trump’s power with Player and later explained it directly to Trump over golf in Florida,” according to their forthcoming book Regime Change, which was obtained by CNN.
In response to an inquiry from the Daily Beast, the White House said: “Refer you to the TRUTH.”
King writes that “powerful” people were historically characterized by “brutal conquest and the fear that they instilled in the populations” during their reigns.
“Common names that would come to mind are Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamburlaine, Napoleon and, more recently, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin,” said King.
“The overwhelming difference between each of the above when compared with President Trump is their lack of global reach. Their power was limited to restricted local areas (even though some of these areas were quite large in a local context). They had nowhere near the control over modern logistics, manpower, technology, and the global economic muscle that President Trump can enforce.”
King is therefore emphatically not David King, a Harvard historian who had been suggested as a possible source of the claim.
In fact, he is in no sense an historian and is not a college graduate. Instead he is a 70-year-old wealthy South African, although he was an immigrant to the country from his native Scotland in 1976, at the height of the apartheid regime.
King, 70, is also the former chairman of the Rangers Football Club in his native Glasgow, where he was brought up in a grim housing project, educated at a public school, and went to work for a local engineering company. After immigrating to South Africa, he became a financial advisor to public institutions. His wealth is unknown, but he was included on the South African “Rich List” in 2012.
Like Trump, King has weathered accusations of financial offenses. Unlike Trump, he was cleared of them in court.
In South Africa he became such a close friend of Player that he was his caddy for his final ten appearances at Augusta for the Masters.
His relationship with the golf legend has spanned decades—even surviving a $1 million legal dispute that was settled in 2013.
White House insiders told CNN that Trump’s touting of King’s document is likely his attempt at damage control ahead of Haberman and Swan’s book release on Tuesday, which includes an anecdote about King.
King is not the only one to invoke the world’s most notorious leaders when characterizing Trump. Notably, Vice President JD Vance referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler” in 2016—before, of course, ultimately kneeling to him.
