Panelists on CNN’s Newsnight were in stitches after learning who exactly compared President Donald Trump to historical figures like Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan.
The president shared a document from someone named “Dave King” on Truth Social that argued Trump is more dangerous than people like Hitler because he has a greater “global reach.”
“Presidential Historian Dave King — Sounds good to me!” Trump wrote.
CNN reported on Thursday that the president had actually flaunted the document months earlier, during an interview with New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, a fact mentioned in their upcoming book Regime Change.
Haberman and Swan also revealed the identity of “Presidential Historian Dave King” was golfer Gary Player’s longtime caddy and personal confidant Dave King, who presented Trump with the document during an event honoring Player.
King told Haberman and Swan that he “had first shared his assessment of Trump’s power with Player and later explained it directly to Trump over golf in Florida.”
Discussing the revelation on Thursday night’s edition of Newsnight, the panelists were unable to contain themselves, laughing at the news that the assessment came from such an unlikely source.
“You wouldn’t believe where he got that assessment from,” host Abby Phillip said. “He released that document saying that it was from a presidential historian, but it turns out it’s actually from a golf hall-of-famer’s longtime caddy and personal confidant,” she continued, beginning to laugh as King’s identity was revealed.
CNN political commentator Xochitl Hinojosa and former Democratic congressional candidate Isaiah Martin joined in, laughing as Phillip continued, while other panelists, including Market Rebellion CEO Marc LoPresti, MeidasTouch’s Washington correspondent Scott MacFarlane, and New York Post correspondent Lydia Moynihan looked on, smiling.
“It’s not a joke,” Phillip added, telling the panelists, “This actually happened.”
“This is the president of the United States,” Hinojosa, former head of public affairs at the Department of Justice, said. “I think it is scary that he is comparing himself, that he believes he has unlimited power, I mean he is essentially saying he is a lot like a dictator. The crazy thing about this is he is less popular than the two last presidents, and given his legacy and where he is, he will never be a president who is popular and leaving office and that is just the reality of things.”
“He can try to say in his head that he is the most powerful, that he’s like a dictator, whatever that is, that he has all the powers in the world, but the reality is that this man is gonna go down as probably one of the least popular presidents.”
In the document, King wrote that historically, powerful people were categorized by “brutal conquest and the fear that they instilled in the populations.”
“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,” King continued.
“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.”
White House insiders told CNN that Trump’s decision to share the document on Truth Social on Thursday was likely his attempt at damage control ahead of the book’s release on Tuesday.
Other revelations in the book include the fact that the president had been personally using superglue to add gold adornments around the Oval Office, and stomach-churning details about his late-night snacking habits and his complete failure to clean up after himself, leaving trash lying on the floor of the White House.
