Donald Trump reposted a short text in the early hours of Friday morning that compared him with Hitler, Mao, Stalin and other strongmen, then answered with three words: “Sounds good to me!” The message said the “overwhelming difference” between Trump and those figures was their lack of global reach.
Trump identified the author as “presidential historian Dave King,” a Scottish-born businessman now living in South Africa who once chaired Rangers Football Club in Glasgow. The repost gave fresh public form to a claim King had been pressing in private: that Trump was more powerful than some of history’s most feared rulers because his reach was worldwide, not local.
That explanation first surfaced in March, when Trump reportedly raised a two-page document during an interview with New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and asked aides to bring it to him after referring to its author as “a historian.” He then recited the names of some of history’s most powerful figures and said each fell short of his own power as US president, punctuating the exchange with, “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?”
The comparison was jarring not because it was subtle, but because it was not. The text framed Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler as brutal conquerors ruled by fear, then argued that Trump surpassed them on the one measure that mattered: global reach. In other words, the praise depended on placing him above the worst names in modern memory, and Trump did not distance himself from that logic; he embraced it.
King said he first shared his assessment of Trump’s power with Gary Player and later explained it directly to Trump over golf in Florida, a detail that helps fill in how a two-page argument about world history ended up in the hands of a president who was willing to read it aloud. book Regime Change, described as an account of the first 14 months of Trump’s second term and based on more than 1,000 interviews over a three-year period, has also drawn attention to Trump’s habit of turning private bragging into public theater, including lines such as “Essentially I won every fucking time,” “And I’m tired of winning and winning and winning and just getting bad fucking press,” “It’s about time that you tell the truth. Okay?” and “We need plot twists.”
What remains unclear is the full contents of the two-page document Trump said he received from “a historian,” beyond the names and the argument that he outstripped them. But the timing and the tone leave little doubt about the point of the exchange: Trump was not just quoted alongside Hitler and the others. He was willing to repeat the comparison himself and leave it standing.
