Donald Trump

Truth-teller this time. Donald Trump told supporters at a New Hampshire rally that he never read Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” manifesto.

The former president deserves his reputation of being a stone-cold liar. The Washington Post reported that he made 30,773 lies or false claims during his four years in the White House. Yet when it comes to Mein Kampf, I believe Trump is telling the truth.

Published in 1925, Mein Kampf has 720 dense pages that spell out Hitler’s anti-semitism and racist world view.

There is no way that Trump, who struggled to get through the President’s Daily Brief in the White House, could have handled Mein Kampf. It's way above his reading and attention levels.

His White House intelligence briefers had to chop the PDB to three topics of one-page each, which was a quarter of the material presented to President Obama.

Trump would only pay attention to the visuals (graphs, charts, telegram images) which were added to the PDB as part of a plan to grab his attention.

Mein Kampf, in sharp contrast to the PDBs, is light on visuals, though there is one of a menacing scowling Hitler. The image looks a little like Trump's infamous mugshot.

Trump ultimately broke with tradition and dispensed of the daily written brief, opting for oral updates about the world’s hotspots every two or three days. And this is the guy who plowed through Mein Kampf? No way.

So how did Trump pick up the line about immigrants “poisoning the blood or our country.”

He may have picked it up in a SparkNotes-like explanation of Mein Kampf, or from the book of Hitler’s speeches that the late Ivana Trump said that her husband kept on a bedside cabinet.

America’s Orange Mussolini may not have read Hitler’s autobiography but he certainly is sounding these days like a fanboy of The Fuehrer.

Trust in Zelensky heads south… Ukrainian trust in president Volodymyr Zelensky has dropped like a rock, according to a report in the Kyiv Independent.

A little more than six-in-ten (62 percent) Ukrainians trust their president, a drop from 84 percent in December 2022.

The percentage of respondents who do not trust Zelensky increased from 5 percent to 18 percent, says the poll from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

Ukrainian trust in their civilian government also plunged, declining to 26 percent from 52 percent.

Zelensky’s poll numbers aren’t expected to recover much following his unsuccessful hat in hand tour of Washington in which Republicans failed to back the release of $61B in funding for Ukraine’s military.

The Pentagon says it will run out of money to replenish arms and equipment to Ukraine on Dec. 30.

Zelensky now has to worry about fighting the Russian invaders, as well as battling to improve his standing among his own people.