A former Trump Organization vice president recalled a story of a time when Donald Trump once joked about Nazi “ovens” to Jewish executives in the room.
Barbara Res served as lead engineer on the Trump Tower project and is author of Tower of Lies, a memoir about her 18 years working for Trump. Res also participated in a 2016 New York Times article along with dozens of women who called out Trump’s private behavior toward them.
“He would make ridiculous remarks,” Res said Sunday on MSNBC’s Velshi of her time with Trump.
Res then said that Trump’s recent comments about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” (a fictional cannibal from the film Silence of the Lambs) reminded her of a Nazi joke Trump once made toward Jewish executives in the Trump Organization.
“It reminds me of a time when we had just hired a residential manager, a German guy,” Res said. “And Donald [Trump] was bragging among, to us executives, there were four of us, about how great the guy was and he was a real gentleman, and he was so neat and clean. And he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said ‘Watch out for this guy, he sort of remembers the ovens,’ you know, and then smiled.”
“Everybody was shocked,” she continued. “I couldn’t believe he said that. But he was making a joke about the Nazi ovens and killing people, and that’s the way he was.”
When host Ali Velshi asked Res about Trump’s affiliation with the Christian right, Res said Trump’s “embrace of religion” is “absolute nonsense.” She laughed when remembering how Trump “used to hate Christmas because he had to go to church one day.”
“He was an agnostic, maybe he was an atheist,” she continued. “He mocked religious people, he thought they were stupid for believing in things that were obviously, intellectually to him not true.”
When Velshi asked Res for her thoughts on Thursday’s upcoming presidential debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, Res said, “I wish [Biden] would goad him and make him go nuts, because when he goes nuts, he’s really crazy.”
In her book about Trump, Res wrote, “Bigotry and bias control Donald’s view of the world.”