Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, once proudly showed reporters a document claiming he was more powerful than Adolf Hitler. He later posted it on Truth Social and credited it to a presidential historian. The presidential historian was Gary Player's caddy.
Yes, This Is a Real Thing That Actually Happened
According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their forthcoming book "Regime Change," Trump at some point presented the two New York Times journalists with a document making the case that he wielded more power than some of history's most feared rulers. Hitler was on that list. Trump was, apparently, above him.
CNN's Abby Phillip recounted the passage on Thursday's "NewsNight," and she could barely get through it without breaking. "It's not a joke," Phillip said, visibly giggling. "This actually happened." Her panel guest, former DNC spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa, responded with a laugh and the only reasonable question: "This is the president of the United States?"
Yes. Yes it is.
The 'Historian' in Question
Here is where the story achieves a kind of transcendent absurdity. Trump shared the document on Truth Social and attributed it to someone he identified as a presidential historian named Dave King. That sounds credible enough. Historians exist. Some of them are named Dave.
Dave King is not a presidential historian. According to HuffPost's account of the CNN segment, Dave King is the longtime caddy and personal confidant of golf Hall of Famer Gary Player. That's the sourcing. A man whose professional expertise is handing someone a nine-iron looked at the sweep of recorded human history and determined that Donald Trump outranks Adolf Hitler on the power scale, and Trump found this so compelling that he showed it to two of the most prominent political journalists in the country.
Take a moment. Breathe. We'll continue.
The Part Where He Posted It Online
The real commitment here is that Trump didn't just receive this document, quietly enjoy it, and move on with his life. He shared it. On his own platform. With attribution. He wanted people to know about this assessment and to know it came from someone with the title "presidential historian."
The decision to post it publicly, slap a credentialed-sounding label on the source, and present it as a legitimate historical evaluation of his place among the world's most powerful figures tells you everything you need to know about both his self-image and his relationship with the concept of verification. Why check whether Dave King has a PhD when the document says what you want it to say?
This is a man who has access to the actual historians employed by the actual government. He chose the caddy's take.
In the Annals of Presidential Vanity, a New Entry
Let's be precise about what the document was apparently arguing. Not that Trump was effective, or popular, or historically significant in some neutral sense. More powerful than Hitler. That is the specific comparison someone wrote down, and that Trump found sufficiently flattering to circulate.
Historians and psychologists have spent decades documenting the pathological narcissism at the center of authoritarian politics. There are serious academic books about it. There are entire journals dedicated to the subject. None of them, to our knowledge, have used a golf caddy as a primary source, but here we are, breaking new ground together.
The Haberman and Swan book doesn't have a release date listed in the current reporting, but given this particular excerpt, it is safe to say the pre-order situation should be robust.
The CNN Panel Could Not Keep It Together, and That Seems Right
Abby Phillip is a professional. She anchors a national news program. She has covered presidential politics for years and has sat across from or reported on some of the most chaotic moments in modern American political history. She got the giggles. She had to acknowledge out loud that she was not making any of this up.
That is, in its own way, a journalistic data point. When the anchor cannot maintain composure while reading a factual account of the president's behavior, something has gone structurally wrong with the baseline. This is not a late-night joke or a satirical bit from The Onion. This is sourced, reported, and documented in a book by two of the most serious Trump-beat journalists working today.
Hinojosa's response, "this is the president of the United States," landed as both a punchline and a genuine statement of stunned disbelief. Both readings are correct.
The Dingo Take
The story is funny. It is genuinely, helplessly funny, the kind of thing you read twice because your brain refuses to process it on the first pass. A golf caddy. Not a historian. Not a biographer. Not even a particularly well-read amateur with a blog. A caddy. And not even the golfer's caddy in some roundabout celebrity-adjacent way that might give the document a thin veneer of interesting provenance. Gary Player's caddy. That's the full chain of custody for the document Trump used to establish his place above Hitler in the hierarchy of world historical power.
But here is the part that should keep you up at night, or at least ruin your morning coffee. Trump did not stumble across this document and get tricked into believing it. He sought it out, or someone in his orbit sought it out for him, because it said the thing he wanted said. The verification step never happened because verification was never the point. The point was confirmation. The document told him he was powerful and great and historically dominant, and that was enough. That is how he processes information about himself, and that is how he processes information about everything else too. The facts that survive in Trump's world are the ones that make Trump look good. Everything else is fake news.
So yes, laugh at the caddy. Laugh until you cry a little. But the reason Haberman and Swan are writing this book, the reason the anecdote made it into a chapter rather than a footnote, is because the man who shops around for favorable historical comparisons with history's monsters is the same man currently making decisions about your government, your economy, your foreign policy, and your rights. The joke is real. The president is real. Both things are true at the same time, and that's the part nobody on that CNN panel was quite laughing about.
