There’s a moment in Michael Bender’s new book where former President Donald Trump reveals something that’s particularly revolting. Of course, he continually does this but this one is bad. Even by Trump standards, Raw Story reports. It’s the moment where the then-president, in the middle of a conversation with John Kelly, his former chief of staff, says that the late Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, accomplished a lot of positive things.

“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump reportedly told Kelly, according to an excerpt of Bender’s book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.

But that’s not the only shocking thing about that conversation Bender, The Wall Street Journal’s senior White House reporter reveals. In an interview with TMZ Bender reports Trump threatened him if he included the comment in his upcoming book, planned for release Tuesday.

Bender remembers Trump inviting him to Mar-a-Lago on two separate occasions so he could hand out questions for the president to fill out. Bender noted that Trump’s response to questions about the Hitler quote was to call it “defamatory.” This led the noted journalist to believe Trump was threatening him with legal action if the conversation was published.

“There was threatening language used. I could say that in several of these instances,” Bender said during the interview, noting that “multiple people heard these things and confirmed them.”

During the conversation with Kelly, Trump had reportedly been talking about Germany’s economic recovery under Hitler in the 1930s and the positive remarks about the brutal dictator shocked Kelly, who pushed back by reminding him “which countries were on which side” and by connecting “the dots from the First World War to the Second World War and all of Hitler’s atrocities”, Bender wrote, per The Hill.

Kelly pushed further on Trump’s shameful claims, arguing that “the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.” The former Marine Corps Gen. concluded by telling Trump “you cannot say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”

The Trump camp, of course, continues to deny this, with his spokesperson, Liz Harrington saying the reported conversation is “totally false.”

“President Trump never said this,” she said, adding “it is made up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired.”

Fortunately, Bender wasn’t cowed by Trump’s threats but the fact that this man admires Adolf Hitler isn’t really surprising — is it?