Here’s a news item the Republican Party could not have anticipated back in the early, innocent days of 2015, when the presidential primary season was still young: David Duke, an infamous white supremacist, argued this week that Donald Trump’s popularity is doing wonders to restore the reputation of Adolf Hitler.

Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Louisiana state senator, speculated on his radio show Tuesday that comparisons between the Republican front-runner and the Nazi dictator would actually be “rehabilitating that fellow with the mustache back there in Germany,” Web site Right Wing Watch reported.

“I saw a commercial against Donald Trump, a really vicious commercial, comparing what Donald Trump said about preserving America and making America great again to Hitler in Germany preserving Germany and making Germany great again and free again and not beholden to these Communists on one side, politically who were trying to destroy their land and their freedom, and the Jewish capitalists on the other, who were ripping off the nation through the banking system,” Duke continued.

Duke, who has endorsed Trump and remains one of his most stalwart supporters, also used his Tuesday radio show to call the billionaire’s candidacy a “great thing” for pointing out the dangers of immigration, although he remains leery of Trump’s “deep Jewish connections.” Trump, who has called himself “very pro-Israel,” eventually disavowed Duke's support after hours of hedging that set off alarms across the Republican establishment last month.

Despite being renounced by the one candidate he thinks could win the "war on the European-American majority of the United States of America,” Duke chalked up the assault on Trump to what he claims is a Jewish-controlled media conspiracy. “The media has incited hatred and violence and repression of Donald Trump and the hundreds of thousands, the millions of people who support him, and that’s what happened in Chicago,” he claimed, referring to the protests that shut down a Trump event last week. If Americans can look past the lies about Trump, Duke suggested, perhaps they would find a soft spot for Hitler, too.