PHILADELPHIA—Add Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to the long line of prominent officials who call her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, a fascist. Many of the others, unlike her, were top members of Trump’s own national security team. And, despite some very bad political actions of their own, they have good reason to say Trump meets the definition of a fascist.
“Do you believe Donald Trump is a fascist?” veteran CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper asked Harris, repeating a question from the audience of undecided voters at an Oct. 23 town hall in Philadelphia’s Delaware County suburbs. Winning Philadelphia and Pennsylvania has become the keystone to winning the November election for both Harris and Trump.
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” Vice President Harris, replied.
“And I also believe the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted,” Harris elaborated. “Look at their careers.” The others “were not politicians…with the exception, I think, only of Mike Pence,” Trump’s vice president during the convicted felon’s four-year presidency.
“These were career people who have served in the highest roles in national security, who served in our military, who are highly respected. Talking about the person who would be our commander in chief.” Trump’s rambling speeches and explosive temper show he’s “increasingly unstable and unfit to serve” to be president again, Harris added.
The bombshell statements by John Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff when he was in the White House, and then by Harris would qualify as far more than just an ordinary “October Surprise” in a normal election. Yet the New York Times and other publications left that news either off their front pages entirely or else squeezed it, as did the Times, into a tiny blurb at the bottom of the page.
All week those newspapers, including publications in the swing states, kept it off their front pages or out of the paper entirely. The Wall Street Journal mentioned the controversy but accused the Democrats, rather than Trump, of being the ones who are the real opponents of the Constitution.
Trump’s response
Trump’s response to the declarations by Kelly and Harris was delivered at a rally in Georgia on Wednesday night. Ignoring his affinity for Hitler, he said Kelly was a “degenerate low-life who once was strong but became weak” and Harris was a “low-IQ criminal.”
When the New York Times asked Kelly to define “fascism,” he gave, as might be expected, only a partial definition, which he said, he found online: “It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.”
That definition leaves out the fact that every single fascist movement to gain state power reflected the naked, direct control by capitalist monopolies over the government and the people. Without exception, labor unions and worker-backed political parties were crushed in every country where fascists came to power, and concentration camps in Germany, for example, were sources of free labor for German corporations.
That is not, of course, a definition of fascism that many billionaires currently backing Trump would be comfortable with. They prefer definitions that stress “autocracy,” military parades, and salutes to the “great leader” while leaving out the economics of fascism.
Nevertheless, it is a step forward that fascism is at least being addressed these days in the media and that Trump is being connected to it.
Harris also declared Wednesday that Trump has “contempt” for the Constitution—a contempt the former president has himself shown on both the campaign trail and, more than a year ago, via his attorneys in court.
“And then today, we learned that John Kelly, a four-star Marine general who is his longest serving Chief of Staff, gave an interview recently in the last two weeks of this election, talking about how dangerous Donald Trump is,” Harris said.
“Frankly, I think he’s putting out a 911 call to the American people to understand what could happen if Donald Trump were back in the White House.”
In a recorded interview with the New York Times, released the day of the town hall with Harris, Kelly was scathing. “Certainly, the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators, he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Harris, and Kelly, who was also Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, follow Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, in calling the convicted felonious former president a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Milley adds that late in Trump’s first term, after the MAGA lost his bid for re-election four years ago, he took moves to prevent Trump from setting off a nuclear war.
Evidence overwhelming
The evidence for the conclusions by all these varied political figures is overwhelming, much of it provided by Trump himself.
Topping that catalog is his aiding, abetting, ordering, and refusing to halt the Jan. 6, 2021, invasion and coup d’état attempt at the U.S. Capitol to keep himself in the White House after Democratic nominee Joe Biden beat him in 2020. Even Trump calls the invasion “an insurrection.”
Second is Trump’s statement to a friendly Fox “News” interviewer that he would be a dictator “on day one,” should he win the White House again. Nobody believes he’d stop then.
Third, though none of the critics mention it, is the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing Republican majority, including three Trump-named justices, giving Trump and all future presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for “official” deeds while in office, including many in a gray area half-official and half-personal.
“No person is above the law” went out the window with that.
When Trump was president, he tried to get Milley to order the shooting of peaceful demonstrators across the street from the White House. “Why not shoot them in the legs?’ Trump asked.
The other national security-oriented ex-Trump officials who believe he’s a dictator of one type or another include former Defense Secretaries Mark Esper and James Mattis.
Trump has “no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about,” and has “nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law,” says Esper, whom Trump fired.
All these people, including Kelly, have things on their political resumes that are far from positive. Kelly, for example, as head of Homeland Security prior to his stint at the White House, backed the cruel family separation policy of the Trump administration. After he left the White House, he took a position on the board of a corporation housing detained immigrants. Harris, who was a candidate for president in the Democratic Party primaries at the time, criticized him for that role.
Kelly said, however, that he finally decided to come out and strongly condemn Trump as a fascist when the ex-president said he would use the military against his political enemies. Even when Trump backers on Fox tried to get the ex-president to back off those statements, Trump insisted that he did indeed intend to use the military to go after the “enemy within.” Among the latter, he included Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, the “communists and radical left,” and Harris herself.
Trump is soon to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden, the location in 1939 of a huge Nazi rally hosted by the German-American Bund. The Nazis scheduled their gathering there at the time because, they said, New York was a “hotbed” of Jews and other anti-American conspirators whom they wanted to challenge.
It has not been lost on the radical rightists who are among the backers of Trump that they can express their support for fascism by attending his rallies. Trump is so worried about losing that he may be feeling even a few hundred or a few thousand votes from among neo-Nazis in swing states could help put him over the top in the electoral vote count.
By contrast, Harris plans to deliver her closing remarks for the campaign next week on the Ellipse in Washington, the same place where Trump launched his unsuccessful coup attempt after losing the last election.
Harris came out of the White House briefly Wednesday at one point and said that “in 13 days, a very serious decision will have to be made by the voters. The American people will have to make that important choice,” she declared, before turning around and walking back inside.
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