For much of her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris has framed the election as a choice between “joy” and freedom and the dark, “weird” vision put forth by opponents Donald Trump and JD Vance. But with under two weeks to go until Election Day, the vice president is sharpening that message into a stark warning: The former president is a “fascist,” she said at a CNN town hall Wednesday evening, who represents a “danger to the well-being and security of the United States of America.”
Trump, she told moderator Anderson Cooper, is “increasingly unstable and unfit to serve.”
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Harris has repeatedly raised alarms about the threat Trump poses to democracy, as well as his admiration for strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, whom he frequently praises on the campaign trail. But her comments at Wednesday night’s town hall, in which she referred to Trump as “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist,” marked the first time she has explicitly described his as one.
Her remarks follow John Kelly, the retired four star general and former Trump chief of staff, warning about his old boss’s authoritarian aspirations and admiration for Adolf Hitler. “This is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is,” Harris told reporters outside the vice presidential residence earlier Wednesday. “And in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and actions.”
Trump and his allies objected to the characterization. The GOP nominee suggested Harris was desperate and claimed that she was the real “threat to democracy.” Spokesman Steven Cheung attacked Kelly and said Harris was peddling “outright lies and falsehoods.” And Elon Musk, one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers, accused the vice president of “incitement to violence” against Trump. (Apparently, Trump describing Democrats as “evil,” “enemies from within,” and the like do not meet Musk’s standard for incitement.)
But, of course, there is no other word that fully captures the pernicious, paranoid program Trump seeks to usher in. “He’s a total fascist,” Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bob Woodward. “He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
Trump spent his presidency chipping away at American norms and institutions. He tried to overthrow the democratic process in 2020. And he is now running a campaign explicitly premised on “retribution” against political foes, crackdowns on immigrants and other scapegoats, and fealty to him above all else. “This is him,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday, telling reporters that President Joe Biden agrees with Kelly’s assertion that Trump is a fascist.
Indeed, Trump himself has not only said he’d been a “dictator” for a day—he has echoed the rhetoric of authoritarians, rallying his supporters against “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. And even as they defend Trump against Democratic critics, his supporters openly cast him in autocratic terms: “There has to be a point at which dad comes home,” Tucker Carlson said in a dark rally rant in Georgia Wednesday, likening Americans to out-of-control children in need of punishment. “Dad comes home, and he’s pissed! Dad is pissed!”
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“And when dad gets home, you know what he says?” Carlson continued. “‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.”
“Daddy’s home!” the crowd chanted afterward, as Trump took the stage.
That sort of thing is “weird,” as Harris and running mate Tim Walz have pointed out during the campaign. But it’s also more than that: It’s a disturbing vision of “unchecked power,” as Harris emphasized Wednesday. “We know what Donald Trump wants,” she said at the U.S. Naval Observatory. “The question in [next month’s election] will be: What do the American people want?”
