Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday she believes Donald Trump is a “fascist” after his longest-serving chief of staff said the former president praised Adolf Hitler while he was in office and placed personal loyalty above the Constitution.
Harris seized on comments by former Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general, about his former boss in interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic magazine published Tuesday, warning that the Republican nominee met the definition of a fascist and that while in office he suggested that the Nazi leader… “He did some good things.”
Speaking at a CNN town hall, Harris said they offer a window into who the “real” former president is and what kind of leader in chief he would be.
When asked if she thought Trump was a fascist, Harris twice replied: “Yes, I do.” She later brought up the matter herself, saying that Trump, if elected again, would be a “president who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
The Democratic presidential nominee said Kelly’s comments, made less than two weeks before voters would decide whether to return Trump to the Oval Office, were a “911 call to the American people” by the former chief of staff. Harris quickly seized on it as part of her closing message to voters as she works to sharpen choice at the ballot box for Americans.
“I believe that Donald Trump poses a danger to the well-being and security of the United States of America,” she said, saying that the American people deserve a president who maintains “certain standards,” which includes “certainly not comparing himself, in general.” “Clearly a style of admiration for Hitler.”
She added that if re-elected, Trump would no longer be influenced by people who would “block” him from his worst impulses.
Earlier Wednesday, Harris repeated her growing warnings about Trump’s mental fitness and intentions for the presidency.
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best, from the people who worked side by side with him in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room,” Harris told reporters outside the vice president’s residence. In Washington.
The comments by Kelly, a retired Marine general who served with Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019, built on previous warnings from former senior Trump officials as the election entered its final two weeks.
Kelly has long criticized Trump and has previously accused him of calling veterans killed in combat “stupid” and “losers.” His new warnings emerged as Trump seeks a second term, pledging to dramatically expand his use of the military at home and suggesting that he will use force to go after Americans he considers “domestic enemies.”
“He commented more than once, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Kelly recalled to The Times. Kelly said he usually ended the conversation by saying “nothing he (Hitler did), you might say, was good,” but Trump would bring up the topic again from time to time.
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In his interview with The Atlantic, Kelly noted that when Trump raised the idea of needing “German generals,” Kelly asked if he meant “Bismarck’s generals,” a reference to Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who oversaw the unification of Germany. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. The former president replied, “Yes, yes, Hitler’s generals.”
Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social, that Kelly “made up a story” and continued to direct insults at his former chief of staff, including that “Kelly’s toughness has turned into weakness.”
The Trump campaign also denied these accounts. Campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung said Kelly “feigned these false stories that he made up,” and after Harris’ statement, he accused the Democratic nominee of sharing “lies and outright lies.”
Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire who has previously been a critic of Trump, said Kelly’s comments did not change his plans to vote for the former president.
“Look, we’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump, from Donald Trump. “It’s really par for the course,” the governor told CNN. “Unfortunately, with a guy like that, it has come down to a vote at this point.”
Some of the former president’s supporters in swing states responded to Kelly’s comments with a shrug.
“Trump had his four years, and we were doing great,” he added. “Kelly didn’t have anything good to say about Trump. He didn’t have anything good to say about Trump,” said Jim Laitner, a longtime advocate for veterans in Nevada who served in the Army in Vietnam and co-founded a resource center Veterans Transition Nonprofit: ‘He Should Get His Ass Kicked’.
Harris said Wednesday that Trump admires Hitler’s generals because “he does not want an army loyal to the Constitution of the United States, but rather he wants an army loyal to him.” “He wants an army that is loyal to him personally.”
Polls show the race is close in swing states, and both Trump and Harris are crisscrossing the country to make their final pitches to a segment of undecided voters. The Harris campaign has spent a lot of time reaching out to independent voters, using the support of longtime Republicans like former Rep. Liz Cheney and comments like Kelly’s to urge former Trump voters to reject his nomination in November.
The Harris campaign held a call with reporters Tuesday to raise the voices of retired military officials who highlighted how many officials who worked for Trump now oppose his campaign.
The retired Army Brigadier General said: “The people who know him best are strongly opposed to him and his presidency.” General Steve Anderson.
Anderson said he wishes Kelly would fully support Harris over Trump, something he has not done yet. But retired Army Reserve Col. Kevin Carroll, a former senior adviser to Kelly, said Wednesday that the former senior Trump official “would rather chew broken glass than vote for Donald Trump.”
Before serving as Trump’s chief of staff, Kelly served as the former president’s Secretary of Homeland Security, where he oversaw Trump’s attempts to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Kelly has also been at the forefront of the administration’s crackdown on immigration policy that has led to thousands of immigrant parents being separated from their children along the southern border. These actions made him a villain to many on the left, including Harris.
After Kelly left the Trump administration and joined the board of directors of a company that ran the nation’s largest detention center for unaccompanied migrant children, Harris wrote during her 2019 presidential run that he was the “architect” of the administration’s harsh child separation policy. Now he will benefit from the separation of families. This is unethical. “We are better than this.”
When she was in Miami for a primary debate in June 2019, Harris was also one of dozens of Democratic presidential candidates who visited a detention center south of the city and protested the administration’s harsh treatment of young immigrants.
In his interview with the Times, Kelly also said that Trump meets the definition of a fascist. After reading the definition aloud, including that fascism is “a far-right, authoritarian, extreme nationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader,” Kelly concluded that Trump “definitely falls into the general definition of fascism, for sure.”
Kelly added that Trump often gets angry at any attempt to restrict his power, and that he “likes to be” a dictator.
“He certainly prefers a dictatorial approach to government,” Kelly told The Times, later adding: “I think he would like to be just like him in business — he can ask people to do things and they will do them, and not.” I really get bothered a lot about the legalities etc.
Kelly is not the first former senior Trump administration official to view the former president as a threat.
Retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, told Bob Woodward in his recent book, “The War,” that Trump was “a fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” Retired Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as defense secretary under Trump, later reportedly told Woodward that he agreed with Milley’s assessment.
Throughout Trump’s political rise, the businessman-turned-politician has benefited from the support of military veterans.
AP VoteCast found that about 6 in 10 military veterans said they voted for Trump in 2020, as did just over half of those with a veteran in the family. Among voters in South Carolina’s Republican primary this year, AP VoteCast found that nearly two-thirds of military veterans and veteran family members voted for Trump over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump’s strongest opponent in the 2024 GOP primary. .
Associated Press writers Lynley Sanders in Washington, Ken Ritter in Las Vegas, Zeke Miller in Aston, Pennsylvania, and Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami contributed to this report.
