A growing number of former administration officials and advisers to Donald Trump are calling the former US president a “fascist,” pointing in particular to recent comments he made about the “enemy within.”
When asked during a town hall on CNN last week whether she believed Trump was a fascist, US Vice President Kamala Harris replied: “Yes, I think so.” She later brought up the issue herself, saying that Trump, if elected again, would be a “president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
Harris was responding to explosive comments made by Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly For the New York TimesWho asked him if he thought Trump was a fascist.
“The former president is definitely on the far right, he’s definitely an authoritarian, he admires people who are dictatorial — he said that,” Kelly responded. “So it certainly falls within the general definition of fascism, for sure.”
In his interview with the New York Times and Another with the Atlantic OceanKelly said Trump’s comments about the “enemy within” and the military’s treatment of “radical left-wing lunatics” inspired him to speak out.
Trump described Kelly as “lowbrow” and a “bad general.” On social truth In response to a New York Times interview. Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance And Republican supporters, including Senator Lindsey Graham also respondedin which Vance suggested that Kelly was a “disgruntled former employee” and Graham claimed that Kelly’s comments were made out of “desperation.”
Top Republicans in Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, cited two assassination attempts on Trump this year. In a joint statement Friday, which described Harris as “reckless.”
“By calling a political opponent a fascist, you risk inviting another would-be assassin to try to steal voters’ choice before Election Day,” Johnson and McConnell said.
“The latest line from Kamala and her campaign is that everyone who doesn’t vote for her is a Nazi,” Trump told a campaign rally in Atlanta on Monday.
“I am not a Nazi. I am the opposite of a Nazi.”
In the week following Kelly’s interview and Harris’ subsequent statements, there was a notable increase in online searches about whether Trump is a fascist. yet There have been more inquiries about what the term “fascism” actually is.
Here’s what the term means, what Trump said, and whether scholars think calling him a fascist is appropriate or overblown.
according to Merriam-Webster, Oxford Universitythe Council on Foreign Relationsthe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and numerous last sourcesFascism is a far-right political philosophy defined by extreme nationalism and the sovereignty of the nation over the individual. Fascist regimes are usually authoritarian regimes headed by a dictatorial leader.
The Council on Foreign Relations points out that fascism stands in opposition to democratic liberalism, which defends individual rights.
the Historian Robert PaxtonA leading expert on fascism, he wrote that the ideology is a form of extreme nationalism rooted in “an obsessive preoccupation with societal degradation, humiliation, or victimhood,” which “abandons democratic freedoms and pursues reparatory violence and without ethics or principles.” Legal restrictions are the goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and their movements are seen as prime historical examples of fascism. Spanish and Japanese totalitarian regimes In the early twentieth century, which also gave priority to extreme nationalism, It has also been studied by academics As other examples of historical fascism.
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Mussolini himself led the National Fascist Party, which ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 as a totalitarian state.
In Hitler’s Nazi Germany, “sovereignty of the nation” was embodied in his quest for Aryan supremacy, which led to the state-sponsored mass murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Nazi propaganda, and Hitler himself, He referred to the Jewish people as “vermin” and “the enemy.”
The Washington Post Newsweek was among the US media outlets that compared Hitler’s recorded language with Trump’s speech and found “significant similarities” between them.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of remarks made by Trump that have been described as fascist or echo rhetoric used by previous fascist figures:
- “We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at Shifty (Adam) Schiff and some of the others, yes, to me, they are the enemy within….I think Nancy Pelosi is the enemy within.” — October 20, 2024, Fox News interview
- I think the biggest problem is the people on the inside. We have some very bad people. We have some patients. Extreme leftist lunatics. I think it should be handled very easily by the National Guard, if necessary, or by the Army if necessary, because they cannot allow that to happen. — October 13, 2024, Fox News interview
- “It’s the enemy within: all the scum we have to deal with that hates our country. This is a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” – October 11, 2024, Colorado campaign rally
- “They are poisoning the blood of our country. This is what they have done. They are coming to our country, from Africa, from Asia, from all over the world. They are pouring into our country.” — December 17, 2023, New Hampshire Campaign March
- “I said I wanted to be a dictator for a day. Do you know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to dig, dig, dig.” — December 9, 2023, Young Republican Club Gala in New York
- “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and far-left thugs who live like vermin within the borders of our country.” – November 11, 2023, New Hampshire Campaign March
- “In 2016, I declared: ‘I am your voice.’ Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. – March 3, 2023, Conservative Political Action Conference
- “Do you throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election and declare the correct winner, or do you have a new election? “A fraud of this kind and this magnitude allows all rules, regulations and articles to be repealed, even those in the Constitution.” — December 3, 2022, Social Truth Post
- “We fight like hell. If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore.” — January 6, 2021, march on Washington before the US Capitol attack
- “(Kim Jong Un) is a head of state, and I mean he is a strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit at attention. “I want my people to do the same.” — June 15, 2018, Fox News interview
What others are saying Trump said
- “He commented more than once, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.'” — Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, New York Times interview
- “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly (during the unrest sparked by the 2020 killing of George Floyd). The protests and violence enraged him so much that he was willing to send in active duty troops to quell the demonstrators. Worse still, he suggested we shoot them.” -Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times
- “(At the 2018 meeting) Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for another six years, and Trump responded that people were saying the constitutional two-term limit for the president should be eliminated. Xi said the United States had too many elections because he did not want to distance himself from Trump, who nodded in agreement. -Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, The room where it happened
“The alarm bells that are ringing now may be somewhat exaggerated,” David Clay Large, a senior fellow at the Institute for European Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Associated Press.
“Our democratic institutions, no matter how besieged, remain much stronger than the institutions of the European countries that turned to fascism in the 1920s and 1930s,” Large said.
However, he added, there would be “a real danger to these institutions” in Trump’s second presidential term.
Trump’s increasing use of extremist rhetoric during the 2024 campaign makes the fascist label more appropriate than it might have been previously, said Andris Kasekamp, a history professor at the University of Toronto who teaches courses on both historical fascism and the rise of contemporary right-wing populism.
He specifically points to not only Trump’s references to the “enemy within,” but also his portrayal of America as a “broken” nation plagued by illegal immigrants, whom Trump blames for everything from crime to rising housing prices.
“With each passing day, with his mental deterioration and the crazier things he says… it seems like you can no longer kind of believe that fascism is not a label that can be applied to contemporary America,” he said in an interview. .
Julia Adeniyi Thomas, a history professor and fascism expert at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, told Global News in an email that she has “no doubt” that Trump fits the definition of a fascist, primarily because of his statements about political violence and the violence it carries. Outed by his supporters – most notably in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
She also cited suggestions by former Trump aides that he values personal loyalty above all other considerations of government service.
Kelly and retired Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, said the former president admired “Hitler’s generals” for their perceived loyalty and would refer to American military commanders as “my generals.” They said they would repeatedly explain to Trump that military officers swear an oath to the Constitution, not the commander-in-chief, and that German generals planned to assassinate Hitler several times.
Trump has denied it Make any positive comments about Hitler or Nazi military leaders.
In journalist Bob Woodward’s new book warMilley called Trump “a fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person for this country.”
Project 2025, the document drawn up by conservative activists that lays out the priorities of a second Trump administration, calls for large groups of civil servants to be politically appointed and vetted for proper loyalty to Trump, which set off alarm bells. Trump condemned the document and distanced himself from it.
Both Thomas and Kasekamp say political conditions are different now than they were when fascist figures in the past came to power. For example, Hitler and his Nazi movement took advantage of the actual economic collapse in Germany, while the current cost of living crisis in the United States is occurring against a strong economy in the macro sense.
Trump also rose within and then gained power within an existing political party, while Hitler and Mussolini established their own movements, Kasekamp said. However, he added that “enablers” in both politics and business helped lead to the rise of Trump and those historical figures.
—With file from The Associated Press
