Stay informed with FP’s news and analysis as the United States prepares to vote.
An unprecedented question in the history of U.S. presidential politics dominated the Sunday morning news programs last weekend and has lingered in the air ever since: Is the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, a fascist?
The question did not arise, as some would like to pretend, from putative left-leaning bias in the U.S. media. Rather, it came from the recent comments of two former senior advisors to Trump during his presidency: Mark Milley and John Kelly, both highly ranked and decorated retired generals with years of distinguished service to the nation in their backgrounds.
Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that his onetime boss is “fascist to the core,” according to Bob Woodward’s new book, War. Meanwhile, Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told the New York Times that Trump meets the definition of a fascist. “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.
“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,” he added. Kelly also said that Trump claimed that he had the authority to use the military to go after U.S. citizens and once told him that “Hitler did some good things.”
The Trump campaign stood ready, if not altogether able, to beat back these claims. Politicians who spoke in defense of Trump on the main Sunday shows said that the retired generals were disgruntled former employees or had chosen the incendiary political label to conceal major policy disagreements between them and their former boss.
Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina and long-standing Trump surrogate, made the peculiar argument on ABC’s “This Week” that it was improper to call Trump a fascist so close to the election. But wouldn’t it make more sense to say that if generals with records of public service such as these genuinely believed their warnings, that here was a case of better late than never?
Graham, grasping for other straws, also faulted the former president’s critics for negativity. “What happened to joy on the Democratic side?” he asked. “They went from ‘joy’ to now ‘Trump is Hitler’!”
Meanwhile, J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential candidate, found himself having to defend recent comments made by Trump that have lent grist to the fascism claims. Trump has spoken darkly, for example, about the presence of an “enemy within” the United States, which he claims poses a greater threat to the country than its foreign adversaries; he has also suggested that he would turn to the U.S. military to deal with that enemy, even though the U.S. legal code broadly forbids the use of the federal armed forces to enforce law domestically.
On CNN, Vance struggled mightily to dismiss this concern. In an attempt to trivialize the matter, he falsely accused anchor Jake Tapper of “playing” a game and misrepresenting Trump’s words.
“He said that he wanted to use the military to go after far-left lunatics who are rioting, and he also called them ‘the enemy within.’ He separately, in a totally different context, in a totally different conversation, said that [Democratic politicians] Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were threats to this country,” Vance said. At this point, Tapper interjected: “He said [Pelosi and Schiff] were the enemy within.”
With television’s inflexible time constraints and constant imperative to move on, Tapper did not get the chance to ask Vance whether directing the armed services against the “far left” wasn’t itself a fairly precise definition of using the military for political ends. Nor did Tapper find an opportunity to ask whether the military should have been employed to put down the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which Trump has recently described as a “day of love.”
During his late-campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday night, Trump himself validated the concerns about his fascist proclivities. He said of his domestic enemies, “They’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy within.”
It was at this ghoulish event, and not in decorum-bound TV interviews, that the truest gauge of the nature of Trumpism and what the country might have in store under a second Trump presidency was on fullest display. In a striking echo of an infamous 1939 pro-Nazi rally at the same venue, two years before Germany declared war on the United States, former Trump aide Stephen Miller said, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (“America for Americans” was a notorious Ku Klux Klan slogan.)
With the exception of pro-Trump Fox News, which has played down the ugliness on display at the rally, networks have given heavy and persistent airtime to one particular insult delivered by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” But emphasis on this comment has partly obscured the breadth of the thuggish racism that pervaded the event. This included anti-Black, anti-Palestinian, anti-Jewish, and anti-women comments.
The question before the entire nation now is whether any of this will matter in what is projected to be an extremely close election. According to new ABC/Ipsos polling, 1 in 8 Republicans thinks that Trump is a fascist. This might seem like encouraging news for those who fear that the United States is about to tip into the authoritarian camp—until one learns that 8 percent of those who think he’s a fascist say that they’ll vote for him anyway.
At this point, it is not a partisan matter to say that down one way lies a commitment to the conventional bounds of American values—including respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the equality and inclusion of people of different backgrounds and identities—and down the other, the vesting of unusual power in a person who, as many who served under him have said, reveres authoritarianism. Nor is it dramatic to say that this election represents a crossroads for U.S. democracy and Washington’s image and role in the world. The country’s future hangs in the balance.