HUFFPOST
Vice President Kamala Harris stepped up her attacks on former President Donald Trump over reports by former aides that he has authoritarian tendencies, agreeing during a CNN town-hall-style event Wednesday that he is a fascist.
“Yes, I do,” the Democratic presidential nominee said when moderator Anderson Cooper asked if she agreed with a recent characterization by his former White House chief of staff John Kelly that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.
Harris’ concurrence with Kelly was an incremental sharpening of criticism she made earlier in the day in remarks to reporters in Washington.
“We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power,” she said, while also taking aim at something else Kelly said: that Trump expressed admiration for Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler and his generals.
Kelly is not the only former Trump aide to be quoted recently as thinking Trump wants to consolidate government power within the Oval Office if he is reelected.
Retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump administration, called Trump “fascist to the core,” according to a new book by Watergate journalist Bob Woodward.
“I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist,” Milley is quoted as saying in the book.
In her CNN appearance, Harris said people who worked in the White House and knew Trump best should be listened to when they call him “unfit and dangerous.”
Kelly’s comments, in particular, amounted to “a 911 call to the American people,” she said.
“No one standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America should be in that position, saying they want to terminate the Constitution of the United States,” she said, a reference to a Trump social media post in which he claimed provisions of the Constitution could be waived in the event of election fraud. No court or election review of the 2020 balloting he’d contested found widespread fraud.
Though Harris’ comments marked an escalation of her rhetoric, Trump for his part has shown no shyness about calling his political opponents enemies of democracy, communists, Marxists and fascists.
As recently as Oct. 16, Trump told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner that Democrats were “the enemy from within.”
“They’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick,” he said.
Kamala Harris also tried during the town hall to highlight what she said was a big difference between her and Trump: that she, unlike him, wanted to take a pragmatic approach to policy.
