Harris is pounding Trump on fascism. Some Dems think that’s a mistake.
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second
Trump term in recent weeks.
By Lisa Kashinsky
10/28/2024 09:53 PM EDT
KALAMAZOO, Michigan — Kamala Harris’ hammering of Donald Trump’s
authoritarian rhetoric is alarming some Democrats in this critical swing
state who fear that message is falling flat.
Voters, they argue, have grown desensitized to Trump and the warnings
about him. Polls not only show the economy remains the top concern
here, but that Trump holds the advantage on it. And activists worry Harris’
attacks on Trump are distracting from her strongest issue: abortion rights.
In Michigan, where the cracks in Democrats’ traditional coalition have set
the party on edge for months, the concern about Harris’ late-stage tactic
is coming from all corners.
“It doesn’t play well in communities that are struggling to make ends
meet, and that’s the problem. They’re talking to the wrong people,” said
Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, a former state representative and Detroit school
board member who is backing Harris. “We can’t keep campaigning on
modes of fear.”
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second
Trump term over recent weeks — returning to an argument that was
central to President Joe Biden’s now-defunct reelection bid in what her
campaign says is a response to the former president’s own escalating
rhetoric.
In recent days, Harris has called Trump “unhinged” and “unfit to serve”
over his threats to weaponize the military and the judicial system against
his opponents, and over his portrayals of his political rivals as the “enemy
from within.” She has promoted the idea that Trump is a fascist after his
longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly, warned that the former
president meets the definition of one. And her campaign has launched TV
ads in battleground states warning of Trump’s disdain for democratic
practices, a message she is expected to amplify by appearing on Tuesday
at the site in Washington, D.C., where Trump rallied his supporters ahead
of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
“Democracy’s on the line, it truly is. When a person tells you something,
that they’re going to be a certain way, and they worship people like Hitler,
and they say they’re going to turn the army loose on you … those are
words coming from a potential dictator,” said Mary Waters, a Detroit City
Council member who is supporting Harris. “Now that is scary.”
Harris ticked through those warnings at a rally in Kalamazoo this past
weekend, adding that Trump would “claim unchecked and extreme power”
if reelected and reminding voters he called for the “termination” of the
Constitution after his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
But even among this friendly crowd, some Democrats were concerned
that Harris was placing too much emphasis on Trump.
“I don’t see us moving anyone over with that message,” said Karen
Lancendorfer, a Democrat who had come from nearby Portage to see
Harris rally with Michelle Obama. Plus, she said, “it’s risky to go negative,
because sometimes independents don’t like negativity.”
Across Michigan, activists are fretting that Harris is missing the mark as
Republicans pummel her over the economy and crime in mailers and
attack her on TV for declining to distance herself from President Joe
Biden. And they worry that the argument that Trump is a threat to
democracy — while intended to expand her coalition by appealing to
independents and disaffected Republicans — is not enough to motivate
lower-propensity Democratic voters.
“We’re going to shame people by saying ‘how dare you stay home and
Donald Trump gets elected’ rather than give people a reason to get people
off their couches to vote,” lamented Carly Hammond, a Democratic
organizer from Saginaw.
After going hard on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies in recent weeks,
Harris’ campaign has already begun shifting focus back onto abortion and
the economy. Harris held a massive rally in Texas last Friday focused on
the threat Trump poses to abortion rights. That was followed Saturday by
Obama’s direct appeal to men on the issue while campaigning with the
vice president in Kalamazoo — where Harris delivered a speech that also
emphasized pocketbook issues like lowering housing costs and tackling
price gouging.
A woman listens as Harris speaks at a campaign rally.
People listen during a campaign event while Harris speaks at Wings Event
Center on Oct. 26 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. | Jamie Kelter Davis/POLITICO
In response to a request for comment on local activists’ concerns about
Harris’ messaging on Trump, Harris’ campaign said she has focused
extensively on the economy in her trips to Michigan. On Monday, Harris
visited a semiconductor plant in Saginaw that is set to receive $325
million in subsidies under the CHIPS and Science Act, touting her record
on domestic manufacturing and attacking Trump for threatening to roll
back the Biden administration’s landmark legislation.
“On every single trip the vice president has made to Michigan, she has
been laser-focused on manufacturing, strengthening the economy and
lowering costs,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said in a statement the
campaign provided to POLITICO.
But as they canvassed a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes in the
Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills on Friday, Democratic activists Marcie
Paul and Emily Feinstein found Harris still had work to do on that front.
Multiple voters expressed concerns about the economy. One man, an
auto-industry worker who said he would not vote for Trump again after
Jan. 6 but remained undecided in this election, said he wanted to hear
more about the candidates’ business policies. One woman said she is
voting for Harris in large part because of reproductive rights — but that
she has “no” sway over her husband who “thinks business is more
important.”
For Harris, “there’s a balance between the issues and the dangers of
Trump,” said Paul, who chairs the Michigan-based progressive women’s
group Fems for Dems. And right now, she said, voters want to hear “who
[Harris] is and what she wants to do. They’re still getting to know her.”
Trump, on the other hand: “They know who he is,” Paul said.
“Unfortunately, personally, I feel as though we knew this about him,” Paul
said of the recent revelations about what critics say are Trump’s fascist
tendencies. “It’s just another drop in a very deep bucket.”
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When former President Donald J. Trump’s longest serving
chief of staff said the other day that his old boss
“falls into the general definition of fascist,” Mr.
Trump let loose with the insults, assailing his onetime
right hand as a “total degenerate,” a “LOWLIFE” and a
“bad General.”
What Mr. Trump did not do, at least at first, was
actually deny that he was or aspired to be a fascist.
"...polls show that more American consider trump a
threat to the constitutional order than the president
or vice president. Only 28 percent of Americans
described Mr. Trump as committed to democracy in an AP-
NORC survey in August. By contrast, 49 percent of
registered voters called Mr. Trump a fascist in an ABC
News/Ipsos poll released on Friday, compared with 22
percent who said that of Ms. Harris.
That may explain why Ms. Harris has seized on Mr.
Kelly’s comments on fascism in recent days in hopes of
motivating her existing supporters to turn out while
also persuading undecided voters to back her. Mr. Trump
pushed back against the fascist label on Fox News on
Friday. “Everyone knows that’s not true,” he said.
“They call me everything until, you know, something
sticks.”
Mr. Kelly is not the only person who worked for Mr.
Trump who worries about his autocratic instincts. Gen.
Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, was
quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” calling Mr.
Trump “fascist to the core.” In recent days, 13 other
former Trump aides released a letter backing Mr.
Kelly’s assessment and warning of the former
president’s “desire for absolute, unchecked power.”
Others who have broken with Mr. Trump see it
differently. John R. Bolton, his former national
security adviser, said that fascism is a “comprehensive
ideology” and “Trump isn’t capable of philosophical
thought.” But he is dangerous, nonetheless, Mr. Bolton
said. “A second Trump term will increase the damage he
did in his first term, some of it perhaps irreparable,”
he said, “but not because he’s thought about it
systematically.”
Either way, advisers like Mr. Kelly, Mr. Bolton and
General Milley restrained Mr. Trump in his first term,
talking him out of actions they considered unwise or
illegal. None of them will be around in a second term,
as Mr. Trump has learned to avoid more establishment
figures who will resist his more extreme demands.
Instead, he has surrounded himself of late with more
radical advisers who encourage Mr. Trump’s most anti-
democratic instincts.
Evoking Hitler
ImageA bird’s-eye view of Mr. Trump standing alone at a
lectern on a blue-carpeted stage. A throng of
photographers and journalists are roped off several
feet in front of the stage.
Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon
drew positive comparisons between Mr. Trump and Adolf
Hitler on the day he announced he would run for
president in 2015.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York
Times
Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has fueled
concerns about fascism since the day he first descended
the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his
presidential bid in 2015. As he kicked off his campaign
that day, he demonized Mexican migrants as rapists and
within months he vowed to ban all Muslims from entering
the country.
He fashioned a foreign policy around the themes of
isolationism and nationalism. When told by New York
Times reporters that it sounded as if he were talking
about an “America First” approach, he happily
appropriated the term. The fact that it was a term
discredited by history because of its association
before World War II with isolationists, including some
Nazi sympathizers, did not matter to him.
Nor did he mind citing fascists like Benito Mussolini.
When Mr. Trump retweeted a quote that “it is better to
live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,”
NBC’s Chuck Todd told him that it was from Mussolini.
“I know who said it,” Mr. Trump replied. “But what
difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or
somebody else?” He also came to use language familiar
to victims of Joseph Stalin when he declared
journalists who angered him to be “enemies of the
people,” a phrase used to send Russians to the gulag.
Mr. Trump has long expressed interest in the most
notorious dictator of the past century, Adolf Hitler,
whose Nazis also used that phrase. In a 1990 interview,
Mr. Trump said he had a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,”
although his first wife Ivana Trump and the friend who
gave him the book said it was actually “My New Order,”
a collection of Hitler speeches.
Mr. Trump’s onetime chief strategist, Stephen K.
Bannon, thought there was a comparison. When he saw Mr.
Trump descend the Trump Tower escalator with strongman
imagery on that day in 2015, Mr. Bannon later told a
Times reporter that he thought, “That’s Hitler!” He
meant it as a compliment.
While he was president, Mr. Trump told staff members
that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” At another
point, he complained to Mr. Kelly, “Why can’t you be
like the German generals,” meaning those who reported
to Hitler. In interviews with The Times and The
Atlantic in recent days, Mr. Kelly confirmed those
anecdotes, first reported in several books over the
last few years. Mr. Trump denied this past week that he
ever said them, and last year he denied ever reading
“Mein Kampf.”
Mr. Trump has associated with people who praise Hitler.
In 2022, he hosted dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in
Florida for the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who is
a Holocaust denier, and the rap star Kanye West. Mr.
West, now going by the name Ye, said shortly after the
dinner that “I like Hitler” and that “Hitler has a lot
of redeeming qualities.” Twice this past summer, Mr.
Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., hosted speeches
by a Nazi sympathizer who has said “Hitler should have
finished the job.”
The former president has likewise affiliated himself
with the modern world’s autocrats. He has praised some
of today’s most authoritarian and, in some cases,
murderous leaders, including President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia (“genius”), President Xi Jinping of
China (“a brilliant man”), Kim Jong-un, the leader of
North Korea (“very honorable”), President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi of Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (“a great guy”),
former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines
(“what a great job you are doing”), President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (“a hell of a leader”) and
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary (“one of the
most respected men”).
On the other hand, the leaders who earn his scorn are
the democrats, like former Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany (“stupid”), former Prime Minister Theresa May
of Britain (“a fool”), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of
Canada (“two-faced”) and President Emmanuel Macron of
France (“very, very nasty”).
‘Whatever I Want’
Image
Mr. Trump posing with members of U.S. Customs and
Border Protection before a rally in Arizona earlier
this month. Credit...Anna Watts for The New York Times
In the course of American history, a number of
presidents have stretched the bounds of democracy,
mostly during war or times of national security
threats.
During a period of tension with France, John Adams
signed the Alien and Sedition Acts that permitted the
government to imprison journalists who defamed the
president or Congress. Andrew Jackson defied an adverse
Supreme Court, saying that Chief Justice John Marshall
had made his decision so let him enforce it.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the
Civil War and seized hostile newspapers that published
misinformation. Woodrow Wilson likewise shut down
newspapers and rounded up opponents of American
involvement in World War I. Franklin D. Roosevelt
confined more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in
internment camps during World War II. George W. Bush
bypassed limits on torture and surveillance after the
attacks of Sept. 11.
Whatever the exigencies used to justify those actions,
the system for the most part eventually corrected
itself. Most of the Alien and Sedition Acts were
repealed or allowed to expire. Lincoln ultimately won
approval from Congress for his suspension of habeas
corpus, and Mr. Bush accepted restrictions forced on
him by the Supreme Court and Congress on his war
against terrorism.
Mr. Trump during his four years in office regularly
asserted the most expansive view of presidential power.
“I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do
whatever I want as president,” he once said, referring
to the article in the Constitution that deals with
executive power, ignoring the limits built into the
document.
Whenever he was frustrated by checks on his power, he
sought to take actions that his own advisers like Rex
W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, or Kirstjen
Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, told him were
illegal. He pushed to shoot in the legs unarmed
migrants coming over the border, sought to use a “heat
ray” on them and even suggested digging a moat at the
border and stocking it with alligators.
When the liberal U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit based in California blocked one of his
border policies, he pressed Ms. Nielsen to “just
cancel” the court, or eliminate it, even though of
course he had no power to do so. At another point when
he demanded aides simply shut down the southwestern
border altogether, he was told it would not be legal.
He insisted they do it anyway. “If you get in trouble
for it, I’ll pardon you,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s instinct to use violence against unarmed
migrants extended to unarmed Americans, too, if he
perceived them to be trouble. When protesters flooded
into the streets after the killing of George Floyd by a
white police officer in Minneapolis in May of 2020, he
publicly suggested they be shot if they began looting.
A ‘Wannabe Dictator’
Image
Mr. Trump with General Mark Milley, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a meeting with senior
military leaders in 2020.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The
New York Times
Mr. Trump’s penchant for the use of force put him in
conflict with the nation’s uniformed military. He came
to office enamored with the armed forces even though he
never served himself, installing veteran officers in a
variety of civilian roles, including defense secretary,
national security adviser and White House chief of
staff.
“My generals,” Mr. Trump called them proudly, which set
off alarm bells in an officer corps that takes
seriously its tradition of nonpartisan loyalty to the
country and the office of the presidency, not the man.
As far as they were concerned, they were America’s
generals, not Mr. Trump’s generals.
An early sign of the tension came during a meeting when
Mr. Trump was pushing the generals to stage a military
parade down the streets of Washington, the kind of
spectacle not typically seen outside of a moment of
wartime victory. General Paul Selva of the Air Force,
the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, objected,
explaining that it reminded him of his childhood in
Portugal when it was a military dictatorship. “It’s
what dictators do,” General Selva told him. Mr. Trump
was undeterred and brought up the idea dozens of times
again, officers later said.
The rift grew over time and culminated in Mr. Trump’s
final year in office. When some of the protests over
Mr. Floyd’s murder turned violent, the president’s
first instinct was to use the armed forces. He
repeatedly pressed his team to invoke the Insurrection
Act of 1807 so that he could send active-duty military
to quell the protests. He wanted 10,000 troops in the
streets and the 82nd Airborne Division called up.
Mr. Trump demanded that General Milley personally take
charge, but the Joint Chiefs chairman resisted, saying
the National Guard would be sufficient. Mr. Trump
shouted at him in a meeting. “You are all losers!” he
yelled and then repeated the line with an expletive.
Turning to General Milley, he said, “Can’t you just
shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
The president then staged a dramatic walk through
Lafayette Square after protesters were violently
cleared out, flanked by General Milley and Defense
Secretary Mark T. Esper, among others, to St. John’s
Church where he held up a Bible. Both General Milley
and Mr. Esper regretted their roles in what they
considered a political stunt for fear that it would
politicize the military.
General Milley went so far as to write a letter of
resignation that assailed Mr. Trump for betraying the
values of the “greatest generation” that defeated the
Nazis. “That generation, like every generation, has
fought against that, has fought against fascism, has
fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism,”
he wrote. “It’s now obvious to me that you don’t
understand that world order. You don’t understand what
the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many
of the principles that we fought against.”
General Milley decided not to send the letter,
reasoning that he had to stay and “fight from the
inside” to guard against a commander in chief willing
to use the military as a political tool. He expressed
concern to aides that Mr. Trump would find his own
“Reichstag moment” to justify an armed crackdown,
referring to a key episode in Hitler’s rise.
After Mr. Trump lost the election to Mr. Biden later
that year, a pivotal moment arrived when Michael T.
Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and Mr. Trump’s
first national security adviser, recommended the
president declare a form of martial law by ordering the
military to seize voting machines and rerun the
election in states he lost.
That was exactly the kind of scenario that General
Milley had stayed to prevent and Mr. Trump ultimately
did not try. But he never forgave General Milley. In
2023, the former president lashed out at the general
for having once called a Chinese counterpart to
reassure Beijing that the United States was not
planning to attack, even though he did so with
permission of the Trump administration at the time.
“This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by,
the punishment would have been DEATH!” Mr. Trump wrote
on social media.
General Milley pushed back a week later during his
retirement ceremony. “We don’t take an oath to a king,
or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t
take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” he said. “We don’t
take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the
Constitution.”
Getting ‘Pretty Wild’
Image
Mr. Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania earlier this
year.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Embittered by his defeat and vowing “retribution”
against his adversaries, Mr. Trump has increasingly
embraced the language of authoritarianism since leaving
office. He has used phrases often associated with
Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, calling leftists
“vermin” that need to be rooted out and asserting that
undocumented migrants are “poisoning the blood of our
country.”
His call to terminate the Constitution has not been an
aberration. Even when his friend, the Fox News host
Sean Hannity, tried to coax him away from such talk,
Mr. Trump did not follow his hint. Mr. Hannity invited
the former president during an interview to reassure
America that “you would never abuse this power as
retribution against anybody.” Mr. Trump replied,
“Except for Day 1.”
He similarly passed when another Fox host, Laura
Ingraham, tried to get him to clarify comments he made
about how his conservative Christian supporters “don’t
have to vote again” if they put him back in office.
Noting that the left interpreted that to mean he might
try to end future elections, Mr. Trump did not take the
opportunity to dispute it. Instead, he repeated that
Christians should vote on Nov. 5. “After that, you
don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care,
because we’re going to fix it.”
Over the past four years, Mr. Trump has escalated his
threats to use the power of the presidency to punish
his antagonists. He has vowed to prosecute Mr. Biden
and other Democrats if he wins the election and
threatened prison time for election workers who he
deems to have cheated in some way.
He promoted a social media post saying that former
Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming,
should face a military tribunal for investigating the
Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He calls Democrats
“the enemy from within” and suggested that he would
order the National Guard or active-duty military
members to round up American citizens who oppose his
candidacy.
He has signaled that he would go after the news media
as well. After “60 Minutes” edited an interview with
Ms. Harris in a way that Mr. Trump did not like, he
said that “CBS should lose its license.” He said
similar things this year about NBC, ABC and CNN. While
in office, aides have said he pressed them to use
government power to punish corporations affiliated with
CNN and the owner of The Washington Post, the Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos.
The discussion of presidential power has gone so far
that his own lawyers said during court hearings that
Mr. Trump, if elected again, could order the Navy SEAL
Team 6 to assassinate a political opponent without
being exposed to criminal prosecution. That was a
hypothetical posed during arguments over whether a
president should have immunity for official acts, which
the Supreme Court eventually agreed to.
Such far-fetched scenarios are often raised during
legal arguments as an intellectual exercise to poke
holes in the logic of a position, but Mr. Trump did not
feel compelled to disavow it as an absurd notion.
Indeed, he has favored more violence by the government
if he is reinstalled. He has called for the summary
execution of shoplifters and ruminated about unleashing
the police to inflict “one really violent day” on
criminals or even “one rough hour — and I mean real
rough” to bring down the property crime rate.
If re-elected, Mr. Trump would not only be without
advisers like Mr. Kelly and General Milley to curb his
wildest instincts, he would also have a vice president
who in some instances shares his views about expanding
the power of the office.
In a 2021 podcast, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, now Mr.
Trump’s running mate, said that if the former president
won again he should “fire every single midlevel
bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative
state, replace them with our people,” in effect turning
the nonpartisan government work force into a partisan
cadre of loyalists.
Mr. Vance added that Mr. Trump should defy legal
impediments. “Then when the courts stop you,” he said,
“stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did.” To
counter what he called the ruthlessness of the left, he
said, “we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out
there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives
right now are uncomfortable with.”
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for
The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and
sometimes writes analytical pieces that place
presidents and their administrations in a larger
context and historical framework. More about Peter
Baker
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