Vice President Kamala Harris said she believes former President Donald Trump is a fascist Wednesday in a town hall with CNN—heightening her criticism after Trump’s former chief of staff said Trump has praised Adolf Hitler and wants a military that is loyal to him above the Constitution.
Harris answered “yes I do” when CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asked her if she believes Trump is a fascist, after Harris opened the town hall by referencing former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s allegations that Trump fits the definition of a fascist in a series of interviews with The New York Times published Tuesday.
Harris also quoted Kelly from her Washington, D.C., residence earlier Wednesday while rebuking Trump over the reported comments, calling them “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous.”
She expanded on her criticism in the town hall, repeating her allegations that Trump is “increasingly unstable” and “unfit to serve,” while referring to various former Trump Administration officials who have since turned on the president, including Kelly, who she said is “putting out a 911 call to the American people” to “understand what could happen if Donald Trump is back in the White House.”
Referencing allegations Kelly made last year and again in The Times interview that Trump referred to dead and wounded veterans as “losers and suckers,” Harris said during the town hall Trump “demeans people who have taken an oath to sacrifice their life for our country.”
She also reminded voters that Trump said in 2022 he believes parts of the Constitution should be terminated over his baseless claims of “massive fraud” in the 2020 election, declaring “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.”
Contra
The Trump campaign blasted Kelly in response to the Times interview, accusing him of having “beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated.”
Tangent
Trump refused to participate in the CNN town hall and rejected Harris’ proposal for a second debate. The town hall comes 13 days before the election as Harris and Trump are virtually tied in polls.
Key Background
Kelly told The New York Times Trump thinks “fascism would work better in terms of running America” and that Trump told him “more than once” that “Hitler did some good things, too.” Kelly said he agreed to the interviews after Trump suggested earlier this month in an interview with Fox News the military should be deployed to handle his political adversaries. Harris has repeatedly seized on Trump’s comments from the Fox interview calling his detractors “the enemy from within.” She warned earlier Wednesday in remarks from her residence that Kelly and others who “once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there and no longer be there to rein him in.”
Chief Critic
Trump lashed out at Harris in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying: “Harris sees that she is losing…so now she is increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind. She is a Threat to Democracy, and not fit to be President of the United States — And her Polling so indicates!”
