Calling a fascist a fascist is how you treat a fascist

For too long we've danced around it in describing Trump. Harris said it out loud last night, following Trump's own former officials and generals.

Last night Vice President Harris told Anderson Cooper in a CNN town hall that Donald Trump is a fascist, agreeing with Trump’s former chief of staff, retired general John Kelly, who described Trump as fascist in an interview with The New York Times and said Trump praised Adolf Hitler and the supposed “loyalty” of his generals. This followed former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, telling The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.”

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Trump’s former defense secretary, retired general Jim Mattis, also told Bob Woodward Trump is “unfit” and “a threat to democracy.” There’s now a list of Trump’s former military aides who are sending up a warning flare.

From the town hall:

“We must take very seriously those folks who knew him best,” she continued, referring to the numerous former Trump advisers who have broken with him and warned the public that he should not be trusted with power again. 

“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” host Anderson Cooper asked Harris. 

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she replied.

Later, she used the word herself to refer to Trump for the first time in public, saying voters care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

You know it was both smart and right for Harris to do this because the right-wing columnist Brett Stephens at the New York Times thinks it’s a bad idea:

This was bound to be the headline of the evening, which otherwise featured a very familiar Harris repeating lines we’ve heard before. And while the F-word no doubt provided moral comfort for her supporters, it struck me as politically ill judged, for three reasons.

Then he explained why he thinks it’s bad because, like “sexist” and “racist,” the term has supposedly lost its “moral force.” He also said it’s “name-calling.” And third, “while Trump can rightly be described as demagogic, mean-spirited, authoritarian-minded—even a plain old jerk—most people think of fascist regimes as places where secret police terrorize ordinary citizens, free media doesn’t exist, and protest is forbidden.”

Where to begin?

First off, yes, it’s a headline of the evening, and we want it to be a headline of the evening. It stretches the alarm by the generals into further news cycles, where it needs to stay until the end of the election. And no, it hasn’t lost its “moral force,” not when generals who worked with Trump are saying it.

And yes, we want people to think of regimes where police and military “terrorize ordinary citizens,” because that is what Trump plans to do.

He says it over and over again. He’s going to round up millions of people and put them in massive camps. He’s going to use the military against the “enemy from within,” which he described as the “left” and has included Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff among those who are the “enemy from within.” He threatens the media, saying he wants TV stations shut down and have news organizations censored by using new laws, reinterpreting the First Amendment. He’s planning to go after his perceived enemies, including political leaders and judges.

Trump just today said that the first day he’s in office—remember, “dictator on day one”—he will fire special prosecutor Jack Smith. His campaign in recent days has floated making Judge Aileen Cannon—the right-wing Florida federal judge he appointed and who dismissed his espionage case over his stealing top secret documents—his attorney general.

Do we really think Trump won’t be inclined to order Cannon to go after Smith, the Biden family, Pelosi, Schiff, Mitt Romney and many others he’s vowed retribution and revenge against?

So Harris, for the remainder of this campaign, does indeed need to warn voters that John Kelly, as she said last night, “is putting out a 911 call to the American people,” and needs to say she agrees with Kelly by using the same words to describe Trump.

For years many of us have called Trump a fascist, drawing upon the words of experts on fascism who have pointed to his impulses, his actions, and his rhetoric. Democratic leaders have danced around it, not calling Trump what he is, fearful the word might give Republicans the ability to claim Democrats were engaged in over-the-top fear-mongering, especially if Adolf Hitler’s name is raised, which is always highly-charged.

But now that Trump’s own former chief of staff, a retired general—and John Kelly is not by any stretch a liberal, a man who, as Homeland Security Secretary, did Trump’s dirty work on separating families at the border—is coming forward and coming clean, the GOP is completely thrown.

Democrats and Vice President Harris have to take every opportunity to use that. While Trump has denied he praised Hitler, as Kelly told The New York Times, Republicans are loathe to say he’s lying, spinning themselves into pretzels on the talk shows. When you’ve got three former generals who worked closely with him saying Trump is a threat to democracy, with two calling him a fascist, it’s too much for the GOP to push back on.

And it’s the last thing they want to be talking about in the closing of the campaign. They want the closing focused on the economy and immigration. But here it is focused on Hitler and fascism.

That’s only going to get more intense: Next week Trump is holding a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York that many have compared to the 1939 Nazi rally that took place in the same location and brought out tens of thousands of protestors standing up against fascism.

That’s why Harris has to keep this in the news cycle by saying the word fascist herself, using the generals to back it up. As we enter the final days of the campaign, voters in battleground states need to be reminded of just how dangerous it would be to have Trump as president again, to make sure they get out and vote if they were thinking of sitting this out.

Calling Trump out as the fascist he is, based on the words of those military leaders who worked with him, is a way to make that happen.