Fox News host Harris Faulkner attempted to give Donald Trump the opportunity to “climb down from his fascist rhetoric” during an open town hall in Georgia Tuesday night, said Chris Hayes, but “Trump wouldn’t take it. He never takes it because he actually believes and wants to do what he says he wants to do.”
More specifically, Trump reiterated his claim that American should be concerned about “the enemy from within.” He added that “they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and Communists and Fascists and they’re sick.” Trump made it clear that the enemy in question is any political opponent he faces.
This includes Kamala Harris. As Harris found out during her own sit down with Fox News’ Brett Baier Wednesday, the network is prepared to go to great lengths to clean up Trump’s rhetoric when it is deemed necessary. After Baier played a clip from Trump’s town hall that had been edited to remove the “enemy within” comment, Harris called him out.
“Brett, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the enemy within, that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed,” she said.
“He has repeated it many times,” Harris added. “And you and I both know that. He has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it.”
Trump’s increasingly fascist rhetoric has been called out several times throughout the election cycle. On Friday Hayes noted that Trump has ramped up insinuations that the election might be “stolen” — similar to those that preempted the 2021 Insurrection in Washington, D.C. — and his running mate JD Vance has been too happy to help.
“These final weeks of the campaign, Trump and his allies are laying all the groundwork, getting ready to reject the free and fair result of this election if he does not win. That’s plain as day. We all know it right?” Hayes said. “Today, JD Vance said he would help his running mate in another coup attempt, after refusing to acknowledge that Trump actually lost in 2020 over and over again.”
Hayes then ran a clip that showed Vance repeatedly refused to admit that Trump lost the presidential election in 2020. “It’s not a question if it’s going to happen, like, if Donald Trump JD Vance could go out and be like, ‘Oh, we conceded defeat. We called Kamala Harris. No, again Trump and his running mate have told us over and over, again they will not accept defeat,” Hayes added.
In January MSNBC’s Ali Velshi insisted Trump’s rhetoric had become “blatantly fascist.” His guest Atlantic writer Tom Nichols agreed, and added, “It’s now come full circle that the anti-establishment candidate has dragged his voters into the sewers with him and they’ve decided that they have, after years of doubling down, that they simply have to accept it and revel in it and claim that this is what they want.”
You can watch the clip from Chris Hayes in the video above.
