Donald Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist” his former chief of staff John Kelly told the New York Times in an expansive interview published Tuesday.
Kelly opted to read a definition of fascism that he found online to support this conclusion. “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said. “So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” Kelly added.
In their time working together Kelly also observed that Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” Trump sought a kind of absolute power, he continued, and “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.”
Kelly didn’t always plan to speak against Trump, but the latter’s repeated “enemy within” comments prompted him to take action. “And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” the former Marine general added.
Kelly was equally concerned about another aspect of who Trump is as a person: his general lack of empathy. The pair were touring Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017 near where Kelly’s own son, who was killed in 2010 while serving in Afghanistan, was buried.
Trump asked Kelly “what was in it” for servicemen and women who died in combat.
“‘And I thought he was asking one of these rhetorical kind of, you know, questions,’ Mr. Kelly said. ‘But I didn’t realize he was serious — he just didn’t see what the point was. As I got to know him, again, this selflessness is something he just didn’t understand. What’s in it for them?’”
Kelly’s interview was published the same day The Atlantic reported Trump said in a private conversation at the White House, “I need the kind of generals Hitler had.”
The outlet also noted Trump’s “desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution” as well as his “denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.”
Retired General Barry McCaffrey and Vietnam veteran told The Atlantic, “The military is a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand the customs or codes. It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”
Days before, The Atlantic published another piece that was more pointed: in “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” Anne Applebaum writes that specific words used by Trump “belong to a particular tradition” — a tradition carried out by the aforementioned fascists and authoritarians. Chinese politician Mao Zedong and Cambodian leader Pol Pot also used similar rhetoric about their political foes and perceived enemies.
“In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same,” Applebaum wrote. “If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them.”
Kamala Harris touched on Trump’s fascist leanings during a town hall hosted by Charlamagne Tha God. After a caller named Bobby said he was worried Trump would use the Alien Enemies Act to “put anyone that doesn’t look white in camps” (the Act was last used to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II), Harris answered, “He is running full-time on a campaign that is about instilling fear, not about hope, not about optimism, not about the future, but about fear. And so this is yet another example.”
Trump “would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she added. “And he’s running his campaign in a way that he does these rallies — where people, by the way, walk out — to try and instill fear around an issue, where he actually could be part of a solution but he chose not to, because he prefers to run on a problem instead of fix a problem, and we’ve got to call it out and see it for what it is.”
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