Vice President Kamala Harris stepped up her attacks on former President Donald Trump over reports by former aides that he has authoritarian tendencies, agreeing during a CNN town-hall-style event Wednesday that he is a fascist.
“Yes, I do,” the Democratic presidential nominee said when moderator Anderson Cooper asked if she agreed with a recent characterisation by his former White House chief of staff John Kelly that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.
Harris’ concurrence with Kelly was an incremental sharpening of criticism she made earlier in the day in remarks to reporters in Washington.
“We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power,” she said, while also taking aim at something else Kelly said: that Trump expressed admiration for Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler and his generals.
Kelly is not the only former Trump aide to be quoted recently as thinking Trump wants to consolidate government power within the Oval Office if he is reelected.
Retired Army General Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump administration, called Trump “fascist to the core,” according to a new book by Watergate journalist Bob Woodward.
“I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realise he’s a total fascist,” Milley is quoted as saying in the book.
In her CNN appearance, Harris said people who worked in the White House and knew Trump best should be listened to when they call him “unfit and dangerous.”
Kelly’s comments, in particular, amounted to “a 911 call to the American people,” she said.
“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 of the United States,” she said, a reference to a Trump social media post in which he claimed provisions of the Constitution could be waived in the event of election fraud. No court or election review of the 2020 balloting he’d contested found widespread fraud.
Though Harris’ comments marked an escalation of her rhetoric, Trump for his part has shown no shyness about calling his political opponents enemies of democracy, communists, Marxists and fascists.
As recently as Oct. 16, Trump told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner that Democrats were “the enemy from within.”
“They’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick,” he said.
Kamala Harris also tried during the town hall to highlight what she said was a big difference between her and Trump: that she, unlike him, wanted to take a pragmatic approach to policy.
“I think that the American people deserve to have a president who is grounded in what is common sense, what is practical and what is in the best interest of the people, not themselves,” she said.
But she may have undermined her message of bipartisanship somewhat by reiterating her position that the filibuster, the favoured procedural weapon of the minority party in the Senate to kill legislation, may need to be scrapped if the legal precedent of the overturned Roe v. Wade decision, giving women a national right to abortion, is to be revived.
Cooper asked how she would realistically try to reinstate Roe by codifying it into law, which would require House passage and a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate to overcome a filibuster.
“I think we need to take a look at the filibuster, to be honest with you,” she said.
In September, Harris told a Wisconsin Public Radio station she favoured at least a carve-out for abortion from the filibuster.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom,” she said.
Cooper also pressed Harris on whether she still believed a wall along the border with Mexico, one of Trump’s signature initiatives, was “stupid,” as Cooper said she had called it, even though a compromise border bill Harris said she supported would have included money for wall construction.
“You don’t think it’s stupid anymore?” Cooper asked.
“I think what he did and how he did it did not make much sense because he actually didn’t do much of anything,” Harris replied.
“But you do want to build some wall?” Cooper said.
“I want to strengthen our border,” Harris replied.