Vice President Kamala Harris is done mincing words about Donald Trump. A day after calling the former president and GOP presidential nominee “unstable and unhinged,” Harris told a popular radio host that Trump’s vision for the county’s future is, in fact, “fascism.”
The remarks represent an escalation for Harris, who has criticized Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies—but never in such explicit terms. They came during a Tuesday exchange with the radio host Charlamagne Tha God, who pressed Harris to explain the difference between her vision for the country and her opponent’s.
“The other is about fascism,” Charlamagne said, referring to that of Trump’s. “Why can’t we just say it?”
“Yes, we can say that,” Harris confirmed, before going on to answer an unrelated question about her relationship with the Black church. She returned to the theme later in the interview, however, telling listeners that Trump’s plans would “destroy our democracy” and rebuking the former president for seeking the “flattery and favor” of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“The man is really quite weak. He’s weak,” Harris said. “It’s a sign of weakness that you want to please dictators.”
Harris’s comments came amidst a string of new revelations about Trump’s relationship with foreign autocrats—and his own intensifying threats against his political opponents. In multiple interviews and appearances over the past week, Trump has described his critics as dangerous, “evil” enemies that threaten democracy, and suggested that the military or the National Guard might be needed to “handle” them after the election. On Tuesday, he repeatedly dodged requests to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost the election, and criticized the journalist who asked him about it.
In that same interview, Trump also declined to say whether he’d spoken to Putin privately since leaving the White House, though he added that it would have been “smart” if he had. According to a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward, Trump spoke with Putin as many as seven times since his exit and, while in office, secretly sent him Covid-19 tests for personal use. On October 12, it was also revealed that Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, called his former boss “a fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country,” again according to Woodward.
Trump, for his part, has repeatedly called Harris and the Democrats fascists—a criticism that’s landed well with his base, but doesn’t technically work. (Fascism, by definition, is an populist, ultranationalist political philosophy, helmed by a dictator—which Trump freely admitted he’ll be only on “day 1.”)
On Wednesday evening, Trump’s official campaign tweeted that Harris’s remarks were “disgusting” and suggested her form of rhetoric “led to two assassination attempts against President Trump.”
It would not appear that Trump himself shares that disdain for divisive rhetoric, however. Hours later, in a Fox town hall, the former president called Democrats “Marxists and communists and fascists” and suggested, vaguely, that under “a smart president, they can all be handled.”
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