A growing number of former administration officials and advisors to Donald Trump are calling the former U.S. president a “fascist,” pointing in particular to recent comments he has made about “the enemy from within.”
When asked during a CNN town hall last week if she thinks Trump is a fascist, U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris replied, “Yes I do.” Later, she brought it up herself, saying Trump would, if elected again, be “a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
Harris was responding to explosive comments made by Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly to the New York Times, who asked him if he believes Trump is a fascist.
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that,” Kelly replied. “So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
In his interview with the New York Times and another with The Atlantic, Kelly said Trump’s comments about “the enemy from within” and the military handling “radical left lunatics” inspired him to speak out.
Trump called Kelly a “lowlife” and a “bad general” on Truth Social in response to the New York Times interview. Trump’s running mate JD Vance and Republican supporters including Sen. Lindsey Graham have also pushed back, with Vance suggesting Kelly was a “disgruntled ex-employee” and Graham claiming Kelly’s comments were made out of “desperation.”
The top Republicans in Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, invoked the two assassination attempts against Trump this year in a joint statement Friday that called Harris “reckless.”
“Labeling a political opponent as a ‘fascist,’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day,” Johnson and McConnell said.
“The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that everyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi,” Trump told a campaign rally in Atlanta on Monday.
“I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi.”
In the week since Kelly’s interview and Harris’s subsequent remarks, there was a noticeable increase in online searches for whether Trump is a fascist. Yet there were far more queries for what the term “fascism” actually is.
Here’s what the term means, what Trump has said, and whether researchers believe calling him a fascist is appropriate or overblown.
What is fascism?
According to Merriam-Webster, Oxford University, the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and several other sources, fascism is a far-right political philosophy defined by extreme nationalism and the supremacy of the nation over the individual. Fascist regimes are typically autocracies headed by a dictatorial leader.
The Council on Foreign Relations notes fascism stands in opposition to democratic liberalism, which champions individual rights.
The historian Robert Paxton, a leading expert on fascism, has written the ideology is a form of ultra-nationalism rooted in an “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood,” that “abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and their respective movements are seen as the key historical examples of fascism. The Spanish and Japanese totalitarian regimes of the early 20th century, which also prioritized ultra-nationalism, have also been studied by academics as further examples of historical fascism.
Mussolini himself led the National Fascist Party that ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 as a totalitarian state.
In Hitler’s Nazi Germany, “supremacy of the nation” was exemplified by his pursuit of Aryan superiority, which led to the state-sponsored mass murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Nazi propaganda, and Hitler himself, referred to Jewish people as “vermin” and “the enemy.”
The Washington Post and Newsweek are among U.S. media outlets that have compared Hitler’s recorded language with Trump’s rhetoric and found “significant parallels” between them.
What Trump has said
The following is a non-exhaustive list of remarks that Trump has made that have been called fascist or echo rhetoric used by past fascist figures:
- “We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at ‘Shifty (Adam) Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within…. I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within.” — Oct. 20, 2024, Fox News interview
- “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics. I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” — Oct. 13, 2024, Fox News interview
- “It’s the enemy from within: all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” — Oct. 11, 2024, Colorado campaign rally
- “They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.” — Dec. 17, 2023, New Hampshire campaign rally
- “I said I want to be a dictator for one day. You know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill.” — Dec. 9, 2023, New York Young Republican Club gala
- “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” — Nov. 11, 2023, New Hampshire campaign rally
- “In 2016, I declared ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” — March 3, 2023, Conservative Political Action Conference
- “Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” — Dec. 3, 2022, Truth Social post
- “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” — Jan. 6, 2021, Washington rally before U.S. Capitol attack
- “(Kim Jong Un is) the head of a country, and I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.” — June 15, 2018, Fox News interview
What others say Trump said
- “He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.'” — Trump chief of staff John Kelly, New York Times interview
- “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly (during the unrest sparked by the 2020 murder of George Floyd). The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them.” — Trump defense secretary Mark Esper, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times
- “(At a 2018 meeting) Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Xi said the U.S. had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.” — Trump national security advisor John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened
What do researchers say?
David Clay Large, a senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies, told The Associated Press “the alarm bells now going off may be somewhat overblown.”
“Our democratic institutions, however beleaguered, remain much stronger than those of the European nations that turned fascist in the ‘20s and ’30s,” Large said.
Still, he added, there would be “a real danger to these institutions” in a second Trump presidential term.
Andres Kasekamp, a University of Toronto history professor who teaches courses on both historical fascism and the rise of contemporary right-wing populism, said Trump’s increasing use of extreme rhetoric during the 2024 campaign makes the fascism label more appropriate than it may have been previously.
Specifically, he points not just to Trump’s references to “the enemy from within” but also his portrayal of America as a “broken” nation beset by illegal immigrants, whom Trump blames for everything from crime to high housing prices.
“With every passing day, with his mental decline and the crazier things he says … it appears that you can kind of no longer sort of think that fascism isn’t a label that could be applied to contemporary America,” he said in an interview.
Julia Adeney Thomas, a history professor and expert on fascism at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, told Global News in an email she has “little doubt” Trump fits the definition of a fascist, primarily for his remarks on political violence and violence carried out by his supporters — most notably in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
She also cited suggestions by Trump’s former aides that he values personal loyalty above all other considerations for government service.
Kelly and retired general Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, have both said the former president admired “Hitler’s generals” for their perceived loyalty and would refer to U.S. military leaders as “my generals.” They said they would repeatedly explain to Trump that military officers swear their oaths to the constitution, not the commander-in-chief, and that the German generals plotted to assassinate Hitler multiple times.
Trump has denied making any positive comments about Hitler or Nazi military leaders.
In journalist Bob Woodward’s new book War, Milley called Trump a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Project 2025, the document drawn up by conservative operatives outlining priorities for a second Trump administration, calls for large swaths of civil service employees to be politically appointed and vetted for appropriate fealty to Trump, which has set off alarm bells. Trump has denounced and distanced himself from the document.
Both Thomas and Kasekamp say the political situations are different now than when fascist figures of the past rose to power. Hitler and his Nazi movement, for example, took advantage of an actual economic collapse in Germany, whereas the current American cost-of-living crisis is occurring within a strong economy in the macro sense.
Trump also rose within and then gained power over an established political party, Kasekamp said, while Hitler and Mussolini founded their own movements. Yet he added “the enablers” in both politics and business have helped in the rise of Trump and those historical figures.
— with a file from The Associated Press