Harris hits out at ‘fascist’ Trump and defends policies at CNN town hall

With less than two weeks until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris went on offense against former president Donald Trump by warning Americans that her Republican opponent is an authoritarian who doesn’t care about the needs of ordinary people.

Harris spoke to voters in Pennsylvania as part of a CNN town hall that took the place of a presidential debate that Trump refused to attend.

The vice president said the recent interview by Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, retired US Marine Corps general John Kelly in which he said Trump repeatedly complained that US military leaders were not as loyal as the Nazi generals who served under Adolf Hitler was a “911 call to the American people” about a man she described as “unstable -- increasingly unstable -- and unfit to serve.”

Asked whether she agrees with Kelly’s description of Trump as a “fascist,” Harris told moderator Anderson Cooper: “Yes, I do.”

“Understand what could happen if Donald Trump were back in the White House. And this time we must take very seriously [that] those folks who knew him best and who were career people are not going to be there to hold him back,” she said.

The vice president was referring to comments Kelly made in an interview with The New York Times regarding Trump’s fitness for office.

The man who served as Trump’s second chief of staff and as Secretary of Homeland Security before that told the Times that the ex-president “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that,” he added.

Trump’s campaign has dismissed the remarks as fabricated and has suggested that Kelly’s comments were politically motivated, even though the retired officer has taken pains not to criticize his former boss publicly since leaving government service.

But Kelly is not the only ex-Trump administration figure who has leveled similar critiques against the ex-president.

His former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, told CNN on Wednesday that it’s “hard to say” that Trump does not meet the criteria of being a fascist. And retired US Army General Mark Milley, who Trump nominated as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, told author Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.”

Later in the televised program, Harris called Trump’s reported admiration for the genocidal German dictator “a serious, serious issue” and noted that her opponent has also expressed similar admiration for dictators in Russia and North Korea.

“This election in 13 days, is presenting the American people the very significant decision and on the one side, on this issue of who is going to model what it means to use the bully pulpit of the President of the United States in a manner that, in tone, word and deed, is about lifting up our discourse, fighting against hate, as opposed to fanning the flames of hate, which Donald Trump does consistently,” she said.

Continuing, the vice president said Americans also “deserve to have a president who encourages healthy debate, works across the aisle, [is] not afraid of good ideas, wherever they come from, but also maintains certain standards about how we think about the role and the responsibility and certainly not comparing oneself in a clearly admiring way to Hitler.”