During her CNN town hall Wednesday night in Pennsylvania in a room of undecided voters, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris went as far as to call her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, a “fascist.”
When asked if the vice president agreed with Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, and Trump’s former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, that Trump is a fascist, Harris said emphatically, “I do.”
Later in the 75-minute town hall, Harris said there were Americans who “care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
Trump has used language similar to fascist and authoritarian leaders like Hitler, including referring to immigrants, journalists and political opponents as “vermin” and “enemy of the people,” calling for “retribution” and encouraging political violence.
The vice president also jabbed at Trump for saying, according to a report by The Atlantic, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
Kelly and others have also confirmed Trump’s favorable views of Hitler, including that he “did some good things.”
Hitler, a former dictator who ruled Nazi Germany from 1933 and 1945, was responsible for implementing racist laws that led to the deportation and murders of millions of German Jews based on the racist ideology that they were inferior.
But Jews weren’t the only ones who suffered under Hitler’s fascist rule. According to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, “For Black Germans, the Nazi era was a time of escalating persecution, marginalization, and isolation.”
The museum adds, “The institutionalized racism of the Nazi regime made life for Black people and their families even more difficult and precarious.”
“When we talk about fascism wherever we’ve seen it represented, whether it was in Hitler’s Germany or other authoritarian regimes, fascism has a habit of primarily dissecting its targets by race and economic conditions,” notes political strategist Ameshia Cross.
Cross told theGrio that Hitler had a “flagrant disrespect and dislike of people of Black descent and people of African descent, and he went after them with that same fervor.”
Historically, under fascist or white supremacist rule, those who live on the fringes of society and who are most vulnerable, namely Black people, are typically “first” to be persecuted, argued Cross.
“You need to pick an enemy, and that enemy is typically a person of color,” she told theGrio.
Trump’s past statements, like falsely claiming Haitian immigrants are eating pets, ultimately “elevates fear of a particular race, with a key target on Black and brown people,” said Cross.
Markus Batchelor, national political director at People For the American Way, told theGrio that, with only days left until Election Day on Nov. 5, “it’s on all of us, including the vice president, to speak plainly and urgently about the threat Trump poses to our democracy.”
“It’s not just name-calling,” he said. “Trump has demonstrated with increased frequency his tendency toward fascist and authoritarian behaviors. Those who’ve worked closest to him have confirmed it.”
Batchelor continued, “As Black and brown voters go to the polls where one candidate has begun calling his political opponents ‘vermin’ and ‘enemies from within,’ we can’t afford to be coy about the political and physical threat Donald Trump poses.”