Harris and Democrats Lose Their Reluctance to Call Trump a Fascist

Since Gen. Mark Milley was quoted as saying Donald Trump is “fascist to the core,” a term avoided by top members of the Democratic Party is suddenly everywhere.

The word “fascist” has hovered around former President Donald J. Trump from the moment he rode down his golden escalator in 2015 to warn of Mexican rapists and drug dealers in the memorable opening of his bid for president. But for most top Democrats, it was a provocative term loaded with dread, historical import and potential incitement — best left unsaid.

Until Vice President Kamala Harris this week made clear — again and again — that it would be just fine with her to use the word.

On Tuesday, as the radio host Charlamagne Tha God interviewed Ms. Harris, he interjected as the vice president contrasted her vision with her rival’s. “The other is about fascism,” he said of Mr. Trump’s vision. “Why can’t we just say it?”

Ms. Harris’s response: “Yes, we can say that.”

On Wednesday, speaking in Washington Crossing, Pa., Ms. Harris quoted Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Trump, describing his former boss as “fascist to the core,” as detailed in a new book from the journalist Bob Woodward.

“America,” she said, “must heed this warning.”

The quotation of Mr. Milley may have opened the floodgates for Democrats, granting new permission with the authority of his uniform and his unique closeness to the inner workings of Mr. Trump’s administration. But an element of political risk remains, even as Mr. Trump freely uses the word himself against Ms. Harris.

For years now, Democrats have avoided calling Mr. Trump a fascist in part out of fear of alienating his followers, said Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian of Central Europe and the Holocaust. For one thing, Democrats did not want a repeat of Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables.”

Even President Biden, who has made Mr. Trump’s threat to democracy central to his case against the former president for years, only inched up to the term when in 2022 he spoke of “the entire philosophy” of Mr. Trump’s movement: “I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

But as Mr. Trump steers his rhetoric toward nativism, racial resentment and overt threats against his political enemies, reticence has fallen away.

“You have people like General Milley, who are telling voters that Donald Trump will usher in an era of fascist America,” said Paul D. Eaton, a retired major general and leader of the liberal veterans group VoteVets. “In so many countries throughout history, we have seen fascism take hold only because the voters enabled it to take hold.”

The quote from Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Trump, may have opened the floodgates for Democrats, granting new permission with his unique closeness to the inner workings of Mr. Trump’s administration.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman and staunch opponent of Mr. Trump, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press”that she had great respect for General Milley, and that “I see no reason to disagree with that assessment.”

Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump’s opponent in 2016, chimed in on Monday in a social media post: “Trump’s rhetoric has become blatantly fascist.”

All of that has come after Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, singled out the term “fascist” as an incitement to violence that was beyond the pale.

“Vance is a very smart guy,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University whose recent book, “Strongmen,” looked at autocrats and fascists from Benito Mussolini to Mr. Trump. “He knows the power of the word.”

Historians, political scientists and linguists have wrestled with the term ever since Mussolini used it to describe his form of authoritarianism, in paradoxical terms, as a “revolution of reaction.” Robert O. Paxton, a political scientist and historian at Columbia specializing in Vichy France, defined fascism as political behavior “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood,” with “cults” of nationalist purity. “In uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,” he said, fascism “abandons democratic liberties.”

But its inexorable tie to the wholesale destruction of Europe during World War II, and to the murder of six million Jews, has made the casual connection of fascism to contemporary politics all but forbidden to serious politicians — until now.

“The most important thing one can say about Trump and fascism is that Trump is a fascist,” Mr. Snyder, the Yale professor, said.

The definitions of fascism, however, have never been completely fixed as each new generation’s authoritarians vary their forms and methods of control.

Peter Hayes, a historian at Northwestern University who has studied the rise of Nazism extensively, pointed to commonalities in regimes and movements typically described as “fascist” — a militarization of politics, through violent militias, misogyny, hyper-masculinity, intense nationalism, calls for economic self-sufficiency, and a scapegoating of groups separate from an aggrieved core of followers.

In the late 1960s, the term re-emerged as an all-purpose epithet, hurled by the left at anything or anyone deemed dull or establishment.

“We’ve always been too ready to use it, like the boy who cried wolf,” Mr. Hayes said.

But Mr. Trump’s calls for mass deportations and internment camps, his promise to use force against a pernicious “enemy from within,” his leveraging of a cult of personality, his refusal to distance himself from groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, and his persistent evocation and even glorification of violence have given Mr. Hayes real misgivings.

“I don’t think we’re hyperventilating here,” he said. “This is a guy very much telling us what he wants to do.”

As Mr. Trump steers his rhetoric toward nativism, racial resentment and overt threats against his political enemies, reticence from Democrats to describe him as fascist has fallen away.Credit...Anna Watts for The New York Times

Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who served Mr. Trump at the Department of Homeland Security, said Tuesday night at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics that Mr. Trump would almost surely pursue mass deportations if he wins in November, since they were central to his campaign. While recent surveys suggest the proposal may be popular now — 57 percent of likely voters said they would support deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally back to their home countries, according to the latest national New York Times/Siena College poll — Mr. Cuccinelli posited that the program would quickly lose support as Americans saw the faces and families of those deported, and the turmoil the effort would create.

But, he added, because Mr. Trump would not be standing for another election, he would not be swayed by public opinion.

Still, Mr. Trump has shown sensitivity to any association with fascism. In 2022, he sued CNN for $475 million, saying the network’s allusions to the “Big Lie” — his assertion, still repeated daily, that he won the 2020 election — amounted to a “highly defamatory and persistent association of the Plaintiff to Hitler.” Cited in the suit: assertions by the anchor Jake Tapper; a piece by a former political columnist, Chris Cillizza; and an opinion article by Ms. Ben-Ghiat. (The suit was dismissed last year.)

The conservative Washington Examiner noted that Democrats had been calling Republicans “fascist” since Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. Richard Nixon’s election marked a rising “fascist tide.” Mild-mannered Gerald Ford, of all people, was harassed as a “fascist pig.” After Democratic officials at their 2012 convention compared Republican rhetoric to Nazi propaganda, Norm Coleman, a former Minnesota senator and ally of the Republican nominee Mitt Romney, demanded that then-President Barack Obama stop his party from “trivializing Nazism.”

“Fascism is anything Democrats don’t like,” the Washington Examiner wrote in August.

Tom Eddy, the chairman of the Republican Party in Erie County, Pa., said he was recently called a fascist by a mask-wearing activist on the streets of Erie, where he was with an elderly friend.

“I said, ‘Do you even know what it means?’” Mr. Eddy recalled. “He said: ‘Don’t need to know. I know what you are.’ And he was threatening my 70-year-old friend, you know? Well, that didn’t last long.” He added, “I have a temper.”

That question — “Do you even know what it means?” — is key in the debate. Laura Thornton, whose McCain Institute was founded to honor the Republican senator John McCain, argued that Republicans are as apt to use the term as Democrats, especially Mr. Trump.

“Every time the radical left, Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I considered it a great badge of honor,” Mr. Trump said in February, and not for the last time.

In a statement, his campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, contended that Ms. Harris was “insulting the intelligence of more than half the country by insinuating they would support a fascist candidate.”

Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s communications director, went further. “There have been two heinous assassination attempts on President Trump’s life, and their violent rhetoric is directly to blame,” he said in a statement.

Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris “fascist” on numerous occasions.

Republicans have used fascism as a rubric for the limiting of certain kinds of speech on social media, the imposition of mask and vaccine mandates, and the legal cases against Mr. Trump.

Such efforts may be considered government overreach, Ms. Thornton said, but they are not fascism.

Ms. Ben-Ghiat drew clear distinctions between Mr. Trump’s movement and classical fascism, which was almost always expansionist in foreign-policy ambition, made use of organized paramilitary forces and implemented one-party states, often after provocations like the burning of the Reichstag in 1933.

But Mr. Snyder ticked off his own touchstones of fascism, all of which he says are present in Mr. Trump’s movement: a government framed around the choosing of its enemies more than the helping of its citizens; the honoring not of an office but of a “capital-L leader,” and the building of a cult around him; and the creation of a Big Lie.

Mr. Trump has used dehumanizing terms for his opponents, real or imagined, like “vermin.” He also has a love of aesthetics and spectacle that hark back to the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, Ms. Ben-Ghiat said.

He certainly has a cult of personality behind him, Ms. Thornton said, but that developed largely on its own, she argued, reflecting the demand for a strongman within elements of the population more than any effort by Mr. Trump to inculcate it.

“If you are tattooing the face of a politician on your body, that is not a normal relationship with a political leader,” she said.

Still, there is a reason the term “fascist” is in such wide circulation as Mr. Trump amps up a campaign increasingly built around nativism, racial resentment, fear and threats, Ms. Ben-Ghiat said.

“It’s a measure of the urgency and sense of emergency that Hillary Clinton and Mark Milley are using this word,” she said. “It packs a punch.”

Jonathan Weisman in the New York Times. Weisman is a politics writer, covering campaigns with an emphasis on economic and labor policy. He is based in Chicago.