Is Donald Trump a fascist? His former chief of staff and Kamala Harris believe the warnings are true

Republican presidential candidate's own former chief of staff says he has spoken positively of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler

Donald Trump and John Kelly in 2017. Reuters

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a fascist seeking unconstrained power, his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris has said as she seeks to regain momentum in the November 5 race for the White House.

The assessment came after John Kelly, a retired general and Mr Trump's former White House chief of staff, said his old boss fits “the general definition of a fascist” and said positive things about Adolf Hitler.

If elected for a second term, Mr Trump would be “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist", Ms Harris said at a town hall on CNN late on Wednesday, hours after telling journalists the Republican candidate wants “unchecked power”.

“The question in 13 days will be, what do the American people want?” she said.

Many polls show Mr Trump is level or ahead of Ms Harris, whose campaign has swapped its initial message of “joy” for bleaker warnings about the former president.

Experts define fascism as a mass political movement emphasising extreme nationalism, militarism and the supremacy of the nation over the individual.

“This model of government stands in contrast to liberal democracies that support individual rights, competitive elections and political dissent,” the Council on Foreign Relations says.

One of Mr Kelly's claims, made in interviews with The New York Times, is that Mr Trump said Hitler “did some good things, too”. The former president also reportedly wished he had “German generals.”

“Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Mr Kelly told Mr Trump, who supposedly responded: “Yeah, Hitler’s generals.”

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a Trump supporter, told CNN that if Mr Kelly “had concerns, he could have said it when he was working for him five years ago … he waited until 12 days before the election".

“Eighty years ago, coming out of the Second World War, Harry Truman was saying the same thing about his opponent, so it's not a new thing in America that we have this kind of rhetoric.”

Mercedes Schlapp, a former Trump administration official, said she does not believe Mr Kelly's comments.

David Neiwert, an expert on the American far-right, said: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.”

Mr Neiwert, an award-winning journalist who has written several books over three decades covering the far-right, describes the phenomenon more plainly as “right-wing populism gone metastatic”.

The distinction between left and right-wing populism, he tells The National, is that right-wing populism promotes a worldview that “the ordinary person is being caught between the elites on top and a parasitic underclass beneath", while “left-wing populism doesn't talk about a parasitic underclass".

The tone of Mr Trump's three presidential campaigns has always had authoritarian, nationalist and anti-immigrant underpinnings. He was inaugurated in 2017 after referring to many Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and said he would build a wall between Mexico and the US. He immediately declared a ban on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries.

His rhetoric in 2024 is even more anti-immigrant, with increasingly racist narratives including the spread of debunked conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs.

The Republican has also said he might use the military to crack down on political threats from “the enemy within."

The minds behind the Trump campaign

Mr Trump's pick for Vice President is telling: Ohio Senator JD Vance has explicit ties to the far-right's more anti-democratic intellectuals.

Mr Vance's persona was first shaped by his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which was embraced by the mainstream media as a sort of Rosetta Stone that explained white, working-class grievances.

He was raised in the rust-belt town of Middletown, Ohio, but the Yale law school graduate's political ties are largely defined by billionaires with authoritarian leanings, including tech chief executives Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

Mr Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, was the primary funder of Mr Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and is a close friend of the Republican vice presidential candidate.

Max Chafkin, a Bloomberg reporter and the author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, describes Mr Thiel's ideology as incoherent.

But Chafkin says: “They’re closer to authoritarianism. It’s super-nationalistic, it’s a longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive, or, you know, a dictator, in other words.”

Mr Thiel is “not just very far right. He actually is actively anti-democratic,” said Mr Neiwert. “And it's not just Vance, it's Elon Musk. It's that whole Silicon Valley segment … this is a segment of the billionaire world that is openly hostile to democracy, is clearly doing their best to tear it down.”

The far-right influences on Mr Vance go beyond tech billionaires. He has named Curtis Yarvin, a prominent blogger who has called on Americans to “get over their dictator phobia", as a guide.

He quoted Mr Yarvin in a 2021 interview where he supported Mr Trump, if elected, executing a plan in line with the far-right Project 2025 and “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people".

Mr Yarvin has a long history of promoting inflammatory stances, including writing favourably of slavery. But in his Substack blog, he denies the notion that fascism is on the ballot this year.

“Nothing of the sort is happening or could possibly happen – for better or for worse,” he wrote this week. “Republicans and Democrats increasingly agree that they are voting on fascism – for or against. While I kind of love it in a way, it is the most ridiculous (and ahistorical) thing in the world. It is a complete, total fantasy.”

Mr Yarvin has said that “the process of a legal regime change must involve electing a monarchy".

Mr Vance has also said conservative Catholic Patrick Deneen is a major influence. In his 2023 book Regime Change, he argued for a “peaceful” revolution to replace liberalism with a “post-liberal order” that promotes conservative and religious values over individual rights.

Americans brace for November 6

How this worldview might materialise in a Trump-Vance administration is difficult to predict: US democratic functions are defined by a checks-and-balance system between the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

One thing is clear: Americans are bracing for the threat of political violence this year. Mr Trump has repeatedly vowed that he cannot lose the election unless there is “massive fraud", setting the stage for his supporters' distrust of election results.

A Scripps News/Ipsos poll found that 62 per cent of Americans – including 70 per cent of Democrats and 59 per cent of Republicans – say violence related to the election this year is somewhat or very likely.

And a 2023 survey from PRRI found that nearly a quarter of Americans agreed that “because things have got so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country", up from 15 per cent in 2021.

According to PRRI, this is the first time support for political violence has peaked above 20 per cent. Further stoking these fears for many Americans is the fact that Mr Trump has survived two assassination attempts this year.

The “main guardrail,” says Mr Neiwert, is law enforcement. “I do think that there are a lot of law-enforcement officers who take this stuff seriously and are properly preparing,” he says.

But there are also corners of US law enforcement that are explicitly sympathetic to Mr Trump and his election denialism.

Last month, a sheriff in the Republican-leaning state of Ohio faced criticism after he encouraged his followers on social media to “write down” the addresses of their neighbours with Harris-Walz signs in their yards.

Mr Neiwert ultimately warns: “I don't think Americans can be prepared for what America is going to look like if Trump wins.”

Whether Mr Trump or Ms Harris clinch the White House, Mr Neiwert says he is “very worried” based on the amount of violent threats and weapons procurement he has seen in his 30 years of covering the radical right.

“I tried warning people in the fall of 2020 that these guys were going to get violent in Washington, DC, and even in one of my reports, I described how they were talking about invading capital … I've definitely not been proven wrong,” he adds.