WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that former President Donald Trump’s reported comments praising Nazi generals offered “a window into who Donald Trump really is,” calling it “deeply troubling” that her Republican rival had apparently invoked Adolf Hitler in conversations with one of his former chiefs of staff, John Kelly.
Harris and her campaign have pounced on Kelly’s comments, recounted in recent news stories and in on-the-record interviews, in the hopes that she will benefit with undecided voters and a slice of conservative-leaning ones by refreshing their memories of a Trump presidency 13 days before Election Day.
In her brief remarks, delivered at the vice president’s residency in Washington, Harris warned that Trump had grown “increasingly unhinged and unstable” and said that he would require that the U.S. military “be loyal to him personally,” even if Trump did not obey the law during the course of a second term.
“It is clear, from John Kelly’s words, that Trump is someone who, I quote, ‘certainly falls into the general definition of ‘fascist,’” Harris said.
Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s longest-running chief of staff, is one of the highest-ranking former Trump administration officials to publicly denounce the former president’s character and question his ability to serve.
In several interviews with The New York Times, which published an article about them Tuesday, Kelly said Trump met the definition of a “fascist” based on what he had seen working closely with him.
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” Kelly said, adding that “those are the kinds of things” that Trump “thinks would work better in terms of running America.”
The former chief of staff also said that Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.”
Kelly recounted that Trump had told him that “Hitler did some good things,” and also confirmed a 2020 report in The Atlantic that Trump had referred to service members killed on the battlefield as “losers” and “suckers.” The Atlantic reported Tuesday that Trump had told Kelly: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
Kelly stressed that he was not endorsing either candidate in the presidential race, but said he was deeply troubled by Trump’s recent comments about using the military against domestic opponents.
On Wednesday, Trump responded angrily, writing on Truth Social that Kelly was “dumb” and saying he had made up negative stories “out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred.”
Trump’s campaign has also tried to discredit Kelly. Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, assailed Kelly in a statement, calling Kelly’s accounts of his time in the White House “debunked stories” and saying Kelly had “beclowned” himself.
Harris and her advisers have been working to draw attention to Trump’s comments and character in recent days, and have even played clips of his remarks at her recent rallies.
The Harris campaign is also trying to emphasize its support from Republican former military and national security leaders repelled by Trump’s conduct. On Wednesday, it hosted a call for reporters featuring Kevin Carroll, a senior counselor to Kelly when he served as Trump’s secretary of homeland security, who said that his former boss’s comments about Trump were “damning.”
“The only reason Trump was stopped the last time was because people like Gen. Kelly stood in the breach and acted as a check to Trump’s worst impulses,” Carroll said. “A second time around, those guardrails won’t exist.”
Steve Anderson, a retired Army brigadier general who also spoke on the call, said Trump “constantly seemed to confuse loyalty to the Constitution to loyalty to him.”
But he said he wished Kelly had spoken out about Trump “earlier.”
“I am disappointed that he hasn’t embraced Kamala Harris,” Anderson said.
Kelly is part of a long line of former Trump administration officials who have condemned him, including his former vice president and the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Other former officials still support Trump, including a White House trade adviser; his former budget director; John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence; and Hope Hicks, a former top adviser.
And in the conservative news media, Trump drew some words of support. On Wednesday, Brian Kilmeade, a host of “Fox &Friends,” questioned whether Trump, in fact, had known that Hitler’s generals were Nazis.
“Play this out: If your general, who’s your chief of staff and your secretary of defense, is not doing what you say on an everyday basis, I could see him going, ‘I’d love generals that listened, that would be great,’” Kilmeade said, basing his argument on Trump’s past as the leader of a family-run business whose employees did as they were told.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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