Vice President Kamala Harris is finished mincing phrases about Donald Trump. A day after calling the previous president and GOP presidential nominee “unstable and unhinged,” Harris advised a well-liked radio host that Trump’s imaginative and prescient for the county’s future is, the truth is, “fascism.”
The remarks signify an escalation for Harris, who has criticized Trump’s more and more authoritarian tendencies—however by no means in such express phrases. They got here throughout a Tuesday exchange with the radio host Charlamagne Tha God, who pressed Harris to elucidate the distinction between her imaginative and prescient for the nation and her opponent’s.
“The opposite is about fascism,” Charlamagne mentioned, referring to that of Trump’s. “Why can’t we simply say it?”
“Sure, we will say that,” Harris confirmed, earlier than happening to reply an unrelated query about her relationship with the Black church. She returned to the theme later within the interview, nonetheless, telling listeners that Trump’s plans would “destroy our democracy” and rebuking the previous president for looking for the “flattery and favor” of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“The person is de facto fairly weak. He’s weak,” Harris mentioned. “It’s an indication of weak point that you just wish to please dictators.”
Harris’s feedback got here amidst a string of recent revelations about Trump’s relationship with international autocrats—and his personal intensifying threats in opposition to his political opponents. In multiple interviews and appearances over the past week, Trump has described his critics as harmful, “evil” enemies that threaten democracy, and prompt that the army or the Nationwide Guard is perhaps wanted to “deal with” them after the election. On Tuesday, he repeatedly dodged requests to decide to a peaceable switch of energy if he misplaced the election, and criticized the journalist who requested him about it.
In that very same interview, Trump additionally declined to say whether or not he’d spoken to Putin privately since leaving the White Home, although he added that it will have been “good” if he had. In line with a brand new e book by the journalist Bob Woodward, Trump spoke with Putin as many as seven occasions since his exit and, whereas in workplace, secretly despatched him Covid-19 assessments for private use. On October 12, it was additionally revealed that Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Employees below Trump, called his former boss “a fascist to the core” and “essentially the most harmful particular person to this nation,” once more based on Woodward.
Trump, for his half, has repeatedly known as Harris and the Democrats fascists—a criticism that’s landed properly together with his base, however doesn’t technically work. (Fascism, by definition, is an populist, ultranationalist political philosophy, helmed by a dictator—which Trump freely admitted he’ll be solely on “day 1.”)
On Wednesday night, Trump’s official marketing campaign tweeted that Harris’s remarks were “disgusting” and prompt her type of rhetoric “led to 2 assassination makes an attempt in opposition to President Trump.”
It will not seem that Trump himself shares that disdain for divisive rhetoric, nonetheless. Hours later, in a Fox town hall, the previous president known as Democrats “Marxists and communists and fascists” and prompt, vaguely, that below “a wise president, they’ll all be dealt with.”
