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WASHINGTON >> When former President Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff said the other day that his old boss “falls into the general definition of fascist,” Trump let loose with the insults, assailing his onetime right-hand as a “total degenerate,” a “LOWLIFE” and a “bad General.”

What Trump did not do, at least at first, was actually deny that he is or aspired to be a fascist.

Any other politician might consider that a damning denunciation worth rebutting. Only when asked days later did he directly dismiss the idea. But in the nine years that he has been running for or serving as president, Trump has regularly evoked the language, history and motifs of fascism without hesitation or evident concern about how it would make him look.

Although presidents have pushed the boundaries of power, and in some cases abused it outright, no American commander-in-chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad. Although plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their opponents, none has been publicly accused of fascism by his own handpicked top adviser who spent day after day with him in the Oval Office.

Trump does not use the word to describe himself — in fact, he uses it to describe his adversaries — but he does not shrink from the impression it leaves. He goes out of his way to portray himself as an American strongman, vowing if reelected to use the military to crack down on dissent, to use the Justice Department to prosecute and imprison his foes, to shut down news media outlets that displease him, to claim authority that his predecessors did not have and to round up millions of people living in the country illegally and put them in camps or deport them en masse.

He has already sought to overturn a free and fair election that even his own advisers told him he had lost, all in a bid to hold on to power despite the will of the voters, something no other sitting president ever tried to do. When that did not work, he spread demonstrable lies about the 2020 vote so pervasively that he convinced most of his supporters that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate, according to polls, eroding faith in the democratic system that is key to its enduring viability. He then called for the “termination” of the Constitution so that Biden could be instantly removed from power and himself reinstalled without a new election.

Trump, of course, failed to reverse the election and had no means while out of office to terminate the Constitution. As a result, many people these days discount warnings such as Kelly’s. Trump, in their view, talks a good game, but it is mostly bluster and bombast, essentially provocation to rile his opponents and “own the libs,” as his allies put it.

He was not really a fascist in his first term, his defenders maintain, and therefore should not be expected to be one in a second. All the talk of fascism, they argue, is just hysterical, hyperbolic or opportunistic defamation by the political left, which routinely seeks to tag any conservative with that label to discredit them and their ideas.

If anything, Trump and his allies try to turn the argument around on the Democrats, arguing that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris pose the real threat to democracy because a special counsel appointed by their administration indicted the former president, which they liken to victor’s justice more commonly seen in countries with less developed systems. Trump calls Harris both a “fascist” and a “communist” without seeming to realize they were historical and ideological enemies of one another.

There is no known evidence, however, that Biden, Harris or their aides played a personal role in any of the prosecutions against Trump.

And polls show that more Americans consider Trump a threat to the constitutional order than the president or vice president. Only 28% of Americans described Trump as committed to democracy in an AP-NORC survey in August. By contrast, 49% of registered voters called Trump a fascist in an ABC News/Ipsos poll released o Friday, compared with 22% who said that of Harris.

That may explain why Harris has seized on Kelly’s comments on fascism in recent days in hopes of motivating her existing supporters to turn out while also persuading undecided voters to back her. Trump pushed back against the fascist label on Fox News on Friday. “Everyone knows that’s not true,” he said. “They call me everything until, you know, something sticks.”

Kelly is not the only person who worked for Trump who worries about his autocratic instincts. Gen. Mark Milley, a retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was appointed by Trump, was quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” calling Trump “fascist to the core.” In recent days, 13 other former Trump aides released a letter backing Kelly’s assessment and warning of the former president’s “desire for absolute, unchecked power.”

Others who have broken with Trump see it differently. John Bolton, his former national security adviser, said that fascism is a “comprehensive ideology” and “Trump isn’t capable of philosophical thought.” But he is dangerous, nonetheless, Bolton said. “A second Trump term will increase the damage he did in his first term, some of it perhaps irreparable,” he said, “but not because he’s thought about it systematically.”

Either way, advisers such as Kelly, Bolton and Milley restrained Trump in his first term, talking him out of actions they considered unwise or illegal. None of them will be around in a second term, as Trump has learned to avoid more establishment figures who will resist his more extreme demands. Instead, he has surrounded himself of late with more radical advisers who encourage Trump’s most anti-democratic instincts.

Evoking Hitler

Whether intentionally or not, Trump has fueled concerns about fascism since the day he first descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid in 2015. As he kicked off his campaign that day, he demonized Mexican migrants as rapists, and within months, he vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country.

He fashioned a foreign policy around the themes of isolationism and nationalism. When told by New York Times reporters that it sounded as if he were talking about an “America First” approach, he happily appropriated the term. The fact that it was a term discredited by history because of its association before World War II with isolationists, including some Nazi sympathizers, did not matter to him.

Nor did he mind citing fascists such as Benito Mussolini. When Trump retweeted a quote that “it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” NBC’s Chuck Todd told him that it was from Mussolini. “I know who said it,” Trump replied. “But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?” He also came to use language familiar to victims of Josef Stalin when he declared journalists who angered him to be “enemies of the people,” a phrase used to send Russians to the gulag.

Trump has long expressed interest in the most notorious dictator of the past century, Adolf Hitler, whose Nazis also used that phrase. In a 1990 interview, Trump said he had a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” although his first wife, Ivana Trump, and the friend who gave him the book said it was actually “My New Order,” a collection of Hitler speeches.

Trump’s onetime chief strategist, Steve Bannon, thought there was a comparison. When he saw Trump descend the Trump Tower escalator with strongman imagery on that day in 2015, Bannon later told a Times reporter that he thought, “That’s Hitler!” He meant it as a compliment.

While he was president, Trump told staff members that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” At another point, he complained to Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals,” meaning those who reported to Hitler. In interviews with the Times and The Atlantic in recent days, Kelly confirmed those anecdotes, first reported in several books over the past few years. Trump denied last week that he ever said them, and last year, he denied ever reading “Mein Kampf.”

Trump has associated with people who praise Hitler. In 2022, he hosted dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who is a Holocaust denier, and rap star Kanye West. West, now going by the name Ye, said shortly after the dinner that “I like Hitler” and that “Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” Twice this past summer, Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, hosted speeches by a Nazi sympathizer who has said “Hitler should have finished the job.”

The former president has likewise affiliated himself with the modern world’s autocrats. He has praised some of today’s most authoritarian and, in some cases, murderous leaders, including President Vladimir Putin of Russia (“genius”), President Xi Jinping of China (“a brilliant man”), Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea (“very honorable”), President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (“a great guy”), former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines (“what a great job you are doing”), President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (“a hell of a leader”) and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary (“one of the most respected men”).

On the other hand, the leaders who earn his scorn are the democrats, including former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany (“stupid”), former Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain (“a fool”), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada (“two-faced”) and President Emmanuel Macron of France (“very, very nasty”).

‘Whatever I Want’

In the course of American history, a number of presidents have stretched the bounds of democracy, mostly during war or times of national security threats.

During a period of tension with France, John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts that permitted the government to imprison journalists who defamed the president or Congress. Andrew Jackson defied an adverse Supreme Court, saying that Chief Justice John Marshall had made his decision so let him enforce it.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and seized hostile newspapers that published misinformation. Woodrow Wilson likewise shut down newspapers and rounded up opponents of U.S. involvement in World War I. Franklin D. Roosevelt confined more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in interment camps during World War II. George W. Bush bypassed limits on torture and surveillance after 9/11.

Whatever the exigencies used to justify those actions, the system for the most part eventually corrected itself. Most of the Alien and Sedition Acts were repealed or allowed to expire. Lincoln ultimately won approval from Congress for his suspension of habeas corpus, and Bush accepted restrictions forced on him by the Supreme Court and Congress on his war against terrorism.

Trump during his four years in office regularly asserted the most expansive view of presidential power. “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he once said, referring to the article in the Constitution that deals with executive power, ignoring the limits built into the document.

Whenever he was frustrated by checks on his power, he sought to take actions that his own advisers such as Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, or Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, told him were illegal. He pushed to shoot in the legs unarmed migrants coming over the border, sought to use a “heat ray” on them, and even suggested digging a moat at the border and stocking it with alligators.

When the liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in California, blocked one of his border policies, he pressed Nielsen to “just cancel” the court, or eliminate it, even though, of course, he had no power to do so. At another point, when he demanded aides simply shut down the Southwestern border altogether, he was told it would not be legal. He insisted they do it anyway. “If you get in trouble for it, I’ll pardon you,” he said.

Trump’s instinct to use violence against unarmed migrants extended to unarmed Americans, too, if he perceived them to be trouble. When protesters flooded into the streets after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, he publicly suggested they be shot if they began looting.

A ‘Wannabe Dictator’

Trump’s penchant for the use of force put him in conflict with the nation’s uniformed military. He came to office enamored of the armed forces even though he never served himself, installing veteran officers in a variety of civilian roles, including defense secretary, national security adviser and White House chief of staff.

“My generals,” Trump called them proudly, which set off alarm bells in an officer corps that takes seriously its tradition of nonpartisan loyalty to the country and the office of the presidency, not the man. As far as they were concerned, they were America’s generals, not Trump’s generals.

An early sign of the tension came during a meeting when Trump was pushing the generals to stage a military parade down the streets of Washington, the kind of spectacle not typically seen outside of a moment of wartime victory. Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, objected, explaining that it reminded him of his childhood in Portugal when it was a military dictatorship. “It’s what dictators do,” Selva told him. Trump was undeterred and brought up the idea dozens of times again, officers later said.

The rift grew over time and culminated in Trump’s final year in office. When some of the protests over Floyd’s murder turned violent, the president’s first instinct was to use the armed forces. He repeatedly pressed his team to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 so that he could send active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted 10,000 troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne Division called up.

Trump demanded that Milley personally take charge, but the Joint Chiefs chair resisted, saying the National Guard would be sufficient. Trump shouted at him in a meeting. “You are all losers!” he yelled and then repeated the line with an expletive. Turning to Milley, he said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

The president then staged a dramatic walk through Lafayette Square after protesters were violently cleared out, flanked by Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, among others, to St. John’s Church, where he held up a Bible. Both Milley and Esper regretted their roles in what they considered a political stunt for fear that it would politicize the military.

Milley went so far as to write a letter of resignation that assailed Trump for betraying the values of the “greatest generation” that defeated the Nazis. “That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism,” he wrote. “It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against.”

Milley decided not to send the letter, reasoning that he had to stay and “fight from the inside” to guard against a commander-in-chief willing to use the military as a political tool. He expressed concern to aides that Trump would find his own “Reichstag moment” to justify an armed crackdown, referring to a key episode in Hitler’s rise.

After Trump lost the election to Biden later that year, a pivotal moment arrived when Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and Trump’s first national security adviser, recommended the president declare a form of martial law by ordering the military to seize voting machines and rerun the election in states he lost.

That was exactly the kind of scenario that Milley had stayed to prevent and Trump ultimately did not try. But he never forgave Milley. In 2023, the former president lashed out at the general for having once called a Chinese counterpart to reassure China that the United States was not planning to attack, even though he did so with permission of the Trump administration at the time. “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Trump wrote on social media.

Milley pushed back a week later during his retirement ceremony. “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” he said. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution.”

Getting ‘Pretty Wild’

Embittered by his defeat and vowing “retribution” against his adversaries, Trump has increasingly embraced the language of authoritarianism since leaving office. He has used phrases often associated with Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, calling leftists “vermin” that need to be rooted out and asserting that migrants living in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

His call to terminate the Constitution has not been an aberration. Even when a friend, Fox News host Sean Hannity, tried to coax him away from such talk, Trump did not follow his hint. Hannity invited the former president during an interview to reassure America that “you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody.” Trump replied, “Except for Day 1.”

He similarly passed when another Fox News host, Laura Ingraham, tried to get him to clarify comments he made about how his conservative Christian supporters “don’t have to vote again” if they put him back in office. Noting that the left interpreted that to mean he might try to end future elections, Trump did not take the opportunity to dispute it. Instead, he repeated that Christians should vote Nov. 5. “After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it.”

Over the past four years, Trump has escalated his threats to use the power of the presidency to punish his antagonists. He has vowed to prosecute Biden and other Democrats if he wins the election and threatened prison time for election workers who he deems have cheated in some way.

He promoted a social media post saying that former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., should face a military tribunal for investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He calls Democrats “the enemy from within” and suggested that he would order the National Guard or active-duty military members to round up American citizens who oppose his candidacy.

He has signaled that he would go after the news media as well. After “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Harris in a way that Trump did not like, he said that “CBS should lose its license.” He said similar things this year about NBC, ABC and CNN. While in office, aides have said he pressed them to use government power to punish corporations affiliated with CNN and the owner of The Washington Post, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The discussion of presidential power has gone so far that his own lawyers said during court hearings that Trump, if elected again, could order the Navy SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political opponent without being exposed to criminal prosecution. That was a hypothetical posed during arguments over whether a president should have immunity for official acts, which the Supreme Court eventually agreed to.

Such far-fetched scenarios are often raised during legal arguments as an intellectual exercise to poke holes in the logic of a position, but Trump did not feel compelled to disavow it as an absurd notion. Indeed, he has favored more violence by the government if he is reinstalled. He has called for the summary execution of shoplifters and ruminated about unleashing the police to inflict “one really violent day” on criminals or even “one rough hour — and I mean real rough” to bring down the property crime rate.

If reelected, Trump would not only be without advisers such as Kelly and Milley to curb his wildest instincts, he would also have a vice president who in some instances shares his views about expanding the power of the office.

In a 2021 podcast, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, now Trump’s running mate, said that if the former president won again, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” in effect turning the nonpartisan government workforce into a partisan cadre of loyalists.

Vance added that Trump should defy legal impediments. “Then when the courts stop you,” he said, “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did.” To counter what he called the ruthlessness of the left, he said, “we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company